I sat at the piano today for the first time in months. Aside from it being out of tune and misbehaving in certain weather lately, I think I’ve been a little afraid of it, because there have been occasions in the past few years where I’ve sat there and felt overwhelmed, as though I were facing eighty-eight silent strangers. When I was a little person I had some reasonably notable talent at it, or more than the average child at least. And then somehow I was never able to take the next step to the point where I was too old to impress ‘for my age’ but could impress on the merits of my performance. I didn’t feel right about the way I was learning. I couldn’t bring myself to just sit there and work on my talent, which could either have been a sign of the anxiety I think I’ve had for a while or just laziness.
I remember about a decade ago wanting to be more than ‘the girl who plays the piano’. Recently I’ve realised that the people I interact with socially don’t see me that way at all, and it scared me more than the alternative. I’ve caught myself playing all sorts of tricks to clue them in, from staring pointedly at pianos to tapping out pieces on tabletops. Yeah, I’m subtle.
Today was different. There are a few things that I remember and play very well automatically and other things I muck around at that I don’t have perfect. I wasn’t getting anything perfect today, but it wasn’t as much of a cause for distress as it usually is. There seemed to be something else in my efforts to make up for the lack of accuracy. I was playing things that I knew well, but didn’t like so much, in different ways, meddling with the melody and hearing all sorts of things I never had before. Sometimes my hands were just flying through things that definitely were not meant to be played that way. It was showing off, perhaps, although there was nobody there to listen but the bird, and she was doing all she could to distract me entirely. It just felt like natural play.
Trying to think about the experience aside from the layer of sparkly that has settled over it in my mind, I don’t think I was physically performing significantly better than I usually do. The connection between the physical act and my emotions and intelligence was much stronger than usual, and that was causing me to take more chances, playing with the technical aspects of the pieces and struggling further than usual with a nine-page epic I’ve been wanting to play for years without being able to get my fingers around some of the diabolical parts in the opening bars.
I think that playing piano has felt for a long time like something I should responsibly pull away from. It reminds me of innocence, happy ignorance, heedlessness, the family unit I once had that was for the most part perfect, united, impenetrable. I doubted whatever had made people admire me in the past.
I think I’ve decided that what happened today happened partly because I can’t bring myself to be terribly afraid any more. I’m not holding down a successful, normal job, or a relationship of the romantic kind or an overwhelming social life, but I’ve worked hard particularly this year to do things that I’ve wanted to and am proud of, and also things that I never realised I would be so pleased to do. Now I’m proud of my progress as a human I’m not inclined to think less of myself for doing things my own way – those two things came to me hand in hand, I think. I’m sitting here with qualifications I haven’t figured out how to use profitably yet, no money coming in but hey, maybe I’m sitting on a gold mine with these stories I keep hammering at… and I think I’m finally getting calm about life. And I guess that’s just the key to me being able to access the most abstract part of my life again.
