In Which I Finally Admit It To Myself

I'm giving up on piano.  Not in the sense that I'll never play again; I love sitting at the piano and working on music, and I'll still do that.  But in the sense that I have finally accepted the fact that I'm not going to be as good as I'd like to be.  For some reason this has not been an easy thing to admit to myself.  The fact of the matter though, is that I have invested a lot of time and effort and money into learning to play and learning about music (hello college degree).  And I really want to be a competent musician.  Not a world class performer, but you know, I think I should be able to successfully accompany a church choir at this point (I have accompanied church choirs in my past, but successfully?  no).  Or play through an intermediate piece of music without much practice.  But I can't.  I can play an early advanced piece with a few months of practice though.  It takes months, and that intermediate piece, that probably takes a few weeks.  Way longer than it should.  And still way harder than it should be.  The truly frustrating part is that my brain is light years ahead of my hands where music is concerned. I get music.  It makes sense to me.  I understand how it works, why it works, from the simple building blocks through the complex relationships.  I get it.  But my hands don't.  There's a huge disconnect between brain and hands when I look at a piece of music.  My brain says "ah, yes... let's go" and my hands fumble and stumble and shake, and it all falls apart.  Maybe I just don't have the physical coordination (which is unsurprising when I think about how terrible I am with sports).  I've thought for years that if I just kept at it and worked harder, longer, smarter, I'd break through "the wall" and become the musician I've thought was locked up inside me.  And maybe if I did, one day that would happen.  But that's just not doable in my current position in life.  I don't have hours and hours to dedicate solely to practicing.  And I don't really want to keep dedicating so much time to something that is obviously a big weakness and a source of frustration and admittedly, shame... if instead I could focus that energy on things that are more important or that I'm good at, or things that I could be good at.

So anyway, that's where I am on that.