What validates you?

Szia! That’s ‘hi’ in Hungarian haha.. For those of you who don’t know yet – I’m in Szeged, Hungary and have been here for almost a week! I came here for the 4th International Szeged Harp Competition (: Apart from the fact that it’s been really cold (temperatures dropped to -5 degrees celcius today), Szeged is a really nice, quiet, peaceful, and clean city. It also has really beautiful architecture and almost every building seemed to have been designed with such great care and detail. Also, what’s really really awesome is that I have the entire Airbnb apartment to myself!! It has one bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen/dining area. It’s really nice having all this space to myself, especially since in NYC everyone has to share living space because rent is just way too high.
This apartment has amazing heating!! I walk around barefoot because it’s warm and toasty in here haha. Sometimes I forget that it’s actually really cold outside so one time, I opened the door wanting to go out without wearing my coat and the cold hit me so I ran back inside lol. And my favourite part –  the bathroom floor and the towel rack are also heated!!! This place is really comfortable, I’ll be quite sad when I leave for NYC tomorrow morning.

Anyway, my bodyclock has been really weird…. it has adopted the timezone in between Szeged and NYC time. I can’t sleep till 2am, but then I wake at 7.30am. But oddly enough I wake up to a sense of sleepiness (lol does that even make sense) and I’ll fall back to sleep till it’s about 9 or 10am. And I guess the main reason why I’m blogging right now is because it’s not 2am yet so I’m trying to tire my brain out a little bit more before going to bed – hopefully I’ll fall asleep faster.

So competitions! I’m glad I did this one, not because I won a prize or even some form of verbal commendation from the judges. (Actually to be honest, I was feeling quite embarrassed about how I played my first stage, I literally bolted after I played and did not go back to the competition venue 3 days later lol). Ok but everybody – I’m not depressed or emotionally scarred or anything. I wanted to do sightseeing/write my essay and also… I guess this trip was my city life-detox that really allowed a lot of introspection.

Yes, I do have a lot of thoughts and I am very very keen to discuss them with anybody who’s interested in talking with me about these things. But I’ll just do a point-form thingum about my thoughts so far, don’t want this to be too wordy. No judgement zone ya.

1. How does one know if he/she has what it takes to be a professional (performing) musician? When will one know if he/she is not cut out for it? Is there an age that you cross, that determines whether this is, or is not, for you?
2. How do I know if I love playing music, simply because I love playing music?
   Will I still be doing this if I do not get any form of validation? Will I still choose to do this even if in this lifetime I don’t get recognised or commended for the work I do?
3. Why do I play music? What do I hope my music will do for people?
4. What validates one as legit musician/performer? What is the yardstick? What is the standard?
5. And I guess all these questions lead up to this –> Is pursuing this path worth it? Which is the eternal question that all artists ask themselves some point in their lives right?

Ok I’m not sure if any of those questions up there are very “Duh why is she asking this kind of questions they don’t even make sense and the answers so obvious”.. and yes I also hate to be melodramatic and emo. But ehh, some reflection is good for the soul and these questions will pop up every once in a while in a musician’s mind I think.

Pictures of my trip in my next post (:

“But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. ” Proverbs 4:18