living backwards

It was a typical morning in piano class with one of the most eccentric professors you will ever meet. That is to say, I thought it was a typical morning until he said something very profound between the bits of his usual, vaguely philosophical musings. He stopped us as we practiced our B minor scales, stepped up to the board and simply said,

"Until you love yourself, you will never master music."

And it was then that I realized that I am living backwards. Here I am, eighteen years old, capable of understanding/explaining/doing things that most people don't even know the name of, studying music at a good school with professors that like me, and yet, I am constantly feeling sadly inadequate. No matter how good I get at something, there is always something else I could learn or improve. I feel that I won't be satisfied with myself, and definitely won't be able to love myself, until I reach a certain level of ability. I ignore the fact that the level I strive for is constantly changing and becoming more difficult to attain, and thus the end result is that I constantly hate myself.

I want to reach "that level" of mastery so that I can love myself. But I have forgotten -- or perhaps, never been aware at all -- that in order to reach that level, I must love myself first. I've had this attitude of self-hatred for a long time, I admit. I just don't approve of myself as-is. But up until now, my self-depreciation was a source of motivation for me to achieve higher and improve more. When I think back upon myself as a musician ... ah! It really is incredible how much has happened just in these past few years. I went from being only a casually interested singer to being the only soprano in my entire school district to make the All-State choir. I went from not knowing what a tritone or a triplet was -- and that was just two years ago! -- to being a girl who walks around solfeging whole-tone scales in her head and analyzing Bach chorales in her sleep.

And yet it all happened because I hated myself, and I was willing to work hard to stop hating myself. I thought it was a constructive hatred. Only now am I realizing that inside, I am falling apart.

This morning in church, Pastor Hong reminded me of something that I think I need to remind myself constantly from now on:

"'You don't have to prove anything,' says God. 'You are My child, and so you are already all you ever need to be.'"

I wanted to cry when he said this. It's not like I hadn't heard it before. But it was something of which I really, really needed to be reminded. In my head, I am convinced. But for my heart, I will need time to heal.