Episode 10: Who Gives A F*ck

The Brown Line train pulls away from the Sedgwick CTA Station. I take inventory of my fellow riders. Who gives a fuck, I say to myself. It must have been the twentieth time that phrase, my mantra for the day, galloped through my internal monologue. Don’t worry; I’m not angry, I’m not sad. I am simply practicing.

As a violinist, practice time is a dutiful part of my daily routine. During the off season (or during a pandemic), these work sessions are devoted to maintenance and personal growth: I revisit scales and etudes, I tackle works from my repertoire bucket-list, and I transcribe Amy Winehouse songs so I can make Acapella© videos for my mom. During the concert season, practice time is dedicated to learning and mastering repertoire before stepping on-stage: I work diligently with a metronome, play along with recordings, isolate the trickiest bits and repeat them ad nauseum; plus I have all sorts of work-outs and drills I put myself through before I feel a piece is performance ready.

So, I don’t mean to brag but as it happens I do already know how to play my fiddle. I mean, I even have a fancy diploma that states I have Mastered Violin Performance. Shouldn’t I be able to pick up a score and play it without all that extra effort?

In theory, I suppose that could work. However, I have this giant human brain and thus I experience things like stress and anxiety, especially when placed in high-stakes situations a concert or audition. When I practice, I fortify my brain and my body with preparation and study, just like a castle is entrenched within outer walls and moats. As such, when introduced to the angst-inducing ambiance of live music-making, my brain and body can use this protection to thwart the nerves.

It works like this: let’s say I’m fiddling away and I approach a tricky passage. Somewhere in the depths of my gray matter, an uninvited voice pops up and says, “Hey! This is a hard part! You are gonna mess up!” If I haven’t practiced, some other internal personification (typically voiced by a French soldier from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) replies, “You’re right! Merde! Run away!” Then I mess up. Following that, I obsess over the mistake, become distracted, and make more errors. Rinse and repeat! However, if I have rehearsed well, I can tell the first voice, “actually I just played this part 1,000 times in a row correctly yesterday so…we’re good.” 60% of the time, it works all the time.**

Similarly, in battling my eating disorder, there are certain mental forces against which I must fortify my brain. One example of such a psychic impulse would be this: the compulsion to compare myself to and compete with other people.

Maybe it's because I’m an aries, maybe it’s because I am the eldest child, maybe it’s something I inherited from my maternal grandma. Maybe it’s Maybelline. Whatever the reason, I am, by nature, a competitive woman. I love to win and I want to flip tables when I lose. I have stiletto-ed many bridesmaids in my bid to catch the bouquet and honestly I believe the institution of marriage is unethical so I don’t even belong in the contest. I just like to win.

When it comes to the violin, this ambitious spirit of mine can certainly be harnessed for good; surely it fuels my drive, determination, and work ethic. When it comes to anorexia, the competitive spirit is not nearly so altruistic: it drove me to be thinner than everyone. We were all in a weight-loss contest; I was the only one aware of it.

Once I out-skinnied my friends, I spent too much of my time googling Jennifer Aniston and Mary-Kate Olsen’s poundage, using their numbers as my new BMI ideals. (Woah wait, hold up. Google didn’t exist when I was actively anorexic. I guess I internet-explorer-ed those details?) Anyway, as I surpassed those unhealthy benchmarks of weight loss, I switched my sights: in lieu of comparing myself to, and competing with, underweight starlets, I instead idealized fantastically waif-like cartoon characters. Their stick-figure bodies became my new challenge. Without any specific numbers to refer to, I strove to convert each element of my physique into the second dimension. I spent hours before the mirror, trying to decide if my ankle was as thin as the boneless, muscle-less, fat-less one sketched onto the newest ad for Pearl Tampons or Venus Razors.

I am no longer out here vying to be the thinnest friend. As it turns out, the prize for that competition is literal death. However, this innate desire to compare to and compete with others remains. I see people on Instagram playing cool gigs or traveling abroad and I can’t help but measure my own success next to their digital images. When I feel I don’t stack up, I rip myself to shreds internally, which puts me at risk of tearing myself to shreds externally. Worse, I find myself wishing ill on those whose lives appear more successful, fun, or exciting than my own.

