I realized I could not hear things right anymore.
The acoustic neuroma stole the hearing from my right ear and now, on stage, I couldn’t hear count-offs, song titles, or, sometimes, when the song started. It was like trying to catch a bullet before it hit you. I thought maybe I had reached the end. 43 years of performing were done.
I enrolled in a Masters program in 2021. Educational Technology. I have a colleague in teaching that suggested the program so I felt, after the pandemic and the health issues, this would be a good time. It would lead to a job I could do from home. I could control what I hear. Misunderstandings and constantly saying “what?” would decrease.
I am also good at teaching.
Done. New path.
The schoolwork was hard but manageable.
I kept gigging. Making money as a musician is what I do; I had work that brought it in. There were some close calls on stage but like the schoolwork, the hearing problem was manageable.
Then, I was offered to join my school’s Ph.D. program in the same field. Apparently, my work stood out. I was surprised. This level of education was a dream for me. I wrote it down on a goal sheet back in the late 90s.
Now it could happen.
But . . .
I’m a musician.
Now, something must die.
This isn’t a death of life.
It isn’t a death of love or hope.
It is a death of ego.
When you meet people for the first time, a common icebreaker is “what do you do?” Simple. Maybe.
The answer you give reveals things about you. There are a few ways people deal with it or dodge it. It can either refute your reality: “Well, right now I am just doing this” or it legitimizes your identity. “I am a this.”
I worked extremely hard to be able to answer “musician.” I had no legacy to stand on, no familial support, and no genetic disposition (as specious as that really is.)
It was me and my desire and love to do it.
Now, that can no longer be the answer and my ego is demanding restitution.
I have been told before that my work as a musician is not a reflection of who I am as a person – bad playing or making mistakes doesn’t mean I am a bad person or inept. It only meant that there were things to work on. I struggled for years with this because I was raised to feel that mistakes were character flaws. Although intellectually I knew this to not be true, emotionally it was deeply embedded. This tying up of my vocation with my emotions put me in many bad situations that created spirals of depression. The job did indeed make the man.
So, letting this go is like cutting out a tumor (something I am intimately familiar with.) It is wrapped around my emotional nerves which means more than just the identity is going to be extracted.
I would love to shrug my shoulders and say “C’est la vie” and move on.
I also know that it is not the end of my music career, per se. It is a pivot. A Walter Payton juke, dodging the defense of performing to emerge in another area of music production that may scratch that musician’s itch for identity.
Admittedly, it feels a little disingenuous to call yourself a music producer/arranger/film scorer/composer/songwriter when you have exactly zero product to show for it.
However, a new persona has to be planted for a new identity to grow.
As someone said to me “you are moving from being a drummer that teaches to a teacher that drums.”
220, 221 – whatever it takes.
Identity is perception. Perceptions become habits. We habituate our stories, the tales we tell ourselves about who we are. We repeat them over and over like an earworm until they are rooted deep inside us and become the very thing we always hoped and dreaded – ourselves.
The new perception is what will eventually become the new identity, but the old identity -the one being clung to by ego – has to die. There is separation anxiety. There is nostalgia. There is fear.
But a vessel that has been emptied can be refilled.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
Lao-Tzu