pessimism/optimism

To anyone who reads my blog, I might appear a pessimist. I am certainly not an optimist, in the sense that I don't generally appraise situations in the best possible light. I am more a realist: I do not like to expect the worst. I base my expectations on my experience, and I look for the possibility that seems most likely. I used to be much more of a pessimist, in that I lacked belief that good things could happen to me. This is the legacy of a childhood marked by unhappy events, traumas, and by my bipolarity and my tendency to be depressed. But when I look back, I realize that as I took control of the bipolar situation, my pessimism abated. Now I look at myself and I feel lucky. I never would have envisioned a life in New York as a composer and artist and teacher, although it is what I sought. No person in my early life had done such a thing, no one I knew, and I had no model to follow. Not until I left Pennsylvania and went to college at Vassar, and met interesting and ambitious and talented people, did I think that such a thing might be possible. Though even then I had no confidence that I might actually succeed. And each step, and with my increasing objective success, surprised me, and started to make me think that maybe I could make it. So I achieved one goal, but ignored my own personal happiness. So in the last fifteen years or so, an eternity, it seems, I have been more content with my "material" life (work, career) I have delved deeply into trying to make sense of my emotional life, and to understand how my bipolarity has colored my views and led my behavior in what are sometimes dangerous and self-destructive directions.

When I was starting to get recognition as a composer, in my early years in Chicago, I won a series of prestigious prizes and awards. Being young and naive and energetic, I thought that this procession of recognitions would simply continue, growing in scope and size until I became "famous." In time, though, I realized that my music was too obscure and "difficult" for that to happen, and in order to be happy as an artist I had to follow the example of my teachers, especially Annea Lockwood and Ralph Shapey, and follow my instinct without worry about worldly success. Making this realization gave me a sense of contentedness as a composer, although I have struggled, in the past two years, with "writer's block" for the first time. But I don't worry; I know that this means I am working out ideas in my mind, allowing my subconscious and my consciousness to take time to solve the problems.