My parents said I could quit in high school. Until then, however, violin was mandatory: the weekly lessons; the practicing at home; the spontaneous concert for a visiting grandma. 

I hated the violin. I hated performing in front of others even more. My palms would sweat, my face would grow hot. Each stroke of my rosined-up bow across the strings sounded, in my ears, akin to an injured animal. But my family seemed to enjoy my musical masochism. They still recorded each performance with pride, and afterward gifted me a bouquet of flowers, an emblem of success I knew I did not deserve.

I began to play the instrument in Kindergarten, that formative, plastic period of life where hopeful parents start to expose their children to activities requiring practice and discipline, increasing the child’s odds of one day, hopefully, getting into a respectable college. 

Each week my parents drove me to Gardnerville, Nevada, where my teacher, Mrs. Helen, lived. Mrs. Helen (Helen was her first name) seemed to me to be 100 years old, although when I started learning from her, she was in her late 80s. She wore big cloudy glasses, yellow with age. A thick mass of curly brown hair belied the web of deep, friendly wrinkles covering her face and an equally wrinkly flap of skin that jiggled beneath her chin when she spoke. One of her thumbs lacked a fingernail. 

Mrs. Helen exhibited an impossible patience and kindness. She never grew upset or even irritated. Playing with her was a safe space in which I could make mistakes without punishment or reprimand, regardless of how embarrassed and ashamed I felt. She did not ruin my relationship with the violin. Perhaps sprinkling in more contemporary pieces among the Suzuki exercises and Wohlfahrt études would have helped establish a friendlier foundation on which to build my relationship with the instrument, but the fault lay entirely with me. 

I detested practice. Each week Mrs. Helen shakily penciled into my spiral notebook six boxes representing the remaining days until our next session. If I did in fact practice, I proudly placed a sticker in its corresponding box. Most weeks the sticker count was meager. This, I knew, was likely why my playing lacked the crispness and moving emotion I craved to one day produce. But practice can only get a musician so far. To be truly great, she must be willing to submit to the process, to go beyond a piece’s notes and technicality. I could not submit. Instead, the mechanics of playing consumed me. 

But exactly why I detested practice remained unknown until years later, after I had quit playing during my sophomore year of high school. My amateur musical career overlapped with the development of a vicious eating disorder, which, in hindsight, was the inevitable continuation of a lifelong pattern. 

…

Sometimes I separate my life into periods of obsessions. In Kindergarten until middle school, at Saint Theresa of Avila’s in Carson City, Nevada, the personal obsession du jour was religion. I remember asking my mom for a statue of the Virgin Mary for my sixth birthday. I admired her purity, kindness, and impossible serenity. 

My intense fascination with such a perfect human being was charming to my mom and teachers. But what began as an innocent interest in religion and conscious living soon morphed into painfully obsessive mental patterns and tics. I recited my prayers multiple times, for I had to mean what I said, and each additional recitation provided a buffer lest the previous iteration failed to convey my serious intent to God. 

I perpetually felt tainted by sin. An impure thought—sexual curiosity, an unkind wish toward a family member—was surely reason to confess. Even listening to 102.9, the local hip-hop station, provided ample fodder on which my obsessive, circular thinking could grasp. I greatly enjoyed the high-energy, beat-driven songs, but the lyrics, riddled with words I would never allow myself to say, prompted me to silently ask the Lord to forgive the foul-mouthed rappers. 

Around fifth or sixth grade, still at Saint Theresa’s, the compulsive prayers and religious prudishness subsided slightly. Any space that opened up was quickly filled with an insatiable hunger to excel academically. Grades consumed my mind. Instead of an impure thought, a score below a 97% became a confession-worthy sin. Rather than repeating my prayers, I read the same textbook paragraph over and over again until I actually understood its content. 

The grade paranoia continued throughout high school, but my obsessive thinking started to grow dangerous after freshman year, when, in a perverse sort of victory lap, my obsession turned to food. Counting calories and bites replaced the compulsive textbook readings. Eating a nutritionally inferior food amounted to sin. My weight plummeted. My period disappeared. It still has not returned. 

…

I played the violin throughout the various obsessive periods of my adolescence. Unsurprisingly, the instrument provided yet another opportunity to indulge my often suffocating compulsions, this one sustained for over a decade. 

