How I Was Supposed to Be

How I Was Supposed to Be

I was pretty well liked by my teachers in high school. I wasn’t a particularly zealous student then—you’d never hear me spouting off about Virginia Woolf or expounding on the atrocities of the Iraq War. My teachers liked me, I think, because they thought I was destined for a different path than my banking/lawyering/doctoring peers (I went to an expensive private school) because I liked to sing and wore eccentric printed dresses on days when we didn’t have to wear our uniforms.

The strangest thing about all of this was that my teachers formed opinions of me when I was very young. I went to the same school from third grade until I graduated high school. There, it was easy to receive and hold on to a reputation. The math nerd was dubbed as such when he memorized his times tables more quickly than anyone else in the third grade. The sports whiz was given that title when she won the game for the home team on the junior high varsity league. And I was told I was a good singer in the seventh grade.

In the seventh grade, I was cast as Marian, the lead in The Music Man. The male lead, Howard Hill, was given to a boy who was good at math and science. Because he was a boy, he was never given the distinction of only being a talented musician; instead, he was a well-rounded individual. Musicals, in consideration of his reputation, were meant to be a hobby for him, like golf or poker, rather than a potential career path. He’s graduated from MIT now.

But after I sang "Goodnight My Someone", I was given the distinction of being a good musician, a title that stuck. And I never tried to shirk it. It fit me well and, dubbed a creative type, allowed me to flaunt my eccentricities in a way that I never would have been able if I had been expected to be a serious person. I wanted to become a musician; sincerely, I think, but it made me create an identity based around a career path that I didn’t even have yet.

My teachers thought of me as the singer and that was very sweet. My Spanish teacher called me a “musical genius” after I got a B on one of his tests. My math teacher complimented me on a musical performance, helping me not to care that I wasn’t in the fast-track math class. My English teacher, who I respect more than I respect most people, never thought that my writing was the best in the class, but that was fine because I had a lovely voice.

I never really gave all this attention a second thought. I’m embarrassed to say it now, but I think that was one of the only reasons I pursued a music degree in college. Even though I liked practicing alone on the piano in my house, I only did it imagining the audiences that would one day await me. I became a musician because that was who I thought I was, but, regardless of that was true or not then, it’s not who I have become.