Becoming Myself, Part I

I guess this is where I introduce myself, isn't it? Well, let's get acquainted:

Since we're going to need something by which you can talk to me (or yell at me, for that matter), whoever you are, you can call me 'P'- how interesting is that? I'm a letter!


I'm a 'youngish' tenor -by that I mean I just have turned the magical number of 30, which means I am no longer a 'young artist' but still considered to be somewhere along the baby scale, I guess.

For as long as I can remember, singing has been the one thing I have wanted to do in my life. Although clearly passionate about it, I admit to have been the victim of my own foolishness during a period of my life in which I allowed some erroneous criteria to interfere with my pursuit of this passion.  Among the voices I allowed myself to affect me were the well-intentioned warnings of my father who, concerned for his son's future and well-being, advised him that it was not a wise decision to follow a path in music as he did not think his son had the exceptional voice required for an operatic career. Since this disclosure came during a trip we were both taking to Italy, a trip where I was surrounded with musical glories, I felt it hit me particularly hard.

I felt as if the world we were seeing, a world which I had always loved, would be forever barred from me because I wasn't good enough for it. I was a teenager during this period and I had a lot of things to be uncertain about - many were very personal, and many of them touching upon the idea of self-worth. Eventually, as more and more things started going wrong for me I became discouraged, ultimately convinced of my own inadequacy and I 'quit' music altogether.

Up until this point there had never been a moment in my life in which I wasn't involved in one or another way of music-making: guitar classes, choir, the baroque recorder, theory, solfeggio, etcetera. The year of 1998, which is now 11 years ago, was a very long one for me due to the absence of music. However, I was convinced that I should be practical, that I should instead seek a career in which I could be realistically successful and perhaps keep music as a hobby.

So, having just graduated from high school, I enrolled myself in the local University as a Psychology student to pursue a career.

It didn't quite happen like that, though. Having given up professional music, at least in my mind, caused me to become extremely depressed.  I spent several hours in front of the television every day without much will to do anything - even read, which has always been one of my passions. Whenever I don't feel like reading, it is an indication that I am seriously depressed. My mother and a friend grew concerned at this during the summer, specially since I said I had no plans whatsoever, and suggested I try something at the university. Not caring very much one way or the other what happened, I gave it a try.  (One good thing of this, though, was that I found a very dear friend, Sasha.)

Little did I realize at the time, but I was following the same path of life my father had followed in the past: The advice he had given me was exactly the same advice my own grandfather had given to him when my father wanted to become an opera singer (runs in the family?), and that is why he became an Electrical Engineer-- a career he absolutely hated, which is why he never actually exercised it but rather ended up following his own unorthodox but extraordinary career path.

I was, I must say, completely miserable during certain periods of my training as a psychologist. I found many things absolutely fascinating, as I have always been an intellectually active person, so I took an interest to neurobiology but dreaded, for example, sitting through lectures about Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud -- it may seem strange to you, reader, but where I come from the predominant school of psychology is Freudian. I found Skinner's behaviorism appalling and completely anti-intellectual, with so many errors that it was astonishing anyone had ever considered using it, and as for Jung... the less said, the better.

I realized that this couldn't possibly be my life. The idea of spending hours in an office every day whilst listening to people's psychological enigmas did not seem attractive to me in the least. Eventually I would come to resent that life, and the thought of living a life I hated was not an option for me. So I  decided to take drastic measures...

Stay tuned for the next installment, where you get to find out the rest!