missroserose | Undeserved praise, or unexpected triumph?

It's been a hectic week, mostly thanks to a strong sense of uncertainty - there may or may not be some pretty serious changes looming on the horizon, depending on how things shake out next week. (Good changes, but big ones.) So of course I've been doing the thing I do best when faced with big scary uncertainties: disappearing into the Internet looking up costs and information and everything I can find so that I'll be prepared if said changes do come to pass. Needless to say, my daily goal checklist has suffered somewhat, as has my guitar practice.

So it was that this morning I woke up, realized I had a guitar lesson today and hadn't practiced the song I was supposed to learn at all. Which, since my teacher's style is very much "here's the chords, let's see what you come up with", is something of a liability. Especially since in this particular one he'd said "Here's this one riff, you can probably fill in the rest from there."

Fortunately my lesson wasn't until 3:00, so even with some "let's procrastinate by taking a walk and doing yoga and all the other stuff I've been ignoring this week", I still had a good few hours to work on it. Fortunately it's not a difficult song ("She's Not There", by the Zombies), so between a chord sheet and the riff my teacher had shown me, I was able to figure out an arrangement I liked, and even a nifty set of strum patterns to jazz it up a bit. Unfortunately, given that I had only an hour or so to practice before I had to pack up and drive to Sierra Vista, it was a lot shakier than I wanted it to be. But it was something. So I went to my lesson, and I played my arrangement (stumbling through a few parts of it, because it was all of a few hours old), and tried not to cringe in anticipation.

And my teacher said, "Holy crap! That sounds great! You must have been working on it all week!"

As one might imagine, my feelings on his reaction are a little mixed. I mean, on the one hand, it was gratifying, and certainly relieved that he wasn't going to be disappointed with me for my lack of practice this week. But I felt a certain amount of what I've heard referred to as "impostor syndrome" - like I hadn't earned the praise he was giving me, and had merely managed to trick him into thinking I'd done well. (Even though I know he's not the type to indulge or flatter his students. Last week, when he told me I was doing amazingly well for only having been playing a year, I was extremely pleased because I knew he wouldn't have said so if he didn't believe it to be true. And given that he's got some basis for experience, I figure he's a good judge. But last week I'd also practiced the song he gave me all week.)

I think some of it is tied in to my ongoing struggle with my own talents - the whole "I can do a half-ass job and still come out above average, so I've never learned to work hard and really develop them" conundrum. (In my particular case, it's combined with a phobia of actually doing as well as I could, since that might create an expectation and then I wouldn't be able to get away with doing a half-ass job anymore.) I'm trying to overcome that, in fits and starts, so hearing praise for my efforts when I knew they weren't as good as I could give was a little cognitive-dissonance inducing.

Still. It's nice to know I can do in two hours what it takes most one-year students a week. :)