Letter to My Left Hand Pinky

I have a complicated relationship with my left hand pinky finger.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the word “pinky” comes from a now-obsolete 16th Century Scottish word meaning “a very small person or creature; a brat; an elf.” That definition gets me some of the way toward an accounting of its qualities: its sheer tininess, its capriciousness—defying my best efforts by arriving late or out of tune.

But what this definition of the pinky leaves out is how damn heroic it can be, which many a string player could attest to if we stopped to consider what we often ask of it. In fact, well into my recovery from dystonia, which seemed to manifest primarily in my ring finger, I insisted that my pinky was just fine the way it was.

“I really don't have any problems with four,” I averred in a lesson with Sophie Till, my recovery guide, a full year after our first meeting. “It's three that really fouls me up.”

She just stared back at me through the computer screen, lightly fingering the strings of her violin in noncommital silence with a slightly concerned look on her face.

That was the first clue.

If you examine your pinky, perhaps on your dominant hand, you'll notice a few things right away. For starters, it's a pipsqueak. Mine reminds me of the women I knew in college who could save fifty bucks at the Gap by squeezing into kids' size jeans—delicate, categorically diminutive. But if you move the pinky at all you'll see that, unlike its neighbor the ring finger, which has practically no independence, it can actually go pretty far afield without the active involvement of the rest of the hand--an impish youngster left let loose in the big wide world.

The question is whether that's really a good idea, for the pinky or for anyone else.

I took full advantage of this quality of the pinky—its capacity for independent movement—for decades. I wasn't particularly conscious of it; in fact, it never occurred to me that I could afford to do otherwise. Leaving my fingers down on the strings while traveling up the fingerboard, as I'd been trained, meant that spanning a whole step between my ring and pinky fingers was impossible without asking the pinky to cover the gap. And as far as I knew, this was an utterly normal state of affairs: keeping a so-called “hand-frame” of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers on the strings required the pinky to stretch, especially on the viola. And it turned out that my pinky was pretty good at it:

“You're lucky—your pinky isn't as short as mine,” people would sometimes remark. Kristin, my Alexander Technique teacher, said I had loose ligaments, so stretching felt pretty easy. And it was true that it never hurt, per se. What hurt was the dull ache in my shoulder after long rehearsals, and sometimes a burning twinge in my forearm, which thankfully didn't usually last if I took a few days off. Occasionally my pinky locked, the second joint buckling, sending the third one jutting out an extreme angle, which made it hard to vibrate. But apart from how grotesque it looked in that state, my teachers' comments about the deformation didn't make it seem like a grievous problem. “Mine does the same thing,” my teacher in college confessed.

And so I came to rely on my pinky and its seemingly infinite capacity for extending beyond its natural limits. Octaves were a cinch, even in half position. I could even manage a 3-4 trill pretty well when needed. My 4th finger wasn't always accurate, but it tried hard and never complained, which I wish I could say I acknowledged and appreciated. More often I berated it for the moments it let me down, its momentary lapses in precision, the wobble in the sound that betrayed its weakness.

It wasn't until I began recovering from dystonia that I began to understand that my assumptions about the pinky—like most things related to my playing—were completely wrong. When I met Sophie and started peeling back the layers of dysfunction that had resulted in a nearly career-ending injury, I had to confront the overwhelming task of dismantling the entire context holding my dystonic symptoms in place.

Her common-sense demonstrations—inviting me to tap my fingers around a series of dots on a page, for instance—proved that the fundamental premise of my left hand technique had been flawed from the start. The fingers, she explained, could only experience a sense of equality when each in turn was supported by the forearm. That's why, without giving it a single thought, I'd naturally picked up my entire hand to move between the dots rather than leaving the first finger down while stretching across to touch the next spot.

I'd looked at her in amazement. How could over two decades of training have overlooked this basic principle? And how on earth could we go back and correct it now?

What followed were months of hard labor for my brain and body, using the principles Sophie taught me in conjunction with comparing the behavior of my left and right hands around the instrument, and sometimes with everyday objects. I wasn't completely convinced that approaching my symptoms in what seemed like such an oblique way would work, but her suggestions were too sensible to be ignored. And slowly, painstakingly, things began to shift.

In moments of intense frustration I'd put down the viola and gaze longingly at my right hand, wishing I could just start again with the correct ideas this time, tabula rasa. But I sensed that wasn't the right solution. So instead I returned to it over an over as a blueprint, willing my left hand to be reborn in its image, to unlearn the torturous patterns my ignorance had forced on it over many years.

The physical patterns weren't all that needed to be unlearned. Even before I started my work with Sophie I'd recognized that grappling with dystonia implied more than completely overhauling my technique and changing my brain circuitry in the process. It was a reckoning—a prospect of transforming my relationship to musicianship and to myself.

If you want to know what it's like to have dystonia, imagine something you do every day that you've done since you were a child, something that occupies a central place in your psyche. You've spent thousands of hours developing this skill through dedicated effort, and not only is it your primary way of making a living and at the center of your social connections, it's so important to you that it's basically become an identity. It's an expression of who you are; it is who you are. And then, one day or over a series of a few days or weeks, your body just says “no.” It goes blank. Instead of fluid movement your body produces strange, uncontrolled spasms. You've lost it all, and you have no idea how to find it again.

When I lost the ability to play it felt like I'd lost everything. Of course, thankfully, I didn't really—not even close. I had a supportive family and husband, friends, a financial safety net, access to information... But even though rationally I knew it wasn't true, I felt like I was dying. Besides losing the thing I loved the most, I'd also been stripped of my primary strategies for staying on an even keel: competence and control. I'd lost the thing I'd declared would make me a worthwhile person if I could only do it well enough, and I couldn't make it stop. Not since childhood had I ever felt so vulnerable, terrified, and small.

But as the months passed and I struggled through each day, calling on every reserve of self-compassion I could find in myself, I leaned into inquiry. Why did losing the ability to progress and succeed in this one (admittedly important) area of my life provoke an existential anxiety so strong it sent shock waves of terror through my body every night? Who or what was it inside me causing all of this fear?

What I found, when I got very quiet and listened, was a little girl—a little girl trying to be a grown-up. “I'll do it,” she'd always insisted, steeling herself. “I can do anything. I have this completely under control. I'm fine,” she'd assured me as I'd gone about my days pre-injury, stuffing down her fragility and exhaustion.

But she was shaking now, confronted with the truth she'd managed to avoid up until now: she wasn't up for managing this alone, not the injury and not anything that had led to it. She'd pretended to be self-sufficient, capable, adult. But she was just a kid.

“Just stop,” I often reassured her, with a hand on my chest as my heart beat so hard I thought it would wake up my husband asleep beside me. “It's ok, you don't have to be in control of this. You don't have to manage this perfectly all by yourself.”

She didn't trust me at first. Not at all.

“But who else is going to do it?” she would usually cry in response.

“I will, my love,” I would reply with a soothing pat. “I will. You're safe. You've done so much and I'm so grateful but it's time for you to let go and be a child.”

And the first time she really heard me, I felt my pinky twitch, leaning ever so subtly into the embrace of the adjacent finger.

It would've been fantastic if the next morning my pinky problems, which were coming more into focus as I surmounted other obstacles in my playing, had just disappeared. But no, it went right back to its well-worn habits: isolating, stretching. It was worse than even the pinky itself, I'd realized: the area of my palm surrounding the base knuckle had become completely collapsed and jello-like from years of distorting itself to extend my 4th finger as far away from the support system of the hand as it would reach.

But however much I lamented about my pinky in lessons, Sophie always insisted that we work at it from the opposite end: the 4th finger could never be convinced to abandon its conditioned habits if we didn't give it a clear and better alternative. And that meant dealing with how the other elements of my left arm were doing—or failing to do—their jobs.

Now I'm going to do something a little mean here: I'm going to single out one of those elements and make an example of him. Finger number one, will you please stand up? If there's any finger that can handle a stern talking-to, it's this one. I mean really, just look at it—sturdy and secure with a whole stack of fingers on one side of it and the thumb on the other, occupying the natural focal point of the hand and ordering the others around, pointing here and there: “Three, you're out of line, what's wrong with you? Pinky, get in shape, you pathetic weakling.”

In truth, it's not the first finger's fault either; it was just built that way. But our habit of privileging it—always leaving it down on the string, making it the anchor of the left hand and asking the other fingers to stretch, or even worse, stretching it backwards as if letting go would unmoor us completely—only encourages its worst tendencies. To help my pinky finally relinquish its tendency to sacrifice its own comfort and functionality to compensate for others' failure to fulfill their roles, first my index finger had to own up to its stuff 100%.

Working through the issues with my pinky has taken a long time. I've continued to chip away at it years after returning to professional playing and considering myself definitively recovered from focal dystonia. And why these issues have stuck around is not a mystery--our most deeply ingrained conditioned responses usually do. Resolving it has required continually walking around the complete context of my left hand and arm, asking who is not doing the task they were designed for and why. It's not perfect yet—there are times my first finger can't be bothered to let go and help my arm deliver the pinky to its spot without histrionics, moments when the pinky lapses into self-sacrificial superhero mode. But it's gotten immeasurably better, and the improvement will continue as long as I keep kindly and wisely paying attention.

If I could write a letter to my 4th finger, here's what it would say:

“Dear Pinky,

I'm sorry. I'm sorry that for years I never realized the inherent and entirely sensible limits of what you could do. What you suffered on my behalf, because of my ignorance, was not right. You're small, and there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong was expecting you to rescue everyone from their own confusion and shortcomings by being more than a pinky. We see that now, and we're changing our ways. Please trust us. Thank you for being so strong and capable for so long; we admire everything you achieved in pushing past your limits. But we don't need you to be extraordinary. Like all unequal parts of a whole, you are perfect just as you are, and you are perfect right where you belong. We love you.”