If I knew then what I know now....

It has been a long time dear blogisphere.   My life has zipped through the madness of second semester and I have now found myself on the cusp of completion. Because of this fact,  I feel contemplative.  My recital waits for me at the end of next week like a dark shadow in the distance.  I prepare and approach the day with heighten anticipation.   Emotions of all sorts run through my veins at any given moment.   Eagerness to have the darn thing completed already, dread, and excitement…  In preparing for this undergraduate level, 45-minute concert featuring myself and a friend on the “keys,”   I have realized that I don’t know what I am doing.    I knew I loved singing 4 years ago when I started this degree, I loved the control I felt, the love for the music that surged through my veins like a drug and the satisfaction I received when I did a job well done.  I loved knowing I had potential and the belief in the possibility of attaining that potential was thrilling.  But since that year one, my passion has withered and mutated into something fearful and unsustainable.   I ache for that old passion to bloom again, for the familiar love and reckless abandon to return.  But I wonder if it has been suffocated in windowless practice rooms with the vain attempts to produce perfection.   Where has that love gone?  I ache to rediscover it on this journey, as Beethoven said, “to force your way into [this art form's] secrets.”   I ache to find my purpose again.   This query is conditional, I know this comes from an exhausted frame of mind that seems to only revisits these worries when uncertainty lurks around the corner.  Nevertheless, this realization terrifies me.  I wonder if I am strong enough?