Leaky Pipe

I played piano for more than a decade when I was a child. From about age four to sixteen, I went to weekly lessons, bi-annual recitals, and yearly examinations. I was good too. I could pick up melodies with precision and speed, I had a relative musical ear, and I was so adept at learning that it took my favorite piano teacher a few months to even realize I had trouble reading sheet music.

My Achilles heel was the weight of my own expectations.

When I began playing, my mom would set a timer for 30 minutes and she would place it on the upright piano in our dining room, and I would sit for half an hour and practice. Chords, then scales, then concertos. As I grew up and gained more autonomy, my mom stepped back and eventually relied on me to remember to practice, no reminding or timers needed.

I don’t remember quitting, but I remember some argument in my mom’s bathroom about why she was wasting money on lessons when I didn’t even practice. I felt so incapable of explaining to her why I found the loudness of our piano paralyzing.

How could she understand that hearing praise for my playing simply added to the weight I felt bearing down on me? How could she know that practicing was inviting my family into an intolerably vulnerable space where I wasn’t perfect? How could I communicate that the expectations I set up for myself made everything untenable?

Very little about piano was fun for me. Sometimes I would play a pretty chord, or hear a melody that sent goosebumps down my arms so strong they were almost painful. But beyond those fleeting moments, piano was overwhelming. I couldn’t see myself being as good as I wanted to be, and I wasn’t willing to work to get to that level because the sheer number of mistakes I knew I would make was horrifying.

Ironically, as painful as I found the process of learning, I never imagined that I wouldn’t be a pianist.

I was at a bar with a friend, and we escaped to a downstairs room with an upright piano and an out-of-tune guitar. This friend was something of a musician, though guitar was his instrument of choice, and he had never formally learned the keys. I asked him to play something, and he obliged.

He was able to play some song or other on the spot, and sing along with it too. He asked me to reciprocate, and I put my hands on the keys, and I couldn’t think of anything.

There it was. I wasn’t a piano player anymore, and I hadn’t been for almost half of my life.

It’s easy to imagine that the same pattern applied to all my childhood hobbies—I stopped doing them because I had never liked them in the first place, or I at least didn’t like them enough to power through my crushing perfectionism. I assumed that other people were the same, doing activities because they looked good on college applications or because their parents mandated after school activity.

But I was at a soccer game with some old friends the other night and as I sat shivering in the chilly March air, I had a thought that other people may have done things because they loved them. And I remembered that I used to love it too.

As a kid I loved to read, I played soccer, I rode horses, I played viola, and I used to sing when I washed dishes with my sisters after dinner. I loved Kpop, I loved cars and gardening. I loved to go out shopping with my mom and pick out blueberry bushes to plant in the backyard.

But slowly I stopped reading, and even if I picked up a book, I wouldn’t cleave to it the same way I once had. When I do sit down and crack a spine, it’s a struggle to read more than 15 pages in one sitting. When I left home, I slowly stopped doing all the things that I loved. I started mindlessly scrolling social media and binge-watching television. I found some new things to love, but for the most part I deleted whole swaths of my life without replacing them.

I feel like there’s a leak in my body. Like my personhood has been slowly draining out of me, drop by drop, through some underground pipe that hasn’t quite burst but definitely got a bit rusty in places. At first, it wasn’t noticeable, just an incrementally higher water bill. Now, it lurks under the surface as a little drip-drop reminder that I used to be more than I am today.

All of that manic teenage girl love can’t just disappear into thin air. But I’ve struggled to find where all of it has gone, where the hole its leaking out of is and how to stop it. How to put all of that passion back into the things that once defined me, or at the very least fetch new containers for the love to leak into.