u/Extra-Block-6708

I can’t do this. I’ve been in marching band the entirety of high school in pit percussion. I’ve always been bad at reading sheet music and I’m not the best player but I was able to hold myself up through those four seasons and mastered all of the songs by the end of camp each time. There was so much reward to being apart of the band with trips and events and parades. Despite the stressful practices and mishaps, I loved it in the end. I had good support from both a band instructor helping the mallets and an amazing section leader my junior and senior year.

College band is so much different. I walk into the room and somehow I am the 2nd most experienced mallet player in a room of 8 people. There are 4 people who have never once been in band prior and our section leader was forced into the role after she was the only returning member (she’s the same skill level as me and also needs help with reading sheet music). We don’t have a pit instructor. Instead, we are given the percussion sound-tech who also teaches at the fancy colleges in my city with music majors and preforms at the big theater too. He’s like Fletcher from whiplash but old. What he’s been trying to do is teach us every small part to perfection. Somehow he’s going too fast and we are still only on page 1 out of 8 5 days in. (Nearly 50 hours of staring at the same page, repeating the same bar over and over again for hours.) When helping he also has this attitude like you are a complete imbecile if you don’t get it right the first time. He’s also disregarded one of the people in our section’s disability (she has a rare medical condition and standing leaves her with extreme pain ), and keeps misgendering another member of our section. There has been so many small comments and actions he has done to where 7/8 people in our section (me included) have cried in practice. I, even ended up crying today and having to excuse myself for the rest of the day due to how much stress has been put on us over the last week. I can’t put into words how awful this is for 13 hours a day. It feels like torture, I even hear the notes in my head after I lay down to sleep.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. I’d rather get my gallbladder removed a second time than do this. I was genuinely considering dropping an iron bar on my hand so I didn’t have to do this anymore. I’m not particularly the strongest person, but this can’t be how band is. I can’t even bring myself to walk back into the building without having a breakdown. My mental health is deteriorating by the day and I can’t take much more of this. I know it’s only 5 more days, but I don’t even think anything after this is worth all of the genuine mental pain this has caused me and my section. We’ve even tried going to the band director about it and have gotten zero progress.

(We had a student instructor for a few days (who was 18 btw) and he did so much better at genuinely helping us than Fletcher ever did. He’s a finance major.)

In summary:

We have no pit instructor
My section leader isn’t qualified to lead
Multiple people have quit over various issues
Our stand in instructor is malicious.

Should I quit?

I’ve only suffered from sleep paralysis once in my life when I was little before last night. I had woken up, an hour or so after I had gone to sleep. My sleep schedule has been off considering I worked my first opening shift at my job around 5 am. All I could feel after a few seconds of being unable to move was aching pain like I had never felt all over. It was like nothing I had ever left before. I was able to somehow get up and take a walk about my house before going back to bed, but it was as if my body wasn’t supposed to be up and moving too. I know that this isn’t typically considered sleep paralysis, but is there any relation to it? I know for a fact it wasn’t some hallucination either considering I texted my friend about it and that text was still there when I woke up.