Annie (Guest Blog)

Continuing my series this month of stories from Alexander Technique teachers in my paid coaching program, Annie Turner from Cornwall in the UK – a teacher for over 30 years – relates a moving account of a life spent in pursuit of authenticity, and how Alexander's work informed her journey. There is a lot here you will identify with. Annie pulls up the veil and offers an account of a dark, inner journey that finally offered her enough courage to write for you today. Don't rush this one: bookmark it and have spacious time to read, reflect and discover a few things about you as you read about… *** Annie’s Story In the words of Brene Brown - ‘Courage’ means to tell your story with your whole heart…so here I go. This is far longer than I intended, but the writing of this with more transparency than ever before has been incredibly helpful to me. Following Angela’s example I have decided to ‘begin at the very beginning’, and connections different to usual are beginning to clarify for me. I am grateful for this ‘mission’, no matter how many read it right through. I am deeply aware now that I write this simply as my story; the emotional tags that used to be attached to these memories have gone. I was born on the 23rd October 1957 in Bucks, UK. I was induced two weeks early as my mother had toxaemia, and seemingly was considered “a difficult child right from the start” by my mother, because as I was handed to her at my birth, I “covered her in meconium”....as if I had known to do that on purpose at one minute old! Maybe it was something to do with the fact that my mother had been given the then current trial in pain relief for birth - heroin! I was an only child with a 6’ 6” ex RAF Squadron Leader, pioneering father in the aircraft industry, and a mother (of a great many suppressed talents) who stayed at home. There were no more children - something that upset me greatly, but even though supposedly more were wanted, there was no chance of an adopted sibling, my father wanting ‘no more children to detract from their mother‘ who he utterly adored to the point of distraction. I was an extremely sensitive and nervous child - probably, I see it now, a complete nightmare for my parents! Yet they too ‘did fear’ extremely well and we probably made a good ‘fear team’ between us all! Life to them was full of conditions, danger, prejudices, and hoops to jump through in order to be ‘nice’. And this they tried to impart to a daughter who just didn’t ‘get’ that way of living - one school report clearly stated, “Anne will never get anywhere until she learns to conform”.... Well, although I was polite and far too scared to break rules, I wasn’t going to conform to others' view of how things should be as this, to me, meant living a lie - being someone I was not..... And yet conformity still crept up on me out of fear and bewilderment, tripping up my ‘authenticity’ many times in the future. (And I was still scapegoated for a great many things other children did because, in the 60's, being red haired and left handed made you the work of the devil!) I was not academic, gaining a music scholarship to my school and far preferring sport, music, dance, and art, at which I did very well. My school thought those unimportant, so I was ‘kept down’ a year until I learned (possibly!) what I was 'meant to know'. I was also kept down in my junior school to be kept away from those who baited me endlessly for having my red hair - how different it might have been today. Looking back I can see the beginning of something important in my life; I needed people to understand the power of their word, to use it with respect and honour. I was always being castigated for ‘taking things too literally’ when apparently they were ‘only teasing’.... I thought there was something wrong with me - probably just only child stuff - but I still rarely enjoy anything to do with teasing. I could feel the pain behind the brave smile I saw on people’s faces when ‘teased’ - not always of course; when it’s a compassionate sign of affection. But all too often it was judgement, unkindness, and even cruelty, dealt in the underhand way of ‘fun’. I would often get into trouble by trying to defend both myself and others, yet deep down a ‘remembering’ was stirring. During my teens, I - or rather my family - decided I was to become a concert pianist. I left school - half way through my ‘unlikely A levels’, so they said - and began to practice for 8 hours a day. It wasn’t a healthy day; shut (and sometimes locked) in the sitting room with the piano, I did hours of scales, finger exercises that would turn any AT teacher grey in shock, and the repetitive playing of ‘difficult passages’ sometimes 100 or more times a day. How brilliantly that reinforced my ‘not good enough’, and those ‘difficult passages’ for ever! One day, after being told too many times by my mother that I was “useless”, I simply walked out and went to London. I was 17 years old, and felt unable to even listen to, let alone play, music for about three years without feeling sick to my stomach. So instead I picked up my old love of dance. After working in Harrods accounts department all day, I went to an open ballet class at The Dance Centre in Covent Garden every evening. I loved it, but my sequencing skills weren’t up to much and I often found myself dancing steps that had me going in quite the opposite direction to everyone else! I now wanted to become a choreographer; I adored the shapes the human body was capable of making, but my dancing wasn’t yet up to the level needed. However, I never discovered if I could have made it as, one evening, I was ‘pointing’ during a pirouette exercise, and something went’ twang’ in my neck.... The next