I spent a couple days just ... recovering, sleeping, visiting with a really good friend who was in town. I waited 2 days to call him, then he called me back 2 days after that. I was in an excellent mood from cooking and listening to music.
He started off telling me that he wanted to know more about what the audition meant and what it was for and I explained, a 2 year graduate performance diploma in Boston. He asked me tons and tons and tons of questions, and I started opening up to him about all my doubt and confusion... but with some emotional detachment about it all. It was like I was being very open, but not actually upset about the things that were confusing in my life. I told him everything I'd wanted to tell him all last semester: how I'd felt so discouraged and wondered if I was in the wrong art form ("should I be a jazz drummer? a comedian?"), how I'd felt so discouraged after the lesson in NYC, and then how things had turned around with my playing... I really poured my heart out.
I even told him how I wasn't sure if coming to Atlanta was worth everything I sacrificed, especially now that I'm working to rebuild my tutoring business and also "because of all the energy I've put into staying in touch with the people I left behind to come here" (sort of an allusion to him more than anyone else). He kept drawing me out more and asking me lots and lots of clarifying questions. At one point he asked me, "what is your dream?" and I told him... it is the same dream more or less since I've known him. And afterwards he said, "I needed to hear that." And he told me he was worried that I wasn't thinking in terms of my dreams anymore--that when he heard about what I was doing it seemed very short-term. He told me how when I was in Boston, it seemed to him like I had these big goals "in the driver's seat" and because of that, everything else fell into place behind my big goals. I laughed and said I just remembered struggling in Boston so much. He expressed concern that my big goals weren't in the driver's seat anymore. But in a way that was really encouraging. I told him, very heartfelt, "It means a lot to hear this from you, because there aren't many people, maybe no one else, who knows me the way you do." There was a long pause, and then he just said, "thank you," or something like that.
At first I thought maybe he was quizzing me to figure out where I was going to be. Maybe that was part of it, but it also seemed like he really needed to hear what was going on in my core. I even wondered, a little tiny piece of me, if me losing sight of my big dreams was something that turned him off while we were still together. This is all sheer conjecture on my part.
