Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  An integrative psychologist, she draws on different schools of thought, from psychoanalytic psychotherapy to Jungian depth psychology, cognitive behavioral and dialectical behavior therapy, and mindfulness. She draws inspiration from the work of John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose theory on the primacy of attachment between mother and infant is back in vogue after years of neglect. Bowlby’s work in the second half of the twentieth century picked up where Freud left off: All anxiety is separation anxiety. Despite the distance that modern psychology has traveled since Freud, separation from the mother is still widely seen as the root of all anxiety. In Freudian terms, stage fright represents a reversion to infantile behavior, rooted in the unconscious and beyond conscious control.

  “If the mother is drunk, anxious, or depressed and doesn’t accurately pick up on the child’s signals, the child will learn a confused way of understanding his own experience,” Raeburn said. “If the parent isn’t attuned enough of the time—because nobody is a perfect parent—the child grows up having to adapt himself to the parent. The child is so out of touch with his own needs, he’s taking care of the mother and doesn’t recognize his own experience.”

  It wasn’t a clear parallel to my own experience, but I suspected she was talking about me. Raeburn speculated that my performance anxiety served an important, maybe even restorative, function. It was my body’s protest against something I was otherwise powerless to protest. If as an adolescent I couldn’t refuse my mother’s expectations and stop entering those endless competitions, my body would speak up on my behalf. It gave me an out. As Raeburn described it, performance anxiety became my ally. I somatized my anxiety, put it squarely in my body. Her advice now: Make the piano mine, not my mother’s. I was not a concert pianist and never would be. My status did not depend on it. Find a relationship with the music that is all yours, she urged. I no longer needed the piano—if I ever did—to prove my lovability or worth. Instead of trying to fulfill my mother’s expectations, I had to come back to music on my own terms. Only then would my stage fright go away.

  Chapter 9

  SO MUCH FOR PERFECTION

  A mid preparations for my performance, I was offered a cautionary tale by a pianist who had been blinded by the pursuit of perfection. John Orlando was a well-known figure in my town, the former chair of the piano department at our local community college. He was a generous man who donated the lion’s share of his mother’s inheritance to a community foundation for a Yamaha concert grand. A re-spected teacher and mentor, he was also a presenter of concerts by emerging pianists from around the world. Music was his life.

  Orlando recently had given a concert with a chamber orchestra, hired at his own expense, at a hall that he had rented and for which he personally sold 152 tickets. At seventy-one, he was determined that the show be perfect, that people see and hear him as the musician he really was. He had given many concerts throughout his life, but he always was haunted by insecurity. He dated it to his childhood.

  The son of a San Jose farmer, Orlando grew up hating the family farm. Every calamity that could befall a farmer befell his father: A tractor toppled over on him, a horse kicked him in the mouth, a hay hook pierced his hand, he was poisoned by agrochemicals. John Orlando determined from an early age that his life would be different.

  His first instrument was the accordion, which he began playing as a seven-year-old. He progressed quickly, learning the standard tunes that his parents loved. His teacher composed music just for him, and he was soon an up-and-coming talent in the Italian American community of San Jose, performing in regional competitions and on local TV shows. Then he discovered the piano, and it was as if he’d discovered ambrosia. He would never touch the accordion again. He got his first piano when he was fourteen, but it was not until four years later—when he enrolled at San Jose State College as a music major—that he had his first lesson. Eighteen years old is late in life to set one’s sights on becoming a professional pianist, but nobody told Orlando that. If they had, it wouldn’t have stopped him. Every morning for the next four years, he snuck into the college music building before the doors opened, to begin practicing at six thirty. He stayed until ten at night, resenting even the fifteen minutes it took to run and grab a quick lunch. He practiced so much that his shoulders seized and his arms became muscle-bound; he sometimes had to play eight hours just to loosen up. For years after graduation, he traveled to New York to study at an institute for injured pianists. There were periods when he stopped playing repertoire to focus on his technique, overhauling it to reach the point where he could play without pain.