Playing the violin requires precision. If one’s finger is not placed in just the right spot, the resulting note will be off-key. Starting out, Mrs. Helen marked the most commonly used notes on the fingerboard with thin tape or stickers. In addition to hitting the correct notes, a violinist must also pay attention to the length of each bow stroke, the bow’s pressure on the string, the piece’s cadence, the instrument’s volume, her posture, her hands’ positions.

Such complexity rendered a successful performance all the more rewarding; it also caused me to detest practice. The process was slow and painstaking, as I had to play each note absolutely correctly. Any mistake sent a surge of shame throughout my body, akin to butterflies, but the ones that result from fear rather than excitement. And unlike a musician who could give into the mess and imperfection of playing the violin, I left no room for such uncertainty and faith.

I especially dreaded the repeat symbol, two malicious dots stacked on top of each other. When placed at the end of a section or an entire piece, it tells the musician to repeat all that came before it. Given that everything I played had to be correct, repeating it merely provided another opportunity to cry tears of frustration. And the only way in which I could be musically accurate was if I played at a glacial pace. The reward was dismally low, the effort excruciatingly high.

Practice became a daily battle. My parents urged me to go through my exercises. I heeded their pleas, and put off playing for as long as I could. When the need to practice was especially urgent, I often cried from the tension that built up within me. I didn’t want to embarrass myself and my parents with a low sticker count at my next lesson with Mrs. Helen. Nor did I want to subject myself to a tearful practice session where each bow stroke felt as if I were dragging it through wet concrete: slow, grueling, futile.

…

My relationship with the violin shifted slightly after I joined the Carson Valley Youth Symphony. When I was in fifth grade, Mrs. Helen determined I had developed enough of the necessary skills to join. I belonged to the second violin section, which played the harmony while the first violins played the melody. Our orchestra also included viola, cello, and bass sections, each of which consisted of no more than seven people.

The harmonious collaboration of all these musicians, ranging from tweens to seniors, provided a liberating layer of safety. In this environment, I could make a mistake. And it was highly unlikely that my fellow musicians, or even I, would notice amid the cohesive whole. My music was no longer futile. I was contributing to something dynamic and fluid, engrossing and deliberate. 

It felt grounding to be enveloped by so many sound waves. I sat within the vibrations, and the thick atmosphere adopted a profoundly deep, pregnant quality. Practice grew less painstaking. The impossible scrupulousness I had applied to Mrs. Helen’s assignments was no longer needed. There was room for error. 

The orchestral off-season still proved to be a struggle, but at least I had a reprieve, twice a year, that allowed me to encounter music differently. Violin no longer represented an instrument of torture, but rather one of potential beauty—or even play. 

But my overall compulsions did not diminish; they were merely redistributed. Any freedom I found playing the violin was balanced out by my academic obsessions throughout middle and high school. When these slackened a bit (a 93% on a test maybe was not the end of the world), the eating disorder took over. The various compartments of my life—food, grades, physical discipline—were extreme. They still are. But I had discovered a perverse sort of balance with the ebbs and flows of my mental framework. I learned what I could handle, and what I could not.

Food, exercise, and school continue to dominate most of my life. They determine my routines and habits, in addition to any limited space for spontaneity. I must exercise every day, but I do so to feel strong and capable, not to punish myself or make my body smaller. I am still rigid in what I choose to put into my body, but I now view food as fuel. I can enjoy more room for play and joy, which were prohibited before and largely during my over five years of therapy.

I feel nourished in my routines. They provide a sense of grounding for my hyperactive mind. Sometimes they may be weaknesses, but they are more often strengths. They work for my advantage.

I was never passionate about the violin; it never developed into a sustainable source of nourishment. I witnessed my colleagues in the symphony become lost in the music they were producing, closing their eyes and swaying with each expressive bow stroke. I could never get to that place. Instead, the technical aspects of music dominated my loveless relationship to it. Fluidity and joy seemed impossible. My instrument of choice only disrupted the balance I had worked so hard to cultivate. This, unfortunately, was something I could not handle. So I quit. 

When I crave that full-body musical freedom I tasted in the Carson Valley Youth Symphony, I rely on musicians who do find joy in their craft—those who can balance musical precision with artistic spontaneity. I’ll put on Timbaland or J. Cole, amp up the volume (moderately, lest I disturb the neighbors), and move my body. No one is watching. There are no mistakes. My need for precision is absent.

That usually does the trick.