morning I could barely move, my right shoulder was a couple of inches lower than my left (even though I wasn’t leaning over), and my lower jaw was seriously over to the left, the pain had begun, the dreadful headaches, and the sense of being utterly dis-integrated. There was no more dancing, and that is how I stayed for about 18 months, seeing an osteopath three times a week and taking up to 8 pain-killers a day. This went on right through my getting married and giving birth to my first daughter the day after my 21st birthday in 1978. In 1980 I met with my voice-coach and actress aunt for supper in London on one of her visits from Canada. “You need the Alexander Technique”, she said. When I asked what that was, she replied by saying, “The osteopath can put your bones back, but your habits are in your muscles and they will pull your bones out again. An AT teacher will show you what those habits are, and how to let them go, and then your bones will stay where they are meant to be.” This made total sense to me, and when her generous gift of a cheque for a lesson arrived shortly after our supper, I found the number of Wilfred Barlow in London. I was put on his grid, told I was very crooked (I knew that!) and sent to one of his teachers, Diana Dante, for lessons. Everything about the work touched a nerve, made a point (and a huge difference!) and had me just know I had to teach this work. I applied to the then three training schools in London, and when Paul and Betty Collins accepted me onto their training course in October 1980, I walked on air in more ways that one; this was not only great, it was probably my first ever moment of being seen as ‘good enough and with potential’ rather than ‘not good enough and not worth bothering with’. During the second year of training I had a breakdown as I was unable to continue to cover the pain I was feeling about having to leave my daughter with her father when we had separated shortly before my training started. If I went for custody he was going to take 18 month old Emma to Canada (which he could have done back then) to make sure she stayed with him. My parents offered no support, my mother even sending me to a psychiatrist saying she felt I wasn’t good enough to look after my own daughter. (He thankfully disagreed!) I capitulated to a place of just being grateful that I had shared custody of Em in Engalnd and had her with me two or three times a week, but the pain that she would live with her father and my mother's judgement of me just got squashed down and down. There was, at that time, nothing in me that believed I could ever be good at anything, even being a mother. It was a horrible few years of huge pain, guilt and shame - I learned so many ways of pretending Em lived with me; mothers who gave up their children in 1980 were considered nothing short of evil. But I was not going to fight over a human being, or risk losing her to the other side of the world, and this is what I told her father and the courts, much to the latter’s amazement. I qualified from the training course in July 1983 and began to teach from my home in Surrey. I was one of only 4 teachers in the huge county of Surrey and didn't connect with any of them. London 35 miles away had the majority of teachers at that time. My diary shows that I was seeing upward of 25 students a week at that time, and all just from post-cards in shop windows, an advert in the classified section of the local paper - “Can I have some of your technique?” often being heavy-breathed down the phone by men who had interpreted the word ‘technique’ rather differently! - and the then useful STAT list, even if it was then only a Roneo’d copy of an old manual typewriter version of the few teachers there were back then, sent by post after someone called the STAT office in London. But how effective all these ways were back then. I remarried in 1987 and was blessed with two more children, and through my working as an AT teacher - both at home and at the Guildford School of Acting - I discovered I was surely as competent as the next person, both in teaching and in parenting. I was also being invited to work with members of the British Dressage team which was wonderful. Of course I had tons to learn, but my self-confidence was growing slowly. I inherited my old Steinway piano and began to play seriously again - not at any high level, but I was serious about losing my old way of responding to the piano - fighting it every inch of the way and playing with an “I can’t, but I darned well have to” attitude. I used a chair instead of a stool so I could place a book between my lower back and the back of the chair so I could tell the moment I lifted and arched my back as the book fell on the floor. I sat at the piano for long periods of ‘doing nothing’, feeling much like FM as I began to lift one hand to wards the keys, and then let it go again as I noticed all the old tensions - and the old emotions - coming up again. Eventually I was able to place both hands on the keys and play a simple piece without falling apart, and with a sort of ‘empathic connected distance’ to both the piano and the music. I can still feel it now - the simplicity, the flow, because my thinking had changed. I was now playing with a “I can, and I and the piano are simply channels through which the composer’s intention can be realised.” I entered a few local music festivals; the most scary thing about them being that I would receive a verbal critique, and in front of other people, too. In the first class I entered I vowed to play and then leave! However, that morning I had a car accident, the car being turned upside-down onto its roof. I still went on to play, and despite the amazement of coming first, my real thrill