Music Made Me An Anxious Child

I recently started listening to a podcast called Radiolab. This blogpost will make much more sense to you if you first listen to this incredibly interesting podcast about how electro-waves can improve learning and performance ability.

I'm going to go right ahead and assume you've listened to it now.

When I was about 7 I started taking piano lessons because my mother wanted me to learn. I never wanted to play and I never enjoyed taking lessons or practicing but I did it to please my mum. I was an anxious child and my music teacher was a 'slave driver', my dad would say. I was terrified of messing up and looking like I hadn't practiced or worse that I was just too stupid to remember the notes. She pushed me hard and expected me to practice for an hour every day. As a kid who felt miserable after playing half a scale I would cut practice sessions short and whenever possible lie to my mother, saying I'd practiced when I hadn't. I hated it. I hated my teacher. I hated my mother for getting me into it and I hated myself for continuing to put up with it and not asking to quit.

But sometimes I'd get into a zone very like the one described in that podcast. I'd no longer be concentrating on each individual note and on what came next and whether I had the right tempo. The song just seemed to flow from my fingers and the music played like I was born to be a musician. I'd be in a kind of daze for the duration of the song and before I knew it, it was over and I hadn't made a single mistake. Occasionally I'd snap out of this zone somewhere in the middle of the song and I'd immediately be filled with cold dread and anxiety, afraid that I'd been playing the wrong song, wrong notes, made a tonne of mistakes - any number of worries would pop into my head-like the gnomes Sally describes. Because I thought I hadn't been paying attention. It felt like I hadn't been paying attention. As though I were in a daydream and I could've been like that for an hour or two minutes, I couldn't say. It was more intense than any daydream though, it was like I had fully dropped off to sleep.

I have never understood this mindset that I got into until listening to this podcast. At the time I considered the possibility that it was my brain's way of coping with the distress I felt every time I played. A sort of mode it went into so I didn't have to experience the stress and angst. I finally quit piano lessons and I've never since felt that way so strongly. Sometimes when I write I get this stream of thought that seems to flow from nowhere and it's the best thing I've ever written and after five minutes I look to the clock and see an hour and a half has passed. It's not quite the same feeling though. It's very difficult to explain. It's a less vivid version of that zone I would slip into when playing.

Like Sally in the podcast said, it became rather addictive to me also. I felt a yearning to feel the calm and serenity every time I sat in front of the keyboard. It was a meditative, almost zen feeling. I haven't thought about any of this in years but that podcast brought back memories.