Single Opportunity

I’ve always been able to sing. But until recently, very few people ever heard it. Singing in front of people, even those close to me, filled me with trepidation. I saw singing as another way to prove my worth. And while I knew that I could sing, I wasn’t confident that my voice was exceptional enough to elicit the response that I wanted from people: affirmation. I wasn’t convinced that I would be considered good enough to be given the further opportunities that I desired. I felt that to stand out, I had to give a truly exemplary performance, and that I only had one chance to garner that image of exceptionality. In essence, I didn’t do the thing that I loved and that I wanted to do because I was confident that if I didn’t perform well enough, I wouldn’t be able to keep doing it. I believed that I needed to be exceptional or silent. I never had the confidence that I was exceptional, so silent I remained. 

I occasionally tried to break out of that silence, but found that my fears were realised each time that I tried to raise my voice in song. I worked up the courage to audition for my middle school singing competition ”Salisbury Middle School Idol”. I was devastated when I glanced at the scoring sheets and saw that my favourite teacher had given me 4 stars and had given 5 to the girl I spent my childhood comparing myself to. I stayed home from school on the day of the next round. A few years later, I MC’d a school awards ceremony and found myself leading an auditorium of people in singing O Canada. The moment after I stepped up to the microphone, I found myself stepping away from it, tears welling in my eyes, the motion of my head communicating to my teacher that I couldn’t do it matching the shake in my voice. 

I was on edge even when not in front of a crowd. I sang in a girls choir for years, and as I got older, I would be offered solos, which I was all too excited to decline. As the girls older than me graduated high school and left the choir, refuting solos became harder. Before our Christmas concert, I was called on to sing a verse of ‘Away in a Manger’. As I stepped forward in that practice, the same familiar sensations came over me: tears welling, voice shaking, panic in my eyes. The one mother watching the rehearsal did her best to comfort me, but there was no amount of smiles and nodding that could help me to overcome my body’s response. I even found myself experiencing those sensations when I became aware, or simply thought, that people were listening to my singing. 

I come from a family of singers and we would, on occasion, perform all together when I was a child. But mostly, we would sing together in the car. When I was in my late teens, I took a short road trip with my parents - them in the front seat, me in the back. And as is our family practice, as the back seat passenger, I got to control the music. I put on an album that my family had listened to a lot - The Hard and the Easy by Great Big Sea; an album of traditional Newfoundland music. One of my favourite songs came on, and I started to sing along with gusto. Moments later, I noticed my Mom’s hand popping up from her seat, pointing upwards. I panicked. I presumed that this was her indicating to me that I was off key, and telling me that I needed to hit a higher note to be in tune. I tried to adjust, sending my voice higher as it grew softer and shakier. When she made that same gesture again, I simply stopped singing. I was holding back tears in the backseat when I saw her hand shoot up for the last time. This time, she also turned around to communicate her message. She looked at me and said “could you turn the volume up? I really like this one.” She had been communicating something entirely different. But in her gesture, I saw what I already believed: that I wasn’t good enough. 

I grew up thinking that I was always being evaluated. That someone was sitting over me, their gavel hovering over the soundblock just waiting to delightfully deem me unworthy at any hint of imperfection. And the thing is, that was true. But the source wasn’t the faceless crowd, the they that I envisioned determining that I didn’t meet the standard, or a jury of my peers somehow unilaterally precluding any future opportunities. It was me. The call, as they say, was coming from inside the house. 

My deep fear of judgement made me hyper aware of my flaws and, in an attempt to protect me from the external judgement that I feared, silenced me by discounting my abilities before anyone else could. The constant through all of these experiences had been my self-judgement. It wasn’t the setting, or the people around me. It was the rhetoric that I had about myself and the standard that I needed to meet to be able to safely put myself out there. I was terrified of the opportunity cost of not meeting the standard. In response to that fear, my critical voice threw down the gavel at the first note, its sharp bang drowning out my feeble offering. An internal mechanism imploring me to stay silent until I was good enough. 

That part of me was responding and adapting to what I had overheard and observed - judgments that were targeted at others, but that were so scathing that I built this internal system to ensure that I would never be the subject of that criticism. I noticed that everyone seems to feel entitled and qualified to hold an opinion about the quality of people's singing voices. This was only fueled by the reality show competitions which came of age in the same era that I did. I observed that decisions about contestants’ ability and value were decided in an instant - sometimes from a single line or note. That was enough to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. As a child who was already afraid of criticism and being counted unworthy, this rhetoric, which I saw on screen and repeated by the people in my life, made every note that I sang feel so consequential, even monumental. I resolved that if I only had one shot to prove myself, I had best delay it until I felt good enough to deserve the praise that I felt that I needed to feel worthy. 

The problem is, that delay became indefinite. I trusted the voice in my head that told me that I would be embarrassed if I sang. I trusted her to the point that she became the only voice that I listened to. And this gave me confirmation bias. Not singing became how I protected myself from the criticism that I became certain would come if I raised my voice in song. Her encouragement to remain silent, combined with my experiences, which I viewed as failures, convinced me that my silence was the source of my safety - and that safety from judgement was the most important thing to prioritise. Years following this pattern resulted in me centering my life around that safety. 

