Gifted, Anxious, and Totally Done: Was It Too Late to Start Over?
- Gökçe Kutsal
- May 1, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* This story is shared with care. To respect the client’s privacy, some details have been changed. The essence of their experience and the outcomes remain true.
When this client first reached out, she was at a crossroads... the kind that can sit in your chest for years without resolving in either direction.
She was a trained opera singer who had built her life and identity around music. She had also, recently, walked away from her career. Stage anxiety had become unbearable. Perfectionism had been quietly eating the joy out of the work for years. By the time she stopped performing, she didn't know whether she was taking a break, or whether she was leaving for good.
Her question wasn't "how do I get back on stage" (that would have been simpler). It was something harder to hold: Do I even want to?
Was opera still right for her?
Should she pivot to something else entirely?
Was she walking away from something she'd love again if she could just find a different relationship to it, or was she finally listening to a part of herself that had been trying to leave for a long time?
I remember reading her first message and thinking: This is someone who's already done a lot of internal work. And she was asking for a space where she could think without a filter.
The Cost of Being Built Around Music
Many of my clients come to me while still performing. This client was different — she had stopped, and the silence had given her enough distance to start asking questions she couldn't ask while she was still in it.
But what had emerged in that silence wasn't relief. It was a tangle.
She absolutely loved music. The thought of leaving opera entirely felt like a kind of grief. But the thought of going back also brought weeks of anticipatory anxiety before any single performance. There was a frustrating gap between how she sang in private (beautifully, freely), and how she sang on stage, where the perfectionism would arrive and start doing its job. By the time she walked off stage, no matter how the performance had actually gone, she felt punished.
Performing had stopped feeling like making music. It had started feeling like sitting an exam she wasn't allowed to pass.
(This is something I see often when someone's passion has also been their profession since childhood. The stakes start high and only get higher. Joy becomes a luxury you can no longer afford to wait for, because the next audition is always too close.)
The Goalposts That Kept Moving
As we explored what she'd actually been carrying, the shape of her perfectionism became clear — and worth describing precisely, because it's the kind of perfectionism I see in highly trained musicians more often than people realise.
It wasn't that her standards were high. High standards are just a natural part of being a serious musician. The problem was that her definition of 'acceptable' had become impossibly narrow:
Not the best in the world? Not good enough.
Quite good, with some minor flaws? Not good enough.
A beautiful performance with one wrong thing? Still not good enough.
There's no version of a performance that survives that filter. No matter what she gave, the goalposts moved. The inner critic always had something else to point at.
So this wasn't a confidence problem in the usual sense. She knew, intellectually, that she was a good singer. The issue was that no amount of evidence could ever satisfy the standard she was being measured against, because the standard wasn't really about singing. It was about whether she was allowed to feel okay about herself at all, and a single wrong note was enough to revoke that permission.
You can't perform from inside that bind. You can survive it, for a while. But eventually, most people stop.
The Empty Chair
Somewhere in the middle of our work, we used a structured exercise borrowed from Jungian and Gestalt approaches called the Empty Chair.
The premise is straightforward. When you're stuck between parts of yourself — part of me wants to sing, part of me wants to stop; part of me believes I can change, part of me thinks I'm fooling myself — most of us try to think our way out. But thinking is exactly what keeps the parts arguing in your head with no resolution. So instead, you give each part its own voice.
Quite literally. You sit in one chair and speak as one part. You move to the other chair and speak as the other.
It sounds odd. It works because of why it sounds odd: It externalises an internal argument that's been running on a loop. Once each part can hear itself out loud, in its own voice, without being interrupted by the other, something usually shifts. You stop being fused with each part. You can listen to them rather than be them.
For her, the exercise gave airtime to a part of herself that had been speaking very quietly for a long time. Not the perfectionist (who had no shortage of airtime). Not the part that wanted to quit (who had finally been heard, which was why she'd stopped performing). It was something else. A more grounded, more compassionate voice that had been there underneath all of it, mostly drowned out.
That part didn't push her either way. It didn't tell her to go back to opera, and it didn't tell her to walk away. It asked a different question:
What if it's okay to continue, even if you're scared? And what if it's okay to stop, if that's what's actually right?
Both options on the table, neither demanded.
What She Found
Over the course of our work, what shifted wasn't her decision. It was her relationship to the question itself.
She stopped trying to solve opera — should I, shouldn't I, what's the right answer — and started getting clearer about what she actually wanted from making music in the first place. She wrote:
“I want to find joy, freedom, musicality and love in making music. I want to focus on the moment, whether it’s practising, studying, or performing.”
That sentence sounds like a decision, but in reality, it's a compass. And it turns out a compass is more useful than a decision when you're standing somewhere genuinely uncertain.
She also began to notice — this was important — that the self-criticism she'd been carrying wouldn't actually be left behind if she changed careers. It would follow her into whatever she did next, because it wasn't really about opera. It was about her relationship to herself. Walking away from opera might give her relief, but it wouldn't give her freedom.
By the end of our work, the inner critic hadn't disappeared. (It rarely does. It's not meant to.) What had changed was that she had access to another voice when she needed it: The wiser, gentler one. This time, she knew it was real and she knew how to find it.
In her words:
“There is a place I can access in me that is compassionate, gentle, caring and wise… This change will be scary, but hopefully in the right way.”
What I Don't Know
I want to be honest about something here, because I think it matters...
I don't know what this client did next.
I don't know whether she returned to opera, chose another path, or is still standing somewhere in between. We finished our work together, and her life continued without my needing to know how it unfolded. That's normal in this work, and it would feel slightly dishonest to tie a neat bow on a story that, in real life, didn't have one.
What I do know is what shifted while we were working. She came in carrying a question she couldn't hold, and left holding it differently. She came in with a perfectionism that had taken the colour out of her singing, and left with a more honest sense of what success could even mean for her. She came in not knowing if there was another voice inside her besides the critic, and left having met it.
Whatever she's doing now — singing, not singing, somewhere in between — she's doing it from a different place than the one she stopped from.
That, to me, is enough.
In her own words:
“I was initially unsure about working with Gökçe, but now I’m grateful I did. Her approach was brilliant, kind, and accepting. She genuinely cares and wants the best for you. I learned some truly life-changing things about myself, and finally put some old problems to rest.”
Not every story needs a stage at the end of it... sometimes it's just about having old problems put to rest.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
