By Eleanor Kazdan, March 4, 2021 — I recently watched the psychological thriller ‘Behind Her Eyes’ on Netflix. Without giving too much away in case you want to watch it, (it is very good), part of the theme is the paranormal. It’s pretty eerie. Don’t view it before bedtime if you have trouble sleeping as I did. It’s six episodes long, and for six nights I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t put two and two together, like “Oh, it’s the program!” But I was reminded of several surprising episodes that I have had, which I would call “semi-out-of-body experiences.”
The first one happened about ten years ago. I attended a sing-along performance of the Messiah at the studio of Andrea Clearfield, an internationally known composer from Philadelphia. At that time, I pretty much stopped singing solo for various reasons. One of which was that my voice could no longer do the things it used to do. The solos in the Messiah were being performed by voice students from Temple or Curtis. Andrea got up and welcomed everyone to the performance. She then went on to say that there was one alto solo that didn’t have a singer and asked if there were any volunteers from the attendees. I can’t explain what possessed me, but after a brief internal dialogue of seconds, I raised my hand. “What on Earth have I done?” I wondered. Well, my turn came after quite a few solos sung by beautiful young voices. I walked to the front of the room, looked out at the audience as I have done dozens, if not hundreds of times before, waited for my cue from the piano, and began singing. My voice sounded pretty good. I had a weird sensation that I was listening to myself sing from outside myself, as well as performing the necessary physical and mental acts of singing.
I had a similar experience not too long after this. I had been studying Spanish for a few years at OLLI, the Temple University Senior’s program. I was good at grammar and pronunciation but really hadn’t had many fluent speaking opportunities. The students had each prepared something to talk about. Our teacher Maria suggested that we try to speak to the class rather than reading what we wrote. So it was my turn. I got up in front of the class a bit nervously and begun to speak. From outside myself, I heard somebody speaking Spanish pretty fluently. Was that me? I realized that it was.
I haven’t had such a dramatic experience since these two. It happened slightly the first time I taught a French class in person, having never done this before, but I was more in my body. Is there a meaning to all this? Maybe the message to myself is that I need to be brave and seek out new challenges.