Evaluating my Negativity

I have many patterns of behavior conspicuously apparent upon observing my own history. One of which is the topic of this discussion. I'm not sure if it's truly a bad thing--it certainly has some bad effects attached--but I have a tendency to turn my favorite hobbies into serious pursuits. The first of the series of examples is classical singing. I was sixteen when I joined my high school choir, and all I wanted to do was to sing and enjoy the beauty of the music. However, soon afterward it became an obsession. I was working so hard trying to be the best I can possibly be. I woke up early before school to practice sight-singing. I took weekly voice lessons, and spent about three hours everyday working on my voice. I was in two to three choirs, while occasionally performed in musicals. While I enjoyed the process to some degree, I also had a hard time dealing with the failures and let it destroy me on many occasions. It wasn't until I gave up my dream to do music as a profession that I actually began to truly enjoy expressing myself through music and felt immensely more confident in my voice.

In college I began to do the same thing with literature. One of the reasons I chose English as my major was because I loved to read. Reading was one of my most favorite hobbies. Nowadays, when people ask me if I am reading something "for fun," the answer is simply that "I do not read anything for fun." Sometimes I have fun reading something, but surely that is not the reason I picked up the book. Everything I read serves to benefit my studies. I NEVER read for fun. There is no such thing as "pleasure reading" in my life.

And now that I'm working harder and harder everyday on becoming an improviser, I feel the need to criticize everything improv-related in the same way that I criticize the books I read. I do it in order to learn. But by doing so, it makes my focus on the activity very negative. Again, I do gain a considerable amount of pleasure from the activity, but I do spend a lot of my time on criticizing the progress and pondering upon my weaknesses and failures.

After my class yesterday I thought back about all the characters and scenes that I did, and I was surprised by how many ways I was able to enter the scene with aggression and judgment. Many--I'm a natural at it, but it's bad for the work that we do. My understanding is that my negative attitude toward the activity is so tremendous that it affects my performance.

While I admit that this tendency of mine has by far been destructive, I also believe that it is, on many levels, constructive. I don't think it necessarily is a bad thing to acknowledge your flaws and try to fix them. I suppose my problem is that I dwell too much on the negative, and that I need to do more of the opposite and keep the balance between the two in order to not let myself sink into the dark pit of self-destruction, as an artist and as a person.