This Is Me Coming Out As a Person Who Is Learning Something New

Hi Everyone,

I saw many of you who read this blog at Christmas, but I have a secret that I told very few of you.

I have wanted to learn to play the guitar for some time but I never really told anyone.

I did tell Santa though and I must have gotten very lucky because Santa gave me an acoustic guitar for Christmas. Santa brought me an acoustic guitar and I am going to learn how to play it, that’s my secret. Santa also brought me two books full of Dave Matthew’s band music that I can’t wait to learn how to play

After I opened my guitar Christmas present, I only told a few people because I was scared. It is hard to think about learning something that seems intimidating. I am afraid that I won’t be good at it. So I haven’t been talking about it and I have been barely taking it out of its case and I certainly haven’t been trying to play it.  Today, I did it though. Today I tried to play.

I have wanted to play the guitar for a long time. I probably wanted to learn how to play the guitar since I was 18 or 19 years old, but I didn’t know how to get started. Around the time it first occurred to me that I might want to do this, I worked as a counselor at a summer camp.

 I saw some of the other camp counselors at the camp where I worked playing guitar and even though I had an interest, it never really occurred to me to ask them if they could show me or give me some tips on how to get started. I didn’t know if they came to camp with guitars already or if there were just some camp guitars staff members could play. My mother owned a guitar I could probably have brought to the camp to play with the other guitarists but again, I didn’t really know where to start.  I was kind of shy.

My mother had a guitar and played for a little while when I was small, but I didn’t really ask her how to get started. I don’t really remember her playing after the time when I was a small child.  I did try to fool around on it a little though when my new guitar interest struck me in my late teens. I couldn’t really figure out how to tune it though and that seemed important, plus I didn’t know what the first step to playing it was. The year was 1998 and the internet wasn’t what it is now. God bless Youtube and the access it provides to people looking to start a new hobby.

I am not a stranger though to musical instruments, but I didn’t have much exposure to string instruments. We did not have a strings section or orchestra in my school, so I have always been a little intimated by stringed instruments.

Thanks to my parent’s encouragement and support during my school years I received musical instruction in my public school from grades 4-12.  Oddly though, I was never afraid of musical instruments when I first started playing the clarinet in grade 4. It just seemed like a fun thing to do at the time, and everyone was a beginner then.

I was in the concert band in grades 4-12 and in the marching band during my high school years. I played the clarinet from grades 4-9 and I played the trumpet from grades 9-12. I even earned the spot of trumpet section leader during my senior year in high school.

I know a little bit about the fear of failing at playing an instrument because I made the decision to transition from the clarinet to the trumpet towards the beginning of my time in high school. Nobody asked me to switch, I just kind of felt like I needed a change.

 At the time though, it seemed scary to leave the clarinet section, where I had been playing with the same girls for several years, as well as my older sister, who was also a clarinetist. But I had felt a calling-like it was time to do something new. I remember I was very shy about it at first, I was even afraid to bring the trumpet to school because other people were used to seeing me with my clarinet case. I worried that people would ask me what I was doing or why I was doing it, but for the most part, nobody did. The other band members accepted it and the other students at my school didn’t care.

Playing the trumpet ended up being the best decision I could have ever made for my high school self. I made friends I might not have made if I had stayed in the clarinet section. I learned that I could learn a new skill.

I was always only ever a mediocre clarinet student, but I really took to practicing the trumpet and made more progress in high school than I think most people, especially me, could have ever predicted.

This fear, I am having now, about learning the guitar reminds me of when I first started playing the trumpet. I was afraid of failing but it was also so exciting.

Years later, when I was in college, I took a trumpet class during my sophomore year. I remember my friend’s making fun of me for taking a band instrument class instead of something “cooler”. What they did not understand was how much the trumpet meant to me during my high school years. I never ended up playing again after that semester, but it wasn’t especially due to their teasing, I just got involved in other things.  However, I regret a little that I didn’t stay involved in music because playing music brought so many good things into my life. I made a lot of friends and acquaintances by playing music. Music can be a great connector.

I look forward to sharing music with my boys. I kind of imagine us, hokey as it sounds, singing along to songs around the campfire. I keep telling my husband that I kind of want us to have a family band.  Even if those things don’t happen though, I hope my trying to play music encourages the boys to not fear learning how to play music or try something new.

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