Listen Molly, before you read what I have to say, it's important that you realize that you cannot talk about it to anyone. Not your family, not Alicia, not Dave. You'll be able to soon, once it's official, but this is one of those exceptional things that you will only know about because of our reading-each-other's-diaries relationship, and that you wouldn't know in real life, and that you absolutely must pretend that you don't know. Once everyone knows, you must pretend that I told you after I was allowed to. Okay? You have to understand that.
I'm not drum major. Eric is. I am assistant, and Mr. Thomas doesn't know who else will be assistant, but he knows I will be because (as we all suspected) it was always just between me and Eric. And I guess Eric... Oh fuck.
This is one of those situations where emotional pain feels almost exactly like physical pain, and you end up not even dealing with the situation logically, as a situation. You just try to cope with the raw emotion - the numbness and heaviness of your arms and legs, the nausea, the headache, the painful, knotted feeling in your stomach and your chest and your throat. You have to consciously try not to hyperventilate, and then, once you've succeeded in that, to breath often enough to stay alive. You are nothing, and nothing else is anything of any interest. You can also tell that your nervous system has automatically turned the volume down - that the amount of pain you're feeling isn't even close to the amount of pain there is, and you don't think about the situation, you can't in any way grasp it, because it would be too much to handle.
I guess I thought that being drum major would make up for everything else that I'm not. I thought it would make my other failures okay, because of how... magical it seems. It's not like it has a certain value and cancels out a certain amount of not-being-a-very-awesome-person. No. It makes you an awesome person automatically. It cancels out all of your failures, because you are on a platform, and you are who everyone looks to, and you are the best bandie and you are The Leader of The Music. You are unquestionably a good musician, and unquestionably a good person overall, because you are it. But I'm not it. And I am questionable. And maybe I'm not the best, not even at that special, different kind of talent I thought I had. I've always had an irrational belief in it - I couldn't even define it, I could just feel it. Potential, I guess. But now I really don't know whether or not I'm just making shit up.
Loading comments...