You can’t always get what you want

In January 2025, I suddenly decided to stop singing so I could pursue other things. Then in December, singing started calling to me again. It was something I missed, but I wasn’t ready to commit again. Not until I received an email a couple of weeks later from a local musical theater choir I’d been following. They were having auditions in two and a half weeks.

This was, perhaps, kind of a foolish plan to go from basically no singing to auditioning in two and a half weeks. But there was a song I had been learning when I took my break last year that felt like a good fit. I booked a voice lesson to smooth out the rough areas in my voice and go over my song. And then I practiced as much as I could.

I have to admit, I think when I signed up I felt like I would have it in the bag. I’ve always been good at singing even before I took lessons, and then I took lessons and had a really solid foundation under me. Even on night 1 when my solo went a little awry, I felt like I did a good job. I came home and journaled on what went right as a way to build my confidence. That is soooooo unlike me. Usually after a performance, I move into critique mode pretty quickly which can devolve pretty quickly into “I’m terrible,” even if I only made one tiny mistake. So even that was something to celebrate.

Here’s the trap, though, if you’re someone who works with doing what’s in your highest good or doing what’s aligned for you: It’s really easy to start to believe that if it’s right for you to take some action, then you will always get the outcome you want. We’re trained to believe that the only thing that matters is the outcome and whether you succeed, not what you learn during or from the experience. We become attached to our favored outcome and then if it doesn’t go our way, it kind of slaps us in the face.

That’s the thing that’s hard for our egos to understand—there was never any such guarantee to begin with.

Something my homeopathic practitioner says often is that sometimes the things that are in your highest good don’t feel very good at the time. For instance, sometimes it’s in your highest good to do something because you need to trigger certain emotional waves so that you can finally move through them. Overall, that is a good thing. But they don’t feel great when you’re sobbing your eyes out because those waves are painful to go through.

This is kind of what happened to me on night 2.

Now, I actually did just fine. In fact, my singing night 2 was better than night 1 and I felt like I ended on a high note (literally and figuratively—I am a soprano after all).

What was different about night 2 was that people around me started talking about how hard it actually was to get in. Some people apparently had to audition three times before they got in. So doubt sank in. I realized how badly I might have miscalculated the chance of getting in.

I moved from trying to convince myself I would still get it despite my mistakes to devolving into intense emotional waves of feeling not good enough:

• I felt like I could have prepared my voice and acting more, and if I had trusted the urge to sing back in December I could have started sooner.
• I felt far more prepared than some of the people there, which brought back all the times people resented me because I did well at something and they didn’t.
• I was awkward in some conversations and relived all the moments in my life I rambled and stumbled over words and got weird looks.
• I wished I had had the foresight to bring a damn Ricola with me because my mouth gets so dry when I’m nervous and that caused some of the issues I had while singing.

I cried. I self-parented. I let myself acknowledge how badly I wanted it and how disappointed I would be if I didn’t get it, and I allowed myself to acknowledge that I did my best which was pretty good (especially considering I’d only had two and a half weeks to train and I semi-dislocated my shoulder on Sunday night which led me to wondering if I’d even be able to sing at all on Monday which was night 1). I wasn’t a failure if I didn’t get in.

After letting out all the fear and grief that came with that processing, I felt steady enough to move into a prayer that I turn to quite a bit:

Open the doors that are meant to be open, close the doors that are meant to be closed, and keep me in the center of your perfect will.

It’s a prayer I constantly said when I quit my last job without another one waiting for me. I had been in a workplace that had been a really bad fit for years, and I knew that being at a company that was a much better fit was going to be the only way I recovered from the burnout and learned to trust myself again. And so waiting for the right fit, the door that was meant to be open for me, was crucial.

Boy, did I have to say that prayer a lot because I kept getting doors slammed in my face for seven months. It was hard to see it as “not the right fit” rather than “you failed AGAIN” because, again, this is what we’re trained to believe. There was a lot of ego death during those seven months.

But all those nos led me to a job where I was forced to be a contractor for 3 years, which taught me a number of things:

• To unhook my identity from my performance at work so I wasn’t constantly obsessing over whether I was providing enough value to not be fired and could put more time and energy toward the things I really loved.
• To raise my voice when things felt off and not be afraid that it would lead to consequences.
• To see that I could get by and even thrive if I didn’t have a “real,” full-time, 9-5 job.
• To trust that something bigger than me was looking out for me—keeping me employed through two rounds of layoffs and finally bringing me a full time offer when I was actually ready for it.

And that is what I’m trying to remember as I wait to hear back. Instead of going over all the things that went wrong in the past that I can no longer change or trying to convince myself I got it so I feel better over the next day or two, I’m trusting that I did my part by showing up. Now, whatever is meant to happen will happen. That is what that prayer truly means.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t happen. It’ll still hurt like hell. It just means trusting that there was a purpose behind me trying out and a purpose behind me not getting it. Maybe I just needed an event that would surface a lot of material that would allow me to move through all those emotional waves I needed to get through. Maybe I just needed something to get me back into singing now so that I’ll be better prepared when a future opportunity comes around. Maybe I just needed to practice getting uncomfortable by trying something that makes me nervous because there is going to be a lot of that coming up this year.

Or maybe I auditioned because it’s the right group for me, I’m the right fit for them, and they’ll tell me yes. I really don’t know. It’s uncomfortable, and that’s okay.

What I do know is that I did my best and that’s all I can do each and every day. The rest is up to the universe.