was that I felt able to stay in the room to hear my critique without running away - inwardly or outwardly! That was really huge! One thing is for sure, the AT helped 100% with getting back to playing. Had I know what I know now, the emotional side could have been released far more easily, but I was just so glad to have the feeling that I could play if I wanted, or not play - the old attachments were dropping away. The relationship between myself and my parents however continued to be extremely difficult, with a toxicity that continued to affect almost every part of my life. Sadly my second marriage failed in 1999, and in 2001 I moved to Cornwall with the man I speak of later. I began to teach here, but apart from 18 months working a very lucrative one day a week at Orange call-centres 100 miles away to the east, I became extremely tired and disillusioned from trying to ‘market’ the AT to people - 23 years since qualifying and still people knew nothing, or had the opposite end of the stick. There was no internet and no Facebook then! So in 2004 I took a ‘sabatical’ from the AT, thinking it was from the work, but realising later it had been from the dismal marketing of the work. I missed teaching hugely as I was only teaching those one or two a year who found me from the STAT list. Instead I set up and ran a ‘Paint Your Own Pottery’ studio for 3 years. When even this began to fold, I folded too - it was the start of the Really Dark Days I write about below; I was a failure again, maybe ‘they’ had been right and I always had been. But I also could see something from my time in the studio; those I loved to work with best were those who ‘wanted to paint but didn’t dare try’..... I would sit with them, quietly offering them the opportunity to try, letting them know I could wash the paint off if they didn’t like it enough for me to glaze and fire their painted piece... one lady in particular was very tearful as she persisted painting with great courage. I said I would fire the bowl, but that she didn’t have to pay for it and have it if she didn’t want it when it was finished. She dismissed her work entirely when finished, but when she came to collect her daughter’s work and saw her bowl with it, shiny with glaze and colour, she simply burst into tears seeing how lovely it was and realising she wasn’t the disaster she had been thinking she was, right back from school days. The memory of this lady remains to this day as being where I knew I wanted to work - assisting people to believe in themselves and feel safe enough to give something a go. This was similar to the one day workshops I used to run in the 90’s with a singing friend and teacher - ‘Discover the Voice Within - for those who have always wanted to sing but never dared try’ - me with the AT and my colleague with the singing. We ran seventeen of these, and each one was full of magical moments for people as they found a safe place to discover how untrue all those ‘you can’t sing’ retorts had been in their life, and that they did have a voice. I even discovered many years later that two people who attended went on to become AT teachers! And many more joined choirs, took lessons and began to sing most proficiently, but more importantly, with confidence and joy. Still, there was yet to come the matter of the ‘fall into darkness’ - which I write about below. A little backtrack here: It was in about 1990 - during a rare visit to London to a workshop for teachers at Lansdowne Road - that I had a huge light-bulb-moment. I suddenly dropped out of the group and went to sit (cower even) in a corner; something had just become almost too clear for me to handle. I woke up to the fact that I was wearing the AT like a coat - a cloak of protection, of pretence. All this ‘up’ was a mask and a costume that had me ‘look fine’, look strong and capable. I was acting the AT, not being it. I knew in that moment that I had to have it running through my bones as deeply as my bone marrow, or not in me at all. A teacher there came up to me at the end of the day - after I had declined any further work - and quietly said, “I’d like to see your work in ten years’ time; it’s going to be incredibly different.” I don’t know who she was, but I knew she was right. In 1992 I read the Direction journal entitled, “Emotion’. I read Jeremy’s article in there - and it knocked me out. I read it so often over the ensuing years that I could (and still can) nigh on repeat it word for word. Two sentences in particular nailed me on the first read:- “Inhibition became for me much more than just stopping. It was about dying.” and “....to give up all the effort I was putting into being Jeremy.” As I read those words the first time, something ‘gave’ in me. I softened, I woke up, I wept from a place deep within; I knew I had read words that resonated more deeply than any I had read to date. Yes, I was making myself up - I was nothing but a facade, the Anne I thought I had to build in order to be acceptable in this world. And I was a mess. Yet I had never stopped to ask myself how I could possibly please everyone? I just had to keep trying, harder and yet harder... Yet in the moment of reading that sentence I knew this wasn’t the way it was meant to be, but I had no idea what was.... When I stopped trying surely I would go back to the person I was so desperately trying to hide? I would revert to the one I had persistently been told was far from ok. I was just about getting by through ‘being’ a mish-mash of the friends my parents “wished I was like”, the people on TV who I “was meant to be”, the “nice” people they so admired. Only I wasn’t getting by at all - fear was building in me daily, angry outbursts becoming more frequent, anxiety and panic