Played in my teacher’s adult student recital on Sunday. First public performance since university. For everyone with one looming, the honest debrief:
What I feared: memory collapse, shaking hands, judgment from strangers.
What happened: hands did shake (nobody could tell, apparently), memory held because I’d practised starting from five different rescue points instead of only from the top, and the audience was eleven kind adults who all wanted everyone to succeed.
What I’d do differently: perform the piece for someone — anyone — two weeks earlier. The gap between “clean alone” and “clean with one person listening” was the entire problem, and I only closed it in the last week.
It was fine. It was actually fine. Go sign up for the thing.