  Even beyond the physical pain, his big hurdle was stage fright. Over the years, he tried numerous remedies, including EMDR, shorthand for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. As the therapist moved her fingers back and forth in front of his face, he followed her motions with his eyes and recalled “the vessel of fear” that seemed to encapsulate him as soon as he walked onstage. He remembered the memory lapses, the mistakes, and the pangs of shame and humiliation. He learned to replace traumatic memories with good ones, and it seemed to help. After a series of treatments, he gave a performance of which he was proud. But his fear was capricious; it came and went. He never knew when it would seize him. Once, backstage, he made a small joke that made the stagehands laugh and gave him confidence as he strode to the piano. He played brilliantly, he told me, and naturally attributed his triumph to the joke. But when he reached for levity a second time, the joke fell flat and his stage fright only deepened. There were performances during which the keys felt strange beneath his fingers and he was consumed by distracting thoughts—chief among them that the audience suspected he was faking his heartfelt connection with the music. “I would think about the phrase I was about to play and remember that I’d screwed up in the past. So I screwed it up again. To overcome it, I tried harder and became more tense. I pressed into the keys, which created more resistance from the instrument. That can create a false sense of expression. You look like you’re feeling something, but it’s like being exposed and trying to hide at the same time.”

  In his late sixties, he suspected his fears were being stoked by his new career as concert presenter, introducing superb young musicians to audiences on the central California coast. It was all his doing, and the job gave him tremendous satisfaction. The young players were so talented, so perfect. “I wanted to be like them,” Orlando said. “I was driven toward perfection. I was obsessed with it.”

  The pursuit of perfection dogged him as he prepared for his concert in March 2012. In the months leading up to it, he practiced with his usual zeal. He retained a performance coach, read seven books about peak performance, and listened to every available recording of the Mozart Piano Concerto no. 15 in B-flat Major, the piece that he would be playing. Orlando compared his own playing with every one of the recordings; in everything he heard, there was the ideal and then there was him. Though he had had memory lapses in the past, he insisted on performing without the music. (“It’s a crutch. As if I don’t know the music!”) He categorically refused to consider taking a beta-blocker (“Never!”), and when a friend suggested he go for a walk and get some sleep, he resented the advice.

  “I was hell-bent on my own destruction,” he later said. “So caught up in trying to be perfect that I was blinded. I knew the music inside and out. I practiced twelve to fourteen hours a day for months before the concert. I was obsessing about little details right up to the last day. There are certain people whose nature is more vulnerable, and I probably fall into that category. My parents were both filled with anxiety and there was tremendous tension between them, much of it unacknowledged. I’m still particularly aware of that unspoken feeling, that you can’t ever know what’s going on.

  “Some people feel entitled to success,” he continued. “I never felt I deserved it, I think because I was angry at my parents. Failing became a way for me to get back at them, a way of wanting to be accepted for myself alone. I didn’t want to have to
prove anything [to an audience], to have to pay a price for being accepted. As a result, I was willing to sabotage my performances.” He seemed to be saying that the love of the audience had replaced his parents’ love and it still wasn’t enough. He was seeking unconditional love. “Because the acceptance and adulation I would get wasn’t what I really wanted. By failing, I wanted to be accepted for myself. What other people thought was very prominent in my mind. Unusually important to me.”

  He was a man of contradictions—one minute doubtful that he was deserving of success, the next convinced of his excellence as a performer. He demanded that the audience see and hear him as the pianist he knew he was, and if it meant “getting back in the ring” to be knocked around, he wouldn’t hesitate.