attacks raising their heads more often, and phobias building by the month. This, coupled with my growing awareness of the extent of the general co-ercing of me to be someone I wasn’t, created more and more relationship problems - horrible rows, words I wished never to say again, words I wished never to hear again, and always the growing clarity that this surely wasn’t the way to be. But what the heck was? I was reading anything I could lay my hands on which gave me ways of understanding, of speaking to be understood, of realising where all this pain came from (aka, blame with permission from countless authors and therapists), and I was taking Valium and anti-depressants on a regular basis. In 1997-ish, I saw Jeremy was giving a workshop in London based on his Congress paper about the enneagram.... I booked on it like a shot - I knew I had to be there. I got lost on the long drive there, arrived in extremely late in embarrassed tatters, burst in expecting a frown and a sigh, but received a welcoming and ‘it doesn’t matter a jot’ smile, and felt an acceptance of me as I was, both late and flustered. This was a completely new feeling to me, and one I can still sense to this day. The day went on to change something in my teaching for ever. We were each working with ‘an issue’, mine a long-standing phobia. The moment I was able, even encouraged by Jeremy, to simply ‘be’ with my issue with no expectation, no demand to ‘free myself out of it’, and even to go into it more deeply in order to make new discoveries, something changed deeply - if not the phobia, certainly the way to approach life. I couldn’t put my finger on quite why or how, but I continued to use this way with myself and a few students over the ensuing months and years. I learned so, so much. But so much came up in me which I had no idea how to handle. Therapy helped, but later I sensed how talking about it was ‘inking the pain in’ further. I couldn’t change the past, and even understanding it in my mind didn’t help for more than a few days or weeks, and the memories, or the stimuli I reacted so strongly to, seemed to have become even more powerful. Throughout all this I was still always so grateful for the now basic AT ‘habit’ of freeing my neck, allowing the breath, knowing where ‘up’ was, not collapsing for longer than I felt I had to... These means of being able to come out of the massive pull-downs after a major relationship row were life-saving - and oh my, I had by then (in 2000) taken up with a man who offered 100 times the combined emotional abuse of my parents! “I’ll make you a better person - just you stick with me and you’ll end up fine.” And how I needed to believe him! But then, as the penny dropped, I wondered, how had I sunk to this? Because I was such a useless person of course, was the only answer I could think of. But one day something shifted and I stood up differently - “You will never speak to me in this way in this relationship again”, I said quietly. And, shock as it was, he vanished within 24 hours, never to return. Time went on, and I went on pretending to go up, but inside I was going down, down, down. I was then with a lovely man, but one who still fed my fire of self-doubt, this time by being an out-and-out ‘rescuer’. So I was now also labelled by a man as possibly Aspergers, maybe bi-polar, undoubtedly BPD (borderline personality disorder - yet that line is pretty subjective after all!) and certainly the owner of quite a few other acronyms that I have long forgotten. One thing’s for sure, despite the fact that I can now see how I was inviting men like this into my life to confirm all my worst suspicion about my self, I was back then discovering the annihilational power of being labelled from the outside by others; the fear those labels brought up in me was huge. The valium increased, the alcohol increased, the anxiety increased, but my self-esteem decreased ever further, finally falling through a crack in the ground and I drowned. But one day, having frightened myself silly, I stopped in my tracks. And I was more than grateful for something from the AT that had stuck with me through it all; the ability to understand and react less to the fear that arises in that place of stopping, that place of neutral, that place of nothingness. Even if, for most of us, the fear associated with not being able to stand up from a chair in our old way, yet not having a clue how to stand up in the new way, is nothing like the fear of stopping being the fabricated you and knowing there is a real you somewhere, but who, where, and how, is she??? In the place of ‘I am no one’, over and over I just remembered those words about ‘dying to the old me’....and I knew I wasn’t alone in this; at least one other person had been there and lived to write about it later. If I am honest, I was in hell for some months. But in the transparency I dared risk on an on-line forum, I discovered something... I was not that bad. In fact I had some strengths, ones that even assisted others. Some of the things I wrote which had ‘Alexander principles’ in them helped others. They thanked me for being me - even though it was a place of avatars and no real names. They thanked me for my ‘wisdom’ ... Me? Wisdom? But yes, it was there; I was an AT teacher of 20+ years and I knew something helpful to others, and I could be something positive. No, I discovered I just was this thing, compassionate. So I began to experience a new me, the real me, in this cyber place. I began to do some work that I sensed I had met before.... It was called ‘Footsteps of the Soul’ Transformational Healing with a lady called Patricia Angove. She wasn’t healing me, but she was facilitating a process whereby my soul could finally shift, seemingly