When I lost my voice, I thought “I love singing,” but singing doesn’t love me back. That’s why it has abandoned me. But after I saw my mom today, I realized I could never give up singing. from the Kdrama, Castaway Diva
In the Kdrama, Castaway Diva, talented 16-year-old singer Seo Mok-Ha endures her abusive father by dreaming of being like her idol, chart-topping Yoon Ran-Joo. By a horrid twist of fate, Mok-Ha is stranded for 15 years on a remote island while trying to escape from her father. Rescued, she tracks down her idol, whose career has long since faded after she ruined her vocal cords. The younger woman urges her idol to restart her career. The older woman replies, “When I lost my voice, I thought ‘I love singing,’ but singing doesn’t love me back. That’s why it has abandoned me. But after I saw my mom today, I realized I could never give up singing.
I recently posed this question to my Sunday Brunch Philosophy Club: “Was there ever something in your life that you loved, but didn’t love you back? Did you abandon it or did you decide not to give it up?”
Our “club” of six gathers every month or so to grapple with the often-unanswerable questions of life. The whys. The how-comes. Questions of good and evil. What constitutes moral behavior. What’s an appropriate response to a totally inappropriate action or statement. How to cope with a world that feels as if it’s going to hell in a handbasket, as my father used to say.
The inspiration for the group was Alexander McCall Smith’s book, The Sunday Philosophy Club in which a quirky woman occasionally called on a couple friends to discuss existential ideas.
The answers to my recent question about not being “loved back” by something we loved were varied and thoughtfully given.
My response was playing the piano as a preschooler. We lived on a farm and had an old upright piano. When my three older brothers were at school, I loved to “compose” the most beautiful music in the world. Unfortunately, my father, who was a swing-shift factory worker in addition to a parttime farmer, was not impressed with my musical talents, especially weeks he was on nights and sleeping days. Eventually the piano cover got locked and the key got lost. At some point my father chopped up the piano and burned it in the coal furnace. It was a very old piano and probably drastically out of tune. But I admit, it broke my heart.
One of our group said for her it was performing on stage, something she loved doing as a elementary and high school student, but had no talent for. Another person said it was basketball. It was her high school passion. But it ruined her knees, and as an adult she’s had six surgeries on her knee and ankle. Yet another member said it was relationships.
That’s a particularly challenging one. I remember a number of one-sided crushes as a teenager and failed love affairs as a young adult. It’s about as soul sucking as it can get to love someone who doesn’t love you back or has stopped loving you. One of our members said for her it was people who didn’t love her the way she needed them to. She learned she needed to accept what they offered or move on. And the last of our group said she once had a job she absolutely loved; it wasn’t the job that didn’t love her back, it was the “politics” surrounding the job that didn’t love her back.
In Castaway Diva the now 31-year-old Seo Mok-Ha is trying to break into the music world, despite being told by a record company owner that she is too old. Another singer who abandoned his efforts to get a record deal tells her it takes courage to realize when it’s time to give up. She replies that if she believed that, she’d have died on that deserted island. He counters, “Won’t you regret it if ten years later, you never succeed?” She smiles and says, “Well, at least I’d have spent ten years doing what I love.”
That was the other part of our Sunday morning discussion—is it a sign of courage to abandon what doesn’t love us back or a sign of courage to continue? The answer was…yes. Both take courage.
The day after our discussion, I thought of another “something” that didn’t love me back—teaching. It was my dream to be a high school social studies teacher. However, when I did my student teaching, I felt totally incompetent and dreaded every day of it, despite the good grade I got for it. I still tried to find a teaching job after graduating, after all I’d spent four years and lots of money on that career. But my efforts came to naught, so I abandoned my dream. Ten years later, I tried again: a year as a seventh/eighth grade Social Studies and English teacher in a Catholic school, then a semester in a public school filling in for a sixth-grade geography teacher on sabbatical.
By then I loved teaching. But it didn’t love me back. Once again, I was unable to find a position, so once again I abandoned it, turning to a new career: community education and media specialist in a county social service agency. Although I abandoned public school teaching, my new job opened the door to a career in staff development and adult education, in which I worked at for 23 years, followed by ten years as an independent trainer.
Thirty years after that piano became firewood, my mother gifted me the piano my sisters and I bought for her after I graduated from college. (She had long since paid us back). I started taking lessons and now play simple tunes when no one is listening. And “compose” my own music, for the sheer joy of it.
Sometimes what we love doesn’t love us back in the moment, but returns in a different form later in life.
Time to get philosophical. Talk about the following question with a friend or contemplate it in a journal: What is something in your life that didn’t love you back? Did you give up on it or persist?