  Orlando hardly slept the week before the concert, choosing to practice nearly twenty hours a day. The night before, he sat up and meditated. He was exhausted before the performance began, and once it did the problems emerged almost immediately, when he made a premature entrance into the music. The orchestra easily covered it up. Orlando had chosen to perform what many regard as the most difficult of Mozart’s twenty-seven concertos. Even the composer, writing to his father in 1784, had called it a piece that would make a pianist sweat. Still, Orlando appeared largely in control until the first cadenza, a lengthy solo passage that begins sparely, with every elegant note and phrase exposed, and then gives way to a rush of scales and trills that would challenge the most accomplished of virtuosos. Amid these cascades, he suffered a memory slip and had to start again. There was another memory slip in the second movement, and then, a little while later, it happened again. By the third movement, Orlando was rattled. This time, when he came in two bars early, the conductor waved her baton to stop the music. After a long pause, she counted aloud and the performance resumed. By the time Orlando got to the end, many in the audience felt almost as drained and anxious as he. Leaving the hall, some people privately wondered why he chose to put himself through so much pain.

  I thought of my own concert, now two months away, and what my guests—some flying from across the country—would think about me. Would I make them cringe? Would they resent me for subjecting them to my slips and stumbles? I thought about what my friend Paul, a bit of an elitist, once said, that anyone who can’t manage to play without errors shouldn’t perform. And I asked myself if I was being a fool. What, exactly, was I setting myself, and my friends, up for?

  John Orlando (Courtesy of R. R. Jones)

  Recovering perfectionists often quote Tolstoy’s maxim that “if you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.” But as a youth, Tolstoy was himself quite the perfectionist. At eighteen, he began a Journal of Daily Activities in which he set forth a list of rules for developing his willpower and improving his character. Every evening, he laid out the next day’s schedule, dictating exactly how many hours he would dedicate to study, leisure, meals: Wake at five A.M. Eat in moderation. Avoid sweet foods. Walk an hour every day. Do only one thing at a time. Visit a brothel no more than twice a month. Ah, rules to live by! By old age, he had renounced his perfectionist tendencies: “To reform all humanity and eradicate all human vice and unhappiness seemed plausible enough to us at the time, just as it seemed an easy and uncomplicated matter to reform ourselves, to master all virtues and be happy,” he wrote. “God alone knows, however, just how absurd those noble dreams of youth were …”

  Around the same time in the late 1840s, such “noble dreams” led John Humphrey Noyes—American socialist, zealot, and coiner of the phrase free love—to found a utopian society in Oneida, New York. The Oneida Perfectionists, as they called themselves, sought to establish a prototype for Jesus’s perfect millennial kingdom. Their version of this paradise combined communism and open marriage—the marrying of all the men to all the women. Monogamous relationships were virtually banned; the elimination of jealousy was one of the first steps on the path to perfection. Noyes also designed meticulous experiments in “human stirpiculture”—better known as eugenics—for the breeding of better children. But the cornerstone of the ideology was the institution of Criticism. For the Perfectionists of Oneida, Criticism was the “main instrument of government … useful as a means of eliminating uncongenial elements, and also to train those who remain into harmony with the general system and order,” according to one 1875 account. When a member of the community was sick in bed, his fellow members would gather around and treat him to the “Criticism-cure.” They chastised one patient, who was bedridden for months with a spinal infection, chills, and fever, for being a hypochondriac who was overly concerned with his own health. One of his critics opined that he seemed to know a little too much about his own physiology and that “as he uses it, it is really a hindrance to him: he knows too much about his case.”1

  Criticism was the vitamin C of Perfectionism. “Many cures were attributed to this treatment,” recounted Pierrepont Noyes, son of the founder, in his extraordinarily odd memoir describing everyday life among the Perfectionists. “It is even claimed that criticism and cracked ice ended an epidemic of diphtheria after all other remedies had failed.”2

  In 1879, the elder Noyes fled to Canada to escape sex crime charges, and the community’s couples soon broke off into monogamous pairs. The utopia was finished when the remaining Perfectionists split their collective wealth and regrouped as a silverware company.