at a cellular level, those life experiences that remained stuck deep inside me, no matter what I had tried before. The work was/is gently powerful, and powerfully gentle. I had done some of it with her a few years earlier in 2004, and remember an extraordinary moment in one of her workshops when I suddenly ‘gnew’ my long-held passion for working with the voice was not really about working with the physical instrument, but with the actual person by assisting them to find their own ‘voice’; to be able to be and say who they really were. My then website was called Open Voice - people with their voice open and free, saying and being what they meant with confidence....but no one knew of it as how I was going to do this thing remained a frustrating mystery for several more years, the frustration also leading to the fall into darkness from 2005-9. After coming up out of the dark days, I delved in deeper with Patricia’s work in 2009. Gradually a really steady light began to go on inside and a self-acceptance grew. And more - I now had a process I was able to use when there was a ‘mucky moment’ in life, just like with the AT. So I undertook the intensive training to become a Facilitator of Transformational Healing myself; for the first time in 25 years I felt I had found work that deeply supported the AT, and vice versa. And it was strangely familiar - yes, it was similar to the ‘it’s ok to stay with it, not have to deny or change it’ feeling of that enneagram workshop years before. The way I knew to be life-changing for me, and for others. The training was deep, intense, sometimes painful, yet full of love and compassion, and utterly life-changing. Others on the course spoke of seeing a veil dropping away from me, and that they could see me as if for the first time. When I came home, close friends said they didn’t know what had happened, or where I had been, but I was so different. I had stopped hiding. Finally I had stepped out of ‘trying to be Annie’. (Even though I can still find myself trying it again sometimes, but I am onto it ever sooner!) This is the reason that Tommy Thompson’s words in a workshop resonated so much with me and I use them so much: “What is it you do in order to be who you think you need to be in any given moment?” This is the ‘doing’ to reveal and let go of. At last I am being me, and not who I think I need to be (as much anyway!). And this is where my passion lies in my work. I realise now that I have an interest, but no passion, in assisting people to just ‘free their necks in order for their backs to lengthen and widen, in order for their knees to go forwards and away’.... I have a deep, bone-marrow passion to assist others to ‘find their feet, find their self, and find their soul’ - to Remember Who They Really Are, safely, confidently, joyfully, and with the tools to continue and to maintain their own beautiful authenticity on their life-long journey. So my work now includes making discoveries about the agreements we made as children when we had no idea we were doing this - agreements about not being this, or must become that, of ‘our family can’t sing, run, add up, etc’, or of ‘nice people are always...’ Discovering how to make new adult, yet flexible, agreements which support the real us. Agreements that also change the attachments we have to those early agreements made when we were ‘domesticated’ by parents and teachers, however well meant their words were. And to discover how it is so often these early beliefs that create the distortions in our bodies that the AT can help release. Consideration of The Power of the Word is top of the list for me; the words we use to others, but mostly the words we use to our self; no one, but no one, has ever spoken to us as harshly as we speak to our self. And because we speak thus to our selves, we allow others to speak to us thus too. When we cease speaking to ourself with hard words, others begin to cease using them towards us. To me, this place of harsh words is where our stiff necks come from. Where our pull-downs come from, Where our fixing comes from - the fear of our self by our self - and this is where I work. A free neck which still hides inner self-beating isn’t the free neck in which I am interested. Self-compassion still benefits from all the awareness and direction that the AT offers, but the two together I believe make a real difference on the planet, because they include something important; self-compassion is catching! This may well mean that in this work I am not really teaching ‘pure’ AT, although I teach a great many 'ordinary lessons' too. To me the AT’s principles are always firmly routed in my work, and have been/are a lifesaver in my and students’ life journey to date, but used maybe in a different way. I work right back at the cause, not just with its the result. Yes, the AT has helped me countless times; a sore hip that my awareness finally found as a releasable odd movement when walking. A sore right foot last year which went within a couple of weeks when I caught myself pulling my right foot off the ground when standing, like a child when nervous - why I was doing that who knows, but I was, I released it, the pain went away. All these moments have me feel magical gratitude for my years’ in the AT when I know a trip to the doctor would have given me nothing but a heap of age-related assumptions on their part, a drawer-full of unnecessary medication - and undoubtedly another page of acronyms! I think the sense of my desire to work in the arena of 'self-befriending' was summed up recently when I read this. I felt it summed up the way I feel drawn to work.....to companion people in that place we feel too scared to visit alone; the in between state, the middle...

Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It's the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us with then make us more rigid and afraid. Pema Chodron.

Jeremy's Comments

It's a magnificent and moving essay Annie – congratulations in putting together an articulate and honest portrayal of your life. I was touched many times and you kept my attention throughout. Now I wonder – can I offer feedback without triggering the "it was not good enough" part of you that is always on the lookout for another opportunity to oppress your joy? I know because I have one too, and my guess is you are totally able to listen constructively, while noticing the old thoughts still jostling for credibility. I love the humour that comes through in lines like these: "…the doctor would have given me nothing but a heap of age-related assumptions on their part, a drawer-full of unnecessary medication - and undoubtedly another page of acronyms!" You have a real gift of the word. In the opening paragraphs about your early life with parents, school and piano, I think there is more power in removing your present day comments on what happened to you then. Let your story do it's own work, and let the reader make their own judgement. Leaving the judgement job to me feels freer. When I am told how I should view you there's a chance I will rebel, stop reading and disregard the rest. Trust the reader to empathise without painting your Self as a victim of others. My biggest shock was discovering that you play the piano – well enough to win competitions! I recall you talking about your musical students, but not that you are one too. So I wonder Annie why you don't make this your niche? I can guess there are not many serious, classical musicians in Cornwall, but if we widen this to musicians and singers – isn't that a real possibility for you to niche to? Choirs, people secretly wanting to sing, musicians of all kinds – you could hobble together a coalition of students to achieve sustainability, even in Cornwall. Look around – are there any other people in Cornwall living off a "music niche"? My guess is that you do not want to give your Self a "Musician" identity, but in terms of others, many possibilities become available for them by declaring your history and self-authorizing your Self to act as a musical advisor to others. It opens the door to that deeper work you yearn for – because, in my understanding, musicians are epidemically plagued by the very same issues of self-criticism and inadequacy. I believe the insights and wisdoms you have to offer others are too confronting to be put out there as a "first step" process. This stuff will always come out, but first comes the necessity to build a trusting relationship, and have something concrete to focus the work towards. After all – that's what you did isn't it? It is not dissimilar to the classic English approach to a crisis: "Let's have a cup of tea." – i.e. let's do a simple, practical thing together that reminds us of being grounded and centred, then we can also get into the deeper existential stuff. Stringing your transformation work around an accessible musical wish may be a way forward in conservative Cornwall… In a note for everyone: "we" is a term I have learnt to watch out for when reviewing my writing and I often ask the question: "Would 'you' or 'I' work better here? With 'we' there is a suggestion of many people listening and reading; whereas 'you' and 'I' suggests just the two of us in a intimate relationship. The reader – when addressed directly as 'you' gets an opportunity to connect in a way that 'we' does not achieve. I love how you tie it all together at the end and make your teaching points, and if I were editing, I would go back and find ways to keep in all the stories that connect with that, and edit out the rest. I think you were the primary audience of this writing, and that's exactly right. Now it's time to highlight parts that connect to musicians, and offer that to the musicians in need. Is there someone you can ask to help you with that? Your writing needs another skilful eye to help you weave the narrative together into an integrated whole with a specific audience in mind. Click here to post any immediate thoughts… https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/