In treatment, our exposure to images of thin people was, by policy, restricted. We could not bring magazines into the facility, and the nurses were always ready to flip the channel if the televised content proved triggering, which wasn’t always an easy task; Survivor was in its heyday. This was helpful, but treatment and real-life are very different places. One cannot hide the existence of other thin people forever. Similarly, I could tuck my competitive spirit away and simply click like on every post, fake-it-till-ya-make-it style. I could delete social media altogether and hope the self-loathing part of me gets deleted too. But what I’d really love is to simply allow others to exist without assigning any judgment to their existence in relation to my own.

For me, this sounds difficult. However, I am not one to be discouraged by a challenge. I do lots of difficult things! For instance, I play the violin. Violins are ridiculous. For one thing, we don’t have frets and yet our fingers need to magically land in some precise millimetre of space on the fingerboard or it is WRONG and HOW DARE YOU. How am I able to do it? I practice. I study the violin methodically and patiently, approaching each difficult technique with a plan for improvement. So too have I created a training exercise, an étude if you will, for that cutthroat part of my own brain.

It works like this.

1. Put yourself in a space where others exist. For example: Board the CTA and take a seat.

2. Casually look around and select a person. But don’t, like, stare at them or talk to them.

3. In your head, identify a thing about that person. For example: That lady has a nose ring.

4. Next, still in your head, declare, “Okay. Who gives a fuck?”

5. Repeat.

Please remember to do all of this in your head. Do not say any of it aloud. Please.

A few moments into the practice, you will realize that people can exist and it rarely impacts you. It doesn’t make you better or worse if someone else has a nose ring, is overweight, is stinky, or reads Tolstoy on the train like a gosh darn snob.

I know what you’re thinking: co-existing with random folks on a train without mentally vying with them in a battle for perfection is all well and good, but how is that going to prevent anyone from dieting their bodies out of existence or wishing tendinitis on every violinist who wins an audition?

To that I say this: how is practicing Dounis’ Daily Dozen or Carl Flesch’s Urstudien (think of these as the lunge jumps, planks, and burpees of violin playing) going to help me play Schumann’s Second Symphony? Those exercises give me the dexterity, precision, and confidence to execute actual music in performance. Similarly, the Who Gives A Fuck etude grants me the mental dexterity and flexibility to avoid comparing myself to others in real-life situations.

Sitting on the train and being non-judgmental towards anonymous beings is like practicing scales and etudes. On the other hand, going to a party where actual humans are going to tell you about the house they bought, the jobs they have, the hot guys they dated, the concerts they gave; that is like performing live on stage. I fortify my brain to have confidence during anxiety-inducing passages of music; I fortify my brain to not compare myself to people I honestly like and wish well. That is to say, when the Who Gives A Fuck drill becomes second-nature through regular practice, I can peacefully scroll through Instagram without envying Suzy’s perfect sourdough loaves, Mary’s “office for the day” selfies from her #tourlife, and Jimmy’s latest “so excited to announce I have won the [insert fully-funded arts-grant title here]” post.

Now I’m gonna get sappy. On the other side of my competition problem there is this beautiful acceptance: good things that happen to anyone are good for everyone. When a person meets a goal, feels joy, eats well, or falls in love it makes the world just a bit better. Therefore, those moments should be celebrated. I believe this most of all in regards to music. There is no limit to the amount of music that can exist in our world; when anyone makes music it creates a global improvement. I suppose that attaining such a level of competition-free acceptance would be like performing at the Carnegie Hall of mental well-being. And, as the old saying goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice practice.”*** Though I know it would be good for me, I doubt I will wake up tomorrow without a competitive or comparative thought in my heart. However, with etudes and practice techniques, I believe I can put in the work to overcome this potentially destructive force in thinking.

Like everything I write about, I’m still not perfect at any of this. Let me know if you are, and let me know what strategies work for you! Will I be jealous of your inner peace? Will I start a secret battle with you to be the most un-jealous, un-competitive, and the best-practicer-of-letting-it-be? Maybe. Then again, who gives a fuck?

Notes

** Practicing is an important part of defeating performance anxiety but, like any anxiety disorder, much more goes into it. So while that is a funny quote from Anchorman, it’s also true: practicing alone probably only helps me with 60% of the mental work for performance.

***Fun fact: Most of the people who perform at Carnegie Hall are actually doing so because they rented the hall. So you don’t have to practice, you just have to have money.