Perfectionism and 'skill dysphoria' as obstacles to healthy contact with reality.

"Fool! You cannot perceive my ✨sound✨ merely by listening to me play!"

I'm currently in a phase of my violin career best described as "aspiring professional."

With me are the best few (several thousand) violin players in my country, competing for 5-10 full-time orchestral jobs that open up each year. We're regularly getting casual work performing, but not enough to make a living. Almost all of us will eventually give up on that goal and take up teaching full-time, play occasional wedding gigs and with pop orchestras, get a day job, and/or marry up^[1]. This typically means spending less time practising and playing, which leads to our skills declining in a vicious spiral.

Avoiding concrete measures of skill

If you ever want to see real fear, compliment a violinist on their playing. 

"That Mozart was sounding so good just now."

"Oh (panics) you were listening to that? Haha yeah I was just sight-reading through some old stuff, just bashing through it, you know? lol. I'm not even warmed up. This isn't even my violin. My left arm fell off and the doctors put it back on backwards, still getting used to that."

"You sounded great!"

Transforms into a demon

"Fool! You cannot perceive^[2] my ✨sound✨ merely by listening to me play!"

Some violinists, particularly as their skill begins to decline after they stop practising 3-6 hours per day, become allergic to public performances.

When they do perform, there is always an excuse justifying why their performance can't be held as a measure of their skill. These excuses are offered unbidden, in bulk, to anyone who will listen, both ahead of and after any performance^[3].

• I'm actually sight-reading this gig, I'm too busy [being successful] to look at my part ahead of time.^[4]
• Wow that tempo was pretty fast, wasn't it?!
• Weird bowings they chose for that. That's not how I played it [during success].
• Haven't actually played my instrument this week yet, hope I'm not too rusty.
• My instrument has been sounding weird recently, I should get it looked at.
• Been so busy with [success thing], probably shouldn't have agreed to this [lowly thing] but here we are!

While initially this is a pragmatic decision (if you get a reputation for being a poor player, even on one occasion, it's a career disaster as a performer), this shyness eventually morphs into something more pathological. 

With skills in constant decline and deprived of feedback, the player develops a kind of 'skill dysphoria'. They become hostile to any contact with reality, thus eventually aversive to practice, and disconnected from any joy or beauty they might once have seen in their playing. The relationship with the mirror becomes pathological.

It goes one of two ways, (or both). 

1. Either they hate their playing, and thus anyone who compliments their playing must be either a philistine or else belittling/babying them. 
2. Otherwise they become delusional. Compensatory ego-defence and reality-distortion mental reflexes thick as brambles. They take refuge in social politics and in judging and gossiping about others' playing, usually based on vague and difficult-to-define and subjective criteria.

"Honorary Good Player" vs. "you're only funky as [the moving average of] your last [few] cut[s]"

Some players will simply coast on their previous reputation for as long as possible, believing "good player" to be a social class marker that, once earned, cannot be lost (rather than something that exists because of ongoing hard work.)

Other players fully embrace "you're only as good as your last performance", which can be a helpful existing memetic antibody to this problem.

The problem is, this antibody risks inflaming the perfectionist impulses that stalk most violinists at this level, undermining mental health and ironically becoming an obstacle to high performance. If every performance defines you, how can you ever relax enough^[5] to perform well?

We need to understand that individual performances will vary, but keeping in mind our current skill level is what matters, not how well we used to play. That way, perfectionism is held in check and we strike a healthy balance.^[6]

Broader Implications

This issue isn't limited to violinists.

It may seem trivial, but nonetheless it's important to reflect on:

Generally, it's healthy to produce work/products/output at regular time intervals, delivered with sincerity and full effort in a forum where you're accountable to peers and you get feedback from reality. Taken as the running average of the past few outputs, this level of performance should not be qualified by any excuses. That's your work.

1. ^{^}

   Just joking.

2. ^{^}

   I'm being slightly unfair. There's an inherent power dynamic in complimenting someone. Listen to the Zoomers on Tiktok: perceiving someone is violence. You could be implicitly putting yourself above them, which they might not like.

3. ^{^}

   I once played a wedding gig where one of the players wouldn't stop saying these things about her own playing to members of the bride's family after the ceremony.

4. ^{^}

   They will fake-play any hard parts.

5. ^{^}

   Because we're directing a firehose of emotion through the most sensitive, finnicky interface you can imagine, you can sometimes literally tell what muscles are tense in a player's arm/back just by listening.

6. ^{^}

   Hahaha hahahhahahaha ahahahahahahahah