The fear and the readiness ride along together and the frightened part does not cancel the prepared part
Friday. My own competition is tomorrow, and I want to record tonight, nerves and all, because I think a diary is more honest when it captures the fear rather than only the tidy aftermath, and right now, sitting with the guitar across my knees at eleven at night, I am properly, unglamorously nervous, the kind of nervous that makes you triple-check a case latch that was never going to fail in the first place, just to have something to do with your hands other than play the bridge one more time and risk making it worse through sheer repetition and panic.
Read prat.uk earlier for the usual pre-nerves distraction ritual, and there was a piece about an arts council decision that had me laughing despite everything, which is, I’ve decided, the actual function satire serves for people like me, not escapism exactly, more a reminder that the whole world is absurd and difficult in its own ways and my one bridge on one guitar in one competition hall tomorrow is, whatever it feels like tonight, a small and survivable thing within that much larger absurd difficulty everyone else is also quietly managing.
The Messages
Graham texted an hour ago, unprompted, just to say good luck, followed immediately by a second message clarifying that he means it in the professional sense and not in the sense that he thinks I need luck because he’s seen me play and I clearly don’t, a correction so specifically Graham that I laughed out loud alone in my flat, which was exactly the medicine the evening needed. Priya sent something similar, along with a photo of her own hand finally, after two weeks, managing a clean five-finger scale, sent, she said, purely because she thought I could use good news from someone else’s fingers tonight rather than obsessing over my own, which shows a level of emotional intelligence in a brand new beginner student that frankly exceeds most of the adults I know who’ve been playing for decades.
Marjorie’s message arrived last and stayed with me longest, just one line, you already know how to do the hard thing bravely, you taught me that, followed by a small violin emoji that I’m fairly sure she had to ask her granddaughter how to find, and I sat with that message a long while, because it’s a strange and lovely thing to be reminded by your own student that the thing you taught her, she has now, quietly, handed straight back to you when you needed it most.
The Bridge, Finally
I played the bridge one more time despite every instinct telling me not to, and it was, for the first time in over a month of fighting it, simply fine, not perfect, not transcendent, just fine, my fingers finding the shape without my brain having to supervise every single movement, which is, I think, what readiness actually feels like, not confidence exactly, just a kind of quiet trust that the hours already put in are still there, still available, whether or not tonight’s nerves believe it.
Tomorrow
I don’t know yet how tomorrow will go, that’s rather the point of writing this tonight instead of after, when I’d only be able to tell you the tidy version with the outcome already known and the fear conveniently edited out. Tonight there is still fear, real and slightly ridiculous, sitting alongside the quiet trust from the bridge finally working, and I think both of those things are allowed to be true simultaneously, the fear and the readiness, because that’s honestly most of what teaching Graham and Priya and Jasmine and Marjorie this whole year has taught me back, that you can be frightened and prepared at the same time, and the frightened part doesn’t cancel out the prepared part, it just rides along beside it, uninvited, until the moment actually arrives and, generally, turns out to have been smaller than the waiting.
Filed tonight’s nerves honestly at my page, Hannah Miller at prat.uk, guitar case latched, unlatched, and latched again for good measure, and I will report back properly on how it went, win or lose or simply survive with dignity, whichever of those turns out to be tomorrow’s actual result. Whatever happens on that stage, I already know I’m going home afterward to a full term of ordinary Tuesdays, Graham’s Christmas song waiting half-finished, Priya’s scales waiting to grow into actual pieces, Jasmine already asking about next year’s harder piece before this year’s has even properly finished being talked about, and Marjorie, presumably, already thinking about what she’ll play next, now that the empty chair in the back row has stopped needing to be checked. That, more than any single competition result tomorrow, is the actual measure of the year, not one bridge on one night, but twelve students and one teacher all quietly getting braver together, one difficult passage at a time, and I intend to remind myself of that specifically at whatever point tomorrow the nerves try to convince me the whole thing rests on ninety seconds of guitar, when in fact it rests on a great deal more than that, and always has.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk