Should I leave piano behind?
Hello all! I've been playing piano on and off since I was 6 years old. I'm 27 now. I, to this day, cannot play a single piece with confidence, and I've only ever learned one complex piece well (Rachmaninoff's prelude in C# minor, which I later forgot, and have been trying to relearn but am failing to achieve the same proficiency). I'm debating if I should leave the instrument behind. I have two major problems I've noticed:
I have unmedicated ADHD and OCD. Focus and patience are extremely hard and always have been. I have a tendency to play everything too fast, put my hands together too early, ignore warming up, and just generally rush to "hear the piece" rather than actually master it. What usually happens is I get good enough to play something with only a few mistakes, then I get bored and give up because I've rushed through the hard parts so much I messed up my technique and it's too hard to fix, and the excitement is gone so I don't care about the piece anymore.
I have severe performance anxiety. As I said above, I've learned some fairly complex pieces, even if not as well as I like, but if someone asks me to play something, I can barely get through the first measure of fur Elise. I almost instantly forget anything I learned, and my OCD makes me obsessively anxious about messing up, so as soon as I start playing I get too in my head and can't play at all. This happens, to a lesser extent, even if I'm alone. If I know a specific part of a piece is giving me trouble, I will get it wrong almost always because I'm so worried about getting it wrong that I panic when I get to it. It probably doesn't help that I was trained by my mother, who was trained under the harsh tutelage of a classical music conservatory in the Soviet Union (where she's from), and thus can be rather harsh herself. Ironically, she, who's worked as a piano teacher and nearly got her Bachelor's in it, has performance anxiety so bad that she dropped out of school because she couldn't play in front of others. Funnily enough, I play guitar too (self-taught), and don't have the same problems at all. Guitar is easy, chill, and I can play in front of others without much issue. I'm a Bard in a DND game, and play the guitar in front of my friends like every week. Granted, it's mostly pop and indie; nothing to match classical piano.
All this to say that piano is stressful, frustrating, and anxiety-inducing. I both love it and hate it. I've put so much time into it, I have so much respect for it, and yet it feels like my worst enemy. I don't want to lose the skill, but sometimes I just don't think I really can get better. And I'm not sure it's worth the stress. Thoughts?