Before then, I was.. not all that great. I tried hard. But my playing sounded more like... hell. I sounded like hell. Hell sounds like unskilled violinists (and oboists).
But when I hit high school and began performing with musicians who stood head-and-shoulders above any skill level I'd considered, I decided I want this for myself. And I threw myself in, worked my literal fingers to bone-hard calluses. In the beauty of childhood learning: it rarely felt like work, in a way that's difficult to explain, because it most certainly WAS hard work, for hours on end, repeating the same motives and exercises in order to absorb the techniques they were designed to impart. It was driven by something that is different from what drives me to learn now, as an adult.
I had some great teachers. But one of my music teachers - I respected him deeply. Deeply. He formed me, as a musician. He was cruel. Not to everyone; only to a few. I wanted to become the kind of musician he was; it fueled most of my work. I ached for his respect, but never earned it. He taught me to steel myself, against anything that would take away the only thing I valued, at the time, and I spent the last year of my high school career hating him. It makes me sad, now, to know that, but I also know that, at the time, I had little choice. And it's painful to remember, but in the resolved way of Adult Lisa remembering High School Lisa, not with angst, but with care and empathy, and the knowledge that she deserved more. As important as I suspect he wanted to feel, I wonder if he ever realized how important he was. And I wonder how many other students gave up, too.
When I graduated high school, there were music scholarships. I was embarrassed that anyone would offer. I was truly embarrassed to play in front of anyone, because why would they want this? All I could hear were my mistakes; all that echoed was his voice: you call yourself a musician? why can't you do it right? what's wrong with you? I tried to sell my violin within the first six months of college. I stopped playing for about six years. As a musician, and as a person who wants to teach, this is the one area in my musician history where I could lose my figurative shit in anger at this teacher: it incenses me - again, as the adult, the teacher, who knows what music means to a musician, and knows the power teachers have. It's a betrayal of the sacred. He had no right to turn the music I loved - what he loved, too, such irony - into something shameful. It's calmed, but it will never be okay.
And it's a hard thing to swallow, because - I don't use it as an excuse, and I'll get to why that's true in a minute - but if I'd had the proper support and motivation, I would have pursued professional musicianship. I know to my bones that I would have thrived. But by the time I fought down the demons and recognized my talent and the work that had developed it, it was too late. Six years is a lot of lost ground in any field. And the ways of going about getting it all back - man, oh man. I worked hard, but the kind of work I must do as an adult who is knowledgeable enough to self-diagnose and correct the physical pulls and difficulties in my body as I pull sounds from a string... In terms of technical ability, so much work is required of an adult to re-establish what was once natural. I don't think it's possible to get back to when I was at my best.
This is why Olympic athletes begin training at eighteen months of age and competing at thirteen. This is why thirty-three is considered "too old" for many things. I'm no Olympic athlete (cheese hockey: imma get ON that), but it's not about athleticism: it's about learning.
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When you're a child, learning is, in many ways, effortless. It's work, and it's tiring, and it's an effort, but I don't necessarily think it's always fueled by effort; I think that, in the young, learning is as much a primal drive as hunger. Maybe the same is true for adults, but I'm not sure this act of eating is the same, as we age.
There's something different about the knowledge you acquire in youth, in the plasticity of body and mind. Maybe we're so much less rigid as children, not even knowing as adults how rigid we are, that learning is just a matter of a new, dry sponge acting the way it has to when dropped in liquid. It's not effort; it simply is. There's no duplicating it using an older, wet sponge. Even a damp sponge. Even a dry sponge which is new-ish, but has been used for things - the kind you have to place under the water and squeeze gently in order to encourage absorbency. It's the same act, but instigated differently, and not as automatic.
When you learn something in youth, there's just something different about the way it changes you with its imprint. Whether it's physical, in the way it actually changes a small person' brain, or just a matter of making a small person aware of truths outside themselves, directions they'd never considered (and, you know, the ways it changes a small person' brain).
It's a different way of knowing. Different way of processing.
And an adult, delving into fresh concepts and experiences as a child might: it's just not the same. In the same way a feral child might, or might not, be able to acquire language skills; in the same way a child who is abused might never overcome the physical changes in his/her brain brought about by chemical responses to events. In the same way a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome might never be able to cognitively overcome the ways in which their developing structures were malformed or interrupted. And while, sure, I think God could do anything - sometimes, I think God Can Do Anything...! is the battle cry of the naive who attach ... if you'd only...! to it.
It's not that you can't learn IT, whatever it is; it is that you can't learn how to learn it, in that fluid-yet-physical way that grows your physical brain.
I, at thirty-three, can't make my brain or body function like those of an eight year old, or a thirteen year old, or a seventeen year old.
It's different.
It's not game over, but the loss of early years to anything cognitive or intellectual is serious lost ground.
I spent the first seventeen years of my life doing little other than 1) surviving, and 2) music.
I spent close to the next ten years recovering, trying to regroup without really knowing how, searching wildly for a direction as my twenties exhausted themselves.
I feel as though I am, again, treading water.
I can certainly learn still, hello.
But it has never been, and never will be, the same as it might have been. I fear that, for myself, the draw toward success will never be intrinsic, as it might have been.
It will never be primary; it will always be secondary. It always has been.
Not secondary as in less than. And it doesn't mean that I shouldn't work hard and reach as far as I can. I work hard every day. I worked hard in college. Both times. I still plan to, in the future.
I think it's about the difference in defining the word "reach." What it even means to know how to use one's self.
I'm lucky, in many ways. Advantaged versus disadvantaged... I have disadvantages. We all do, I know. I'm willing to say that mine were pretty serious, and they affect me. There are certainly more serious ones out there. I know.
When I hear someone argue that disadvantaged people are surrounded by opportunity and suffer solely, or even mostly, from lack of initiative, I used to want to argue. Pick it up and show you all the ways about it, the ways you don't know.
Anymore, I deflate. and shake my head. and exhale to try to rid the ache that creeps along my bones. Because fighting to reach is hard enough without fighting about what it should mean.
