When Fear Infiltrates our Singing

So what is fear really?

Fear: “…an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.”

What hurts in reading this is that I know, from my own experience and from my work with singers over the years - that many of us have had the courage to sing and have been met with pain and threat as a result.

We’ve been laughed at. We’ve been disregarded. Rejected. Our voices have been picked apart. We have been compared to others and found wanting. We have been scorned for our musical interpretations. We have been told we don’t fit. We’ve been told to be quiet. And maybe most painful of all, perhaps we have rejected our own voices, holding them up to an imagined standard of perfection we can’t possibly reach.

Right in the heart of our musical growth, in our moment of courage, as we released our voices into the world - we are so often handed a big old list of all the ways we didn’t live up to the listeners expectations.

And that hurts.

And you know what I’ve seen time and time again that gives me hope? We don’t give up on ourselves and our voices. We might be feeling defeated and disconnected but singing is such a part of our being, we refuse to let go.

I know that because you’re reading this. And I know that because I have experienced all of the feelings listed above, and I’m still here.

Because I simply, truly, love to sing (full stop). And I won’t let fear win.

There’s nothing quite like singing. It lifts us up, it pours us out, it enlivens us, it allows us to express our heart in a deeply fulfilling way.

And still, challenging experiences can make singing start to feel riddled with a subtle sense of anticipated pain or threat - we feel fearful. It might be big fear - making our mouths feel dry, our bodies tremble and our tummies tighten. Or it might be subtle, making us feel disconnected on stage- like we’re putting up some sort of wall when we sing, not truly engaging in the music as authentically as we desire because it’s too risky. And this subtle disconnection might carry through to our practice, even to our simple moments of singing in the car or the shower - something is lost. 

We need a way to process and perhaps even learn to befriend this fear. We need spaces where we can heal and ways to bring self-compassion into our musical journey. We need a chance to explore our voices and artistry without threat. We need a chance to reconnect to ourselves again. And we need to know that we’re not alone. This is the space where beautiful, authentic and profound music making happens.