REST
An evening view walking home from the opera in Rome
There is a graceless period in between engagements in which I find myself irascible, irritable, restless, and generally unpleasant to be around. These moments of respite—inevitable in every itinerant musician’s schedule—are necessary, especially for singers, who rely on our bodies as our instruments. Beyond the rather banal opportunities to do laundry and sort through the mail that accumulates while away, they provide crucial moments of physical recovery and rest. They ought to be moments of spiritual and emotional respite as well. Perhaps they are, on the surface. But I am simply not someone who goes from sixty to zero easily. I find these abrupt descents into slowness jarring, and my mind struggles to make sense of them.
Intellectually, I know what I should do during these pauses: sink back into my home routine. Go to yoga at my neighborhood studio. Catch up with friends and family. Read on the back deck in the sun. Enjoy time cooking in my own kitchen. Practice and study for the engagements ahead. In reality, I enter these periods armed with a long list of tasks I’ve been postponing “until I have the time,” and then promptly overcommit myself to catching up on the social life I missed while away, buoyed, as ever, by my broad and loving San Francisco community.
Instead of feeling centered, grounded, and restored, my mind ping-pongs between anxieties: not accomplishing all the things I feel I should be accomplishing: clearing my inbox, finishing programming projects, editing BACH 52 videos, organizing social media, practicing new repertoire, maintaining vocal shape for the pieces I already know. The list goes on. Eventually, these anxieties paralyze me into procrastination. And once I’m stuck there, I begin worrying that I should be resting and recovering from the grueling schedule I’ve been keeping. The result is a peculiar double failure: I accomplish far less than I’d hoped, and I don’t rest either.
My horoscopes this past month (which I’m never quite sure whether to take seriously) have repeatedly urged rest and refuge in this final stretch of the year. For several years now, they’ve warned me that I must acknowledge my physical and emotional limits and learn to build recovery into my life. Naturally, these messages have only fed my anxiety—until, after a spell of paralysis, that anxiety flips into fierce productivity. It feels disordered, almost bipolar: a feast-or-famine relationship to work that makes finding any ideal, orderly middle feel impossible.
In trying to understand how to rest, I’ve begun by stopping my resistance to this cycle and instead accepting that, for better or worse, this is how I function. My hope is that by practicing non-resistance, I might learn how to rest even during the periods when I feel inert or stuck. Over the past year, I’ve also come to recognize that much of this inertia is grief. Rather than fight it, I’ve tried to become a sieve, holding on to the parts of grief that feel useful and honoring, the parts that memorialize my parents and keep me feeling alive, while allowing the depression, anxiety, sadness, anger, and frustration to pass through me. In doing so, the weight of grief eases, if only slightly, from my heart and mind.
When I look back on 2025, one experience stands out with particular clarity: my time in Rome this past fall. Not only because it felt meaningful to return to the opera house for the first time in more than a decade, but because it was the first opportunity I’d had since the early days of the pandemic to root myself in one place and to focus on just one thing for five or six uninterrupted weeks.
Paradoxically, though it was a period of intense work, it became a deeply needed pause. Sometime during that first week, I realized I was finally beginning to process some of the grief I’d been carrying (and avoiding) as I moved from engagement to engagement. There were heavy days, to be sure. But by the time I left the Eternal City, I felt I had turned an important corner.
I will always be grateful for that time, and for the colleagues who encouraged me to bring my whole self into the room, fully aware of what the past few years have held. It was a rare and generous gift—one I will carry with me into the year ahead.
A technical rehearsal selfie from the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma