Musician's Identity Crisis!

I love playing the flute. I work really hard at it, but in the last 2 years I felt like I've made very little progress. I have less than a year until my uni auditions and I'm really stressed out already. Every time I pick my damn flute up I'm feeling anxious. I have a lot to do in the next year, but my flute teacher is convinced that if I do everything he says I'll get into the Adelaide Conservatorium, which is probably the best place to study in the country right now.

My saxophone, on the other hand, is just a bit of fun. I'm the lead tenor sax in my school's senior bigband this year, so I'm getting to do lots of improvising. The highlight of this was definitely having a huge improvised solo infront of 3000 people at Adelaide's annual Festival of Music. I'm also part of a newly formed Funk/Soul band at my school, which again is good fun. I play my saxophone as little as I can to still sound good and pour the rest of the time into my flute. Somehow I'm making leaps and bounds forwards with my sound. My school's Jazz Cabaret happened the other week and lots of people heard me solo a few times. Everyone has been really glowing about how good I sound, including an ex-student that I don't even really know. My flute teacher came over and shook my hand, congratulating me on playing really well. It was good, but he's never that encouraging with my flute playing.

I'm not well suited to flute playing. My lips are a funny shape. My old flute teacher used to comment about how perfect one of his student's lips were and I've always had to work harder than her to sound any good. In my saxophone lesson the other week my teacher told me that she would recommend I don't play flute based on my lips. I don't think she realised how much that hurt me.

I love playing the flute when I'm not stressed out about it. I want to follow it through into a career. I don't love playing the saxophone. It's just a bit of fun on the side. I would give up the saxophone in a instant if it could make me improve more on the flute. Suddenly everyone loves my sax playing and I feel like I'm having a musical identity crisis. I will always be a flautist at heart, but can I deny my more natural knack for the saxophone?

This has led me to wonder if music is actually what I want to do. I'm not enjoying it right now because my flute playing feels so damn stunted. Everyone loving my sax is just driving me mad. Thinking about dropping music for next year actually seems relaxing. I could pick up all of the nerdy maths subjects I love next year. I could go through and do a computer science degree, which I would really enjoy. There would be less pressure from myself. Suddenly I would have many, many extra hours in my week to keep on top of my schoolwork and actually have a social life.

I feel like I have some big decisions to make relatively soon and I really don't know what to do.