I Just Lost A Thousand Pounds
Shedding the emotional dead weight of my piano
I have had an unshakable sense of inferiority from a young age.
I failed miserably at sports and scouting as a kid, partially because I was a tiny person for my age, partially because I have absolutely no talent in those areas, but mostly because I just didn’t care about them. My stepfather constantly made his dissatisfaction clear when I failed at something he cared about, and had nothing to offer when I tried to pursue something I cared about.
I remember in 8th grade I saw one of my classmates play piano at an assembly, and she was pretty good playing Grieg’s opening theme to his piano concerto. I had taken some piano lessons back when I was in the single digits, so we got an upright Yamaha electric piano. I took piano lessons again. My stepfather never had a word of praise for it and never showed up for a recital, or a lesson, or anything he wasn’t dragged to by my mother. He couldn’t be seen with anything less masculine than camping gear.
As my family situation deteriorated over the next few years, I hid at the electric piano, playing with the headphones on to ignore the world around me. By this stage of my puberty, my stepfather had done a great job of making me feel terrible at everything from my handwriting to my telephone etiquette to my window-washing behavior to the fact that my sister had slightly better grades than me.
Even as my skill improved, I was overwhelmed with a sense of inferiority and awkwardness, resulting in terrible stage fright. Every time I tried to play with the headphones off I’d choke. This inability to perform would go on to dog my footsteps through every decision I made in life. That piano was my escape, but it was also a reminder of how much better everyone was than me in the world outside my headphones.
Regardless, I became more and more fascinated with the mechanics of music as I hid from the world. I was learning C++ in 11th grade and got entirely fed up with misplaced brackets that derailed the compiling of code all the time. Seeing as how it was an elective, I switched into something that interested me. I transferred into a music theory class halfway through the year and learned the whole course in maybe a month. I was teaching the class half the time.
The next year I took an AP test and would have aced it if I’d known what “ritornello” or “ma non troppo” meant. I found out I had perfect pitch. I could see the relationships between pitches, tones, and chord progressions. Holy shit, I was finally good at something! It wasn’t glamorous but it was something, and I held onto that as the ugly two-year-long standoff between my stepdad and the family drudged on.
Then came the dreaded question: “How will you make money from that?”
I’ll spare you my diatribe on how capitalism destroys art and just say that I couldn’t answer that question as a teenager. I didn’t really know what to do with my life, and I didn’t really show both a proficiency and an interest in anything else. I was generally smart but not very coordinated. I could sing but not dance. I could run but not tackle. I could come up with an argument but I couldn’t debate without choking. C++ had already scared me away from coding.
I bumbled around for a few years, making a series of major life mistakes and decided, “Screw it, I’m going to music school.” I liked the subject and I was better at it than anyone I knew (except that girl in eighth grade).
I got my ass handed to me at Berklee. It was seriously demoralizing to realize just how far out of my league I was. I still learned a lot, I still made the most of my craft, but even when I did have time to play between work and school, I could not for the life of me beat the stage fright. The echoes of my family fighting and the constant icy tension that peeked through the headphones in my teenage years followed me everywhere I played piano, chastising me for every wrong note, demanding to know why I couldn’t do better.
I hadn’t really understood the toxic positivity of my mother at the time, but the internalization of it made for a truly miserable practice session, listening to the other students nailing their chord scales and licks while I fumbled over my fingers. Her misguided praise in contrast to my stepfather’s berating did nothing to help my ego during practice time. I could hear her calm, slightly chilly tone in my head: “you’re smarter than everyone, you’re certainly more talented, you have been learning for years. Why aren’t you better than them?”
I graduated with honors because I was seriously so awesome at theory and composition it made up for my persistent shortcomings at performance.
Again the question haunted me: “How will you make money?” The neurotic perfectionism imbued in me convinced me for a long time that I could never ask for money for my work. It baffled and honestly offended me deeply that Soulja Boy was so popular at the time. A fifty-thousand dollar debt to a prestigious music school and I’m working at CVS watching everyone crank back left to right! That broke me. How does someone so thoughtless deserve more than me? I don’t even deserve it!
I was broke for a long time, stuck delivering pizzas aimlessly in a failing marriage that was my second biggest mistake aside from joining the military. I worked long and fruitless hours to come home to a woman I hated. I got rejected from graduate school while I paid off my student loans. My life nosedived and I didn’t recognize myself anymore.
I got divorced after three years. I got a job as a night manager at QuikTrip and I filed for bankruptcy. I lived alone for a while. I still had the old upright electric from my teenage years and thought, “why am I not practicing?” It made sense: I liked the subject, I went to school for it, I understood music. Why not at least try?
In the spare hours between my overnight shifts, sleep, and my downstairs neighbor’s daily parties, I started completely over, taking out the first piano lesson book I had from when I was five. I zipped through it because… come on. But I was certain there was something I missed learning when I grew up with this.
After a few months, I was through the whole lesson plan again and started going in to actual compositions. I got the Hanon. I aced the Hanon. I moved in with a friend and bought the half-ton spectacle you see here because I knew this time I could get it right. I could still be great enough to deserve a living.
I pushed myself as hard as I could at this piano. The voices were still there, fresh as my adolescence. The headphones from my old electric were still on my ears. I was still hiding from the icy, judgmental world even as my parents’ constant criticism of me invaded my practice. Why am I still flubbing this section when I’ve been playing it over and over all day? Why can’t I understand this? Why am I just so… incapable?
I found the zenith of my skill when I was 32, working on Rachmaninov’s second piano sonata. Honestly, I know I should be impressed that I made it halfway through that monster but there was one page halfway through the second movement that I could not, for the life of me, get past. I spent two months on that page, staring into the void, seeing every flash of anger and disappointment my stepfather and mother ever showed me. My best was still not good enough.
For contrast, I was also learning bass around this time. Not seriously, not well, but I didn’t care. It was something to noodle around on and suck at while I watched Breaking Bad. It turned out I could suck on bass and perform better than when I was putting everything I was worth into piano. With the bass, I wasn’t scared to perform and I wasn’t hyper-vigilant about every wrong note. I remember playing at open mic nights, watching people when I started to choke on my performance: they kept on sipping their beers, not even breaking their conversation. It was so freeing to realize that no one cared.
Soon I was faking my way into a band. I was actually having fun playing bass. I’d show up to my friend’s house, and play mediocre covers with a bunch of people who also played with similar levels of mediocrity. One guy straight up told me I sucked at bass while I was playing at a friend’s house. I laughed and said, “I really do!” and then kept playing, because it was… fun.
I never had fun on piano. There were too many demons in it, too much disgrace and expectation and disappointment and absolutely zero reward. I couldn’t lug around a thousand pounds of deadweight to an open mic, much less could I play it in front of people without disintegrating.
I held onto the piano for a long time, wondering if I’d ever get back into it. It’s been two years and I’ve barely played a note and honestly, why should I? The past few years of my life have been all about leaving the past behind, so why should I lug around an old relic of my dead self? Why have that vanity hanging over me when I’m trying to play Civilization? I don’t need to try and reconcile with this thing, I don’t need to learn to love it: I have a thousand pounds of trauma all wrapped up in one little package in the corner of my living room, ready to be expunged from my life.
It was a crutch. That was all it was: a way to appease my fragile ego with a dream that could never be realized, just so I could feel like my life could mean something. I find it kind of funny how in the past few months we have all learned that sometimes the best thing you can do for the world is stay out of it. I feel like I’m accomplishing more for the world doing nothing right now than I ever felt beating my head against the piano. I hope the next person to own this gets something better out of it than I did.