  Ballet, classical music, gymnastics, and equestrianism are disciplines whose demands appear tailor-made for perfectionists. They exact years of training, practice, and blistering self-evaluation—the very principles that perfectionists live by. No one can attain mastery in any discipline without a relentless drive for excellence. But the line between excellence and perfection is a thin one, and a body of research shows that it’s the people most preoccupied with perfection who are most vulnerable in performance. Canadian psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett point to “a perfectionism paradox” that requires athletes to achieve perfect performances even as the traits of a perfectionist personality subvert the very act of performance. Because, as John Orlando can tell you, there are two audiences at every performance. The first audience is external, the other is internal. They may witness the same event, but they don’t hear the same music, watch the same play, take in the same speech, or follow the same sporting event. For the perfectionist, the internal audience is the one that terrifies. It is ruthless and unforgiving, seizing upon every misstep, punishing the performer for every error, repudiating an entire performance for a blemish that no one else has registered. The accomplishments pale next to the failures. As with Caesar, the good is interred with the bones.

  Hewitt and Flett argue that nothing good can ever come of perfectionism, which they define as a neurosis, implicated in depression, eating disorders, even suicide. They illustrate their argument with the story of “Mr. C.,” a fifty-year-old writer whose life unraveled after he discovered a single error in one of his published works. He was a lifetime perfectionist who regarded himself as never being “quite good enough in any of his pursuits.” After he discovered his mistake, his confidence declined, his writing grew disorganized, his career faltered, and he was fired from his job. Always a loner, he distanced himself from others more than ever. Unable to bring himself to inform his wife that he had lost his job, he began drinking heavily and finally tried to kill himself. Later coaxed into counseling, he brought along a copy of his résumé so that the therapist could “get to know him quickly.”3

  “Mr. C.” brings to mind the French celebrity chef Bernard Loiseau, who in 2003 shot himself in the head when he learned he was about to lose his perfect three-star Michelin rating. An official from the guide had recently paid a visit to Loiseau’s famous restaurant, La Côte d’Or, to express concerns about its irregularity and “lack of soul.” As Loiseau—a manic-depressive who at the time of his suicide faced a mountain of debt—once said, “C’est jamais gagné.” The battle’s never won.

  The perfectionist equates a perfect performance with se
lf-worth, an impaired performance with worthlessness. This love-hate is at the crux of Jennifer Sey’s memoir, Chalked Up. The 1986 National Gymnastics Champion, Sey was one of the sport’s golden girls—that is, until she wrote her blistering exposé detailing the years of withering criticism and twice daily weigh-ins required to reach her goals. She acknowledged that she was born with a competitive streak and a “near manic ambition” that gave her a willingness to endure punishing hard work, a diet of fruit and laxatives, and a host of injuries, including the breaking of her femur, the largest, strongest bone in the human body. But she also laid blame on an overzealous mother (who threatened to boycott her high school graduation if Sey quit gymnastics) and the trainers at her win-at-any-cost gymnastics club in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I can see the fat on you!” one trainer berated her. “Can you see yourself? After all this. All we’ve done. You’re gonna give it all away. You’re nothing!”4

  Research on dancers, gymnasts, figure skaters, and high divers links perfectionism to high rates of injuries. “Most of the injuries, far and away, are overuse injuries,” says Bonnie Robson, a Toronto psychiatrist who has worked with Canada’s National Ballet School and other dance companies throughout North America. “You know that old joke? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Well, doctors will tell you that the way to ruin your career is practice, practice, practice.” Robson’s research has found that 47 percent of dance students suffer a chronic injury by the time they reach high school.5 Among professional dancers, that figure hovers at 66 percent.

  The perfectionism common among dancers has long been attributed to a tradition of harsh teaching styles. Early training, a desire to prove oneself, and a focus on the teacher’s approval create a confluence of negative effects. Now, at least, the culture of secrecy is changing, according to Robson, who’s a specialist in performing arts medicine. “Before, when it came to anxiety or even injury—you would whisper, ‘Oh, so-and-so is injured.’ And the implication was that the injury was her fault. Her technique wasn’t correct; she didn’t have strong technique. No wonder. When the fact was that she was probably injured because her teacher was driving her on. But if you asked the teachers, they’d say, ‘Oh no, my dancers don’t have injuries.”’