In the years that I have spent healing, I have learned another way. One that is more gentle, understanding, and that prioritises my overall wellbeing over my sense of security. One that is built on a self-determined definition of success and the deep knowledge that I can handle any potential consequence that my decision to be vulnerable and prioritise my subjective definition of success might bring. I can now trust that instead of standing in self-judgement at a wrong note, I will stand behind my decisions to be vulnerable and be proud of doing the things I love. That instead of echoing the critical voices that I deeply feared, I will be proud of my attempts and count them as successes, even if they are failures by another metric.

As time went on, and I became more comfortable with this new way of responding to my vulnerability, I started to implement it by taking the leaps that had previously felt unavailable to me. I started to test the biases that I had from listening to that single critical voice. And about a year ago, I tested it in a pretty critical way: I started singing again. Or, perhaps, I started properly singing for the first time.

One of my friends runs a singing session in Sailortown in Belfast; a monthly gathering devoted to sharing traditional music. Each month, a dozen or so of us settle onto pub stools in the light of tall banqueting candles held by old spirit bottles, and we take turns singing traditional songs acapella. The room is still and silent as we take in the song being shared, with only the occasional beep of a card machine indicating a replenished pint of Guinness bringing us back to the room. 

After months of my friend inviting me along, I finally went. And I finally sang. At that session I sang the very song that was playing through our car speakers when I became discouraged on the road trip with my family. And in that moment, I felt like I reclaimed my voice in a significant way. I chose to engage in an activity that I loved on my own terms, with a refined definition of success that prioritised my participation over my performance. I acknowledged my fear and comforted myself through the potential pain of my voice not meeting the arbitrary requisite standard that I had set for objective success. I chose to raise my voice, having resolved that I had remained silent for too long and trusting that I could handle the emotional consequences, perceived or real, of my imperfection. I chose to treat it not as a single opportunity, but as the start of releasing my voice. 

“I chose to engage in an activity that I loved on my own terms, with refined definition of success that prioritised my participation over my performance.”

My first Nightengale singing session - 20 June 2023

Two significant things happened after that first singing session. People, firstly, were really lovely. Friends and strangers alike were complementary and thanked me for sharing. My voice had been shaky, and it took me some time to find the right register, so I slightly changed keys as I went along. Had I received those compliments even a year earlier, I would have dismissed them as efforts to be kind to hide their embarrassment for me. But the genuineness with which the folks around me made their comments helped me to realise that maybe no one cared about those minor falters; that those few blips weren’t what they carried forward from the several minutes over which I sang. It dawned on me that maybe the standard of perfection that I had imposed upon myself for decades wasn’t what people actually expected, or even valued. 

The more that I have become brave enough to show up imperfectly in other areas of my life, the more I have found this to be true: people have consistently valued my willingness above my ability. I wasn’t able to grasp that when I was focused on performance, when I thought that I would be counted out if I wasn’t perfect, cut off from further opportunities if I didn’t prove myself immediately. I couldn’t see this when I treated every moment as an audition, every interaction as a litmus test. I have honestly found that most people aren’t terribly interested in evaluating me. And I could only truly grasp this once I became one of them. My own focus on self-judgement led me to perceive that it was also at the front of everyone’s mind. I believed that people were looking for an opportunity to tear me down - to point at a performance of mine and finally have the evidence that they needed to discount me. But, I was the one doing that. I was the one counting myself out. I did it early and at every sign that I might falter because I thought that would be less painful than having others discount me. Not only have I found that my self silencing is more painful, I’ve also found that it gave me the perception of a reality that doesn’t really exist.

The second significant thing that happened that first night at the singing session was that I realised that the praise which once motivated my desire to sing, and the fear of not obtaining it that kept me silent, didn’t drive me anymore. Others’ encouragement was helpful, but their praise was only a secondary benefit. I had found something deeper and more valuable to propel me: my own wholeness. Once I chose to define success on my own terms, the fear that I thought bound me, dissipated. I realised that I can decide what I want to get out of an experience. That first singing session, success was simply not remaining silent. And I was so proud of myself for doing something that broke down a wall that had been constructed over decades. 

I no longer define success by my ability to meet an external metric. It's not about executing a song perfectly, getting compliments from particular people, or my voice not shaking. Success is my own progress. It is being present with my fear and choosing to centre my own growth, or joy, or connection over remaining silent to preserve an image. 

What I’ve learned is that, the more notes that I sing, the less consequential the ones where I falter become. So much of my perception of a single opportunity was self-constructed. It was a protective mechanism to help me keep an image that I thought I needed to maintain to be loved. This notion protected me from the vulnerability that I feared. It gave me a reason, which appeared to be rooted in logic, that kept me from having to engage with the fear of showing up imperfectly, and the significant consequences that I thought that would carry for my sense of worth and connection to others. I had to strengthen my relationship with myself, re-define success, and find my worth outside of performance to be able to healthily start showing up as my full self. I’ve seen that my wrong notes don’t have the severe consequences that I once thought they carried, which emboldens me to break down this structure in other areas of my life. To stop believing that every invitation to speak, teach, or cook for someone is a litmus test. It allows me to show up as I am, arms open, ready to try - to go on a journey with myself rather than to chastise myself believing that I’ve already blown my single opportunity.