Beyond "Never Good Enough"

Just over two years ago, the day before Halloween in fact, I made a horrifying discovery: after twenty-five years of playing the viola, over a dozen as a professional, I could not play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

My playing had been a mess for over a year by then, thrown out of whack by the emergence of focal dystonia in my left hand, but I'd been pursuing treatment and thought things had been improving. In an effort to focus on retraining, I'd abandoned all of my gigs a couple of months after the symptoms first arose, and with diligent practice of my rehabilitative exercises I'd gained more control over my hand. But the progress hadn't been as swift as promised, so when a friend-of-a-friend recommended I get in touch with violinist Sophie Till, who'd helped him with a similar problem, I'd emailed her right away.

Our first lessons had mostly consisted of swinging my arms and throwing a handbag on my shoulder. Apparently, for the work to be effective, we needed to start from scratch. Which meant no playing. At all.

Obedient, I'd followed Sophie's advice and stuck to the initial regimen—a suite of about five or ten minutes of simple exercises done every so often throughout the day. The empty hours, no longer filled with the useless repetition that used to serve as “rehabilitation,” had ballooned, and an existential void had begun to blossom inside me. I felt unmoored.

A few weeks into the new routine, I unpacked my violin with trembling hands. I'd reluctantly agreed to do a violin demo class for a friend's preschool music program, and at the end I planned to play Twinkle, a perennial toddler favorite and probably one of the first songs they would learn if they decided to take up the instrument next year. I brushed my fingers over the strings to check the tuning, tightened the bow, and began to play.

Open strings, of course, were fine. But to my shock, the simple D-C#-B-A descent I could always manage before, even on bad days, was nearly impossible. My third finger was so wobbly I could barely depress the string long enough to get the note out. I started to panic.

Oh my God, what's Michelle going to say? She hired me to do a violin demo and I can't play Twinkle? She's going to think I'm a total freak. What the hell am I going to do?

I didn't have time to think about it—I'd left the “rehearsal” as a last-minute afterthought, assuming there'd be no problems, and now I had to leave.

As I boarded the subway, violin case strapped to my back, I tried to distract myself, but the thoughts kept swirling. I just have to get through it somehow. I'll use first and second finger for everything. Michelle and a bunch of three-year-olds won't even know the difference. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the glances of some other passengers, probably wondering if I was on my way to a rehearsal or something.

She's a musician, they were thinking.

But they were wrong. I was no musician. I was no one anymore. For the past year, practically all I'd had to hold onto was Twinkle. Now I didn't even have that.

I got to the school and found Michelle's classroom. Well, let's see what happens, I thought, as I waited outside the door for her signal. When she looked up and waved, I ginned up all the enthusiasm I could muster and bounced into the room.

“Ooooooh, look who's here!” she beamed. “This is Nora, and she's our very special guest today. She's a violinist.”

I smiled, cringing internally, and launched into my lesson plan.

When the time came for the demo, I just prayed. Something about the urgency of a “performance,” no matter how trivial, seemed to summon enough adrenaline to help me muscle through.

Oh thank God, I exhaled with relief as I packed up and waved goodbye. No one saw.

The following morning, I broke down as I related the story to Sophie during my Skype lesson.

“It was so much worse than it's ever been,” I whimpered. “I didn't know what to do.”

She smiled sympathetically. “A bit like being in Times Square with no clothes on, isn't it?” she said softly.

I nodded, brushing tears from my face.

“Believe it or not, it's actually a good thing,” she went on. “It means your brain is already forgetting how to play that way.”

I stared through my devastation into the screen. “But I haven't learned the new way yet.”

She pressed her lips together in an affectionate smile-frown and nodded. “Times Square, no clothes.”

Gradually, over the course of the next year, I got more used to that feeling of nakedness, of having nothing to hide behind. And I got a better look at what I'd always used my playing to disguise, what I'd never been forced to confront while I had the ability to run around proving myself all day long.

Shame.

I was ashamed that I couldn't play anymore. I was ashamed that the technique I'd been using and my chronic anxiety and self-doubt were probably partly to blame. I was ashamed that I hadn't gotten farther in my career before it tanked, hadn't achieved what I wanted to. And under all of that, there was an even more fundamental shame, which was what all of my striving with the viola was designed to cover up: I, just myself, was simply not good enough.

Maybe, deep-down, you also have some shame. Many musicians do. About your technique, or where you went to school, who you studied with, what gigs you do, what repertoire you play, how much money you make. Or maybe, like I was, you're in pain or injured, and you're not sure it will ever get better.

Here's the difference between shame and plain-old dissatisfaction: dissatisfaction is, What's happening right now is bad; shame is, What's happening right now is bad, and therefore I am also bad.

I may not know you, or what you're dealing with, but I know this:

You are not bad. You're doing the best you can with what you've got. And maybe there's something concrete you can do to improve the situation that's causing you frustration or distress. There certainly was in my case: I had the enormous good luck to find a teacher who could help solve my injury and address the technical confusion holding back my career. Perhaps you also could seek help, from a coach, teacher, therapist, doctor, or friend. Because if you get anything from reading this post, it should be that your present circumstances are not permanent, and they are not you.

After two years of hard work with Sophie, I'd finally recovered to the point that I felt ready to re-emerge, which I did in a comeback blog post. It felt fantastic to reconnect with friends and colleagues I'd been out of touch with for so long, and of course I was overjoyed to be performing again. But I immediately noticed something sticky: I was having a hard time accepting all of the love, support, and praise.

You'd think that after three years of hiding out in my cave of shame I'd be eager for some good vibes, but instead I was stuck on one persistent, nagging little doubt:

Do I really deserve it? Is it ok for me to welcome this? Maybe people don't even want to hear about this stuff.

As I did some digging, I discovered that my resistance was coming from a deep and honest place: I was afraid. When we're so conditioned to feel ashamed of ourselves, letting that go, even a tiny bit, can be frightening. It's unfamiliar and disorienting. Maybe in childhood we even faced situations where something bad could happen if we seemed too pleased with ourselves.

So I went slowly. Can I take this in? Just a little. Can I allow myself to be safe in this strange new world I've emerged into? Can I be touched by this love and goodwill, and see that whatever people love about me has been here all along, injury or not?

Soon after resurfacing, I remembered what had kept me going on days when I doubted my progress and the process itself, wondered if I could make it through at all: Somewhere, there is someone else going through this, feeling just as alone and ashamed as I am. They need help. Just hours after posting my blog, I got a message from none other than Michelle. It turned out that for the past six years she'd been dealing with dystonia, too, and wondered if I had any resources to share. My mind flashed back to the Twinkle demo and I laughed in disbelief: at the very moment when I'd felt most vulnerable, ashamed, and alone, there was someone else in the room going through the very same thing.

When we spoke, I told her how impressed I'd always been with her deep musicianship and talent with young children, with the vibrancy and kindness of her spirit. Her skills were quite impressive, of course, but there was something even deeper than that, more essential, visible to anyone who paid attention. She thanked me, and told me she felt the same way about me.

“You're magic,” she said.

I knew she meant it.