the dreaming tree

i’ve been numb for the past 48 hours. i can’t really explain why, or what to do. i’m scared of the future. i’m afraid of my failures continuing to mount until i crack and wither, or whatever descriptive imagery you want to apply. i want to say i hate my life, but i can also think of a number of things that i do like, even if they don’t always seem like solid things to me. i try to pretend i don’t care, but i do. i care a lot. and just what is it about being alone that brings out the worst in me? fiddle faddle. one thing that did brighten my day was my composition lesson. i’m enjoying it again, for one, but today i just wanted to laugh. most of you won’t know what this means, but my prof was looking over a new piece i handed him and asked if i had used set theory (a pretty involved, mathematical way of writing, to put it briefly) to compose it. and before i could really answer he started pointing out all these things that i had done that seemed to jive quite nicely and logically with set theory. but the thing is, i hadn’t done that at all…at least consciously. i basically wrote what my ear told me was what i wanted for that piece (which is for piano and trumpet if you’re just so curious), and that somehow came out organized in ways i had never dreamt of, and probably never would have applied to the piece if i was asked to analyze it. and i just thought that was really amusing and interesting to be shown my mind working in a way i didn’t realize. i wonder how it’ll effect my work on the rest of the piece. i think it actually opened some doors for me, cause now i recognize a tool i can use to sort of bring the piece together and improve on it. but i also have to be sure i trust my instinct, which is what the professor urged me to do, rather than simply work within this theory, which i don’t really fully understand (or..maybe i do and didn’t know it). other than that hour, though, i remained mostly numb today.