Overshooting your mark

In one of my singing lessons, my coach asked me if I was breathing while I was singing. She specifically asked me if I was exhaling. She said that she noticed that sometimes even when I’m talking, I’m not exhaling.

This was very confusing to me. Because I didn’t think it was possible for sounds of any kind to come out of my mouth without breath accompanying them. Can you hold your breath and talk at the same time?

Sure enough, she asked me to hold a tissue in front of my mouth while I was doing a scale, and it didn’t move at all. Not at all. It is possible to make noise and not to exhale. Unbelievable.

Well, this really pissed me off, to be honest. I do a weekly meditation where we focus on breathing for the first 10 minutes! And I’m not capable of breathing when I talk and sing?

Even a sigh, which is an expression of self-compassion, is an exhale. And I sigh a lot.

So I’m perfectly capable of breathing, gosh darn it! Or if I’m somehow not capable in the specific instances of talking and singing, then I’m gonna be very soon!

You better believe I attacked my vocal lessons that week, and the next week, and the week after that. Until finally, my voice coach said, you’re breathing too much.

I was like, woo hoo!

She said no, that’s bad. Well, not that it’s bad. She would never say that. She said, that means you have to scale your breathing back.

To which I replied, I know. But if I didn’t keep pushing myself to breathe until I overshot my mark, how can I pull back?

Because sometimes to find the balance, you first have to go too far–cross the line–before you can find the middle ground.

The next day was that Sunday when a bunch of people were mad at me for things that I had no control over.

With my family, their biggest concern was that they thought I had overshot the mark. I had become too loud, too argumentative, and talked too fast. Which I wrote about in my last blog post.

I didn’t see this as a big problem. Although they had never seen me in this state before, because usually I was depressed and masking when they saw me, my friends in Roanoke frequently saw me in this excitable, dysregulated state. They would just say stuff like, be quiet! You’re going to get us kicked out of this restaurant, too, and we’re running out of places to eat!

Check out my blog post Embarrassing Moments if you want to see how out of control I could be around my friends, if you don’t believe me.

When I was telling my therapist about my family’s concern, I told her I wasn’t that concerned because it just meant I overshot my mark. And she understood exactly what I meant. Because she has been my therapist for 26 years now, so she knows me pretty well.

If you are learning to do something new, whether it’s to sing, set boundaries, express your feelings, or make new friends, aim to overdo it. Too often we barely try and fear that we have gone too far, and then we give up.

Instead, push yourself to go a little further. Then ask the people who you trust to be honest with you and to give you feedback like, you’re breathing too much now. You’re being too loud. Let’s take a breather because this is getting too intense for me. (All excessive breathing examples, by the way 😉.)When you’re learning something new, you need feedback to know when you’ve hit the sweet spot. Making mistakes is part of walking the path towards balance.

Successes are important because they give us the encouragement and motivation to keep trying. However, you will learn far more from your mistakes than you will from your successes. It’s only in the mistakes that we encounter the opportunity to acquire wisdom. And then, we can start having a real conversation about balance.