Dear Aim:

I will start with a little summary of your June 2016 thread because it can help me understand your current situation better: when you were about 13 your suffered from Lyme Disease and were taking a medicine that damaged your digestive tract. This was a start of digestive problems, back pain, adrenal gland problems and elevated anxiety related to these health problems.

As a child, you “always wanted to be a performer.. always playing violin or piano or singing in recitals.. loved it”. You were “a good student and worked hard in college.. majored in piano”, but you suffered from performance anxiety playing the piano, and when you graduated, you felt that you didn’t meet the expectations of most of your professors.

Soon after graduating,  you left for Japan by yourself, but returned to the US about a year later, earlier than planned, because of worsening health problems. Back in the US, at the age of about 24, you lived with our parents for three years. You weren’t able to find a full time job, worked a few part time jobs, including one as a pet-sitter/dog walker, but wanted something “a lot more exciting”, and you were “constantly thinking about going back to Japan”. Sometime during those three years you violently vomited and diagnosed with a “severe case of Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth” that caused you severe back pain and inability to sleep properly. You also found out that your “adrenal glands were shot” because of stress over the years.

Back in June 2016, you wrote: “I felt like I have been held back and missed out on so many things because these anxieties and uncomfortable feelings that I haven’t been able to get over yet. I feel so close and yet so far away still to being my best self”.

Three and a half years later, you are 31, living in Japan, married and 17 weeks pregnant. Last year, you worked full time as an ESL teacher in Japan, quit to live with your now husband, got pregnant, started working part time side jobs that don’t pay much, working inconsistently, “going through dry spells”.

You currently feel that you are “soooo done with English teaching”, you know that as a pregnant woman you are not likely to find office work, and you are trying to find online work. You “tried applying for a Japanese transcription company” but (I figure) your old test anxiety was activated when you found out you would have to take “a test of audio (that) was all in Japanese”. Your mother thinks you should work as a piano teacher, be your own boss, once you move to the country.

Your husband bought a house “out in the country side. You are very allergic to mold, and to make the house livable for you, it needs to “be cleaned up to fix the mold issue”. Last week you spent time there in the house, with your husband, and didn’t enjoy it, because of the “air quality and mold spores”. You are not looking forward to moving there because you “don’t have any job prospects out there.. don’t have a car.. don’t have money t buy one.. don’t know anyone out there”.

Your husband “is trying to make all the financial stuff down to be 50/ 50 for every little thing”, and it is driving you crazy. Your parents who live in the US, caring for your brother who has a brain injury, sent you money a few times. Your husband plans to “create his own business” and wants to work as a truck driver to get started. You want him to take on a better paying job and he resents you for “not making enough money right now”, and he criticized you most recently for “not wanting to do harder work, ie., working at a cash register, jobs that involve manual labor”.

Also recently, you decided that you “want to play piano again after years of not doing it… being constantly blocked from doing what I wanted to be all along, which is a performer”.

You thought about breaking up with your husband “over the whole house fiasco”, but his parents encouraged you to stay with him (that happened before you got pregnant). Currently, you are still thinking about leaving him and going “back home and start over without him”.

My current input: you can’t keep running away and starting over because you did just that before and ended in the same place repeatedly. It is time to start over where you will soon be -in that house in the middle of nowhere (once it’s cleared of mold and is safe for you and your baby to live in). This is your opportunity to experience the much needed calm you needed for so very long.

At times you want excitement: when you did the pet sitter part time, you wanted to do something more exciting. You had many exciting ideas and plans, but none came to fruition. You recently got bored of teaching English, and so very done with it. And most recently you are back to your childhood dream of performing in front of an audience.

You have been caught for many years between a childhood dream, a need for excitement and adventure and a Lyme disease, stomach distress, health problems, and elevated anxiety. Time to exit this in-between state of mind and life, and settle into a calm life experience for yourself, and for your baby.

You can still play the piano, in that house in the country side, but time to let go of the dream of performing. The dream has that youthful energy in it, and it feels intense, doesn’t it. But from what you shared, you are not good enough with the piano to be a celebrity performer, and you are 31. Almost all of us have to let go of those old dreams fueled by that youthful magical thinking and imagining, so special to childhood.

You seem to have your husband’s parents’ support, they wanted you to remain married to their son even before you got pregnant. Take advantage of that. I am guessing it means that your husband himself is motivated to stay married to you, it being that his parents support that.

Work with him, work with your husband as a team. Lower your expectations of living that exciting life of youthful imagination, and live the life that is available to you. Live a life of calm- that will help your health. This is what you needed before, what you need now, being pregnant, and what you will need as you take on the most important job you will ever have, the most important job for any woman, that of being a good mother.

anita

Hello Aim,

Whats it like living in Japan? I have great interest in that. As far as the troubles you are dealing with…trouble with your partner will be a constant. How you handle it is a big part. I have experience in this department. It can be very challenging and learning how to sort things out with another person under the pressure of having child/children break most relationships apart if not handled correctly.

Best of luck. I myself am currently putting in the good fight with my own marriage/family. There are highs and lows. Hang in there. I am always around to talk if you would like.

Dear Aim:

“I never said anything about being a celebrity performer.. I really feel my soul’s purpose is to be a performer in some capacity”- I misunderstood. I thought you were considering a lucrative career as a performing artist in front of paying audiences. But performing in the contexts of a school play, church, a local community event, a small charity event, that would be wonderful, I am sure you qualify to do that, as well as teaching piano.

“I didn’t play for me. I was playing to fulfill other people’s expectations. I now really just want to go back to that dream in ways that I can achieve it.. I’m seriously considering teaching piano because I think that’s because I think that’s where I’m being called to do. I am terrified of this whole process… stressed about not feeling good enough… stuck between stopping and going”-

– creativity is like the gas pedal in a car, and fear is like the brake pedal. Stuck between stopping and going is like sitting in a car pressing the gas pedal and the brake pedal, gas, brake.. it doesn’t get you anywhere and it runs down the car mechanism.

Nothing rains heavier on the parade of Creativity than Fear.

Not long ago, in the small town where I am closest to, there was an event and a group of musicians was on the stage. The singer, he was not great, his voice wasn’t strong or versatile, he had a limited capacity there, but as I watched him, I was enthralled, fascinated, uplifted. He was enjoying himself, he was creative, he let himself go. And this is what fascinated me, now I wish I could do that. So many of us people are afraid and we envy those who seem to be able to create in spite of fear, to push that gas pedal, to let go, to be and become… it is fascinating.

There is another singer who performed in the local market a couple of years ago. She sounded like a celebrity singer, strong voice, very capable, I didn’t notice anything about her singing that was any less than any celebrity singer. I enjoyed hearing her, but got somewhat bored at one time  or another because there was something automatic, or repetitive about her singing, different than the singer I referred to later. She had a great voice, great singing, but she was pushing that brake pedal while singing.

If you played the piano without fear, if I watched you play without fear, letting your hair down, so to speak, daring to defy fear and side with you, not with fear- that would be fascinating, exciting and uplifting to witness. Mistakes along the way, these will be part of the fascination, encouraging the audience to follow your lead and in whatever they do, to let go of that figurative brake pedal.

anita