My first experience with passive suicidal ideation happened when I must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen, a ninth-grader. The thought drifted across me while I was practicing the piano, a Baldwin spinet my family had in the living room. I hate this so much. It would be better if I weren't here.

Although these thoughts seemed embarrassing and forbidden, I wrote about them in a journal for English class. The teacher asked a question in the margin of my freewrite. Are you ok? I didn’t have a name for the detachment I felt, so I told him I was fine, chalking the whole thing up to reading Ordinary People. I was ashamed to have said anything at all.

In 2016, after a year of psychically draining, counterproductive orthopedic doctors’ visits and physical therapy sessions for tendinopathy, brought on by overpracticing the piano but unresolved by quitting, a year of symptoms I couldn’t stop ruminating about, a year of breakdowns in public and broken relationships in private, in what seemed like a hail Mary, I ended up in a psychiatrist’s office.



Even before the drugs started helping, before I had the years to consider and accept everything that had led to this, being diagnosed as an anxious depressive radically reframed my young adulthood, my past and present at the piano, my own teaching. Diagnosing others is beyond the scope of my work as a literature professor, but surely empathy is within it. Now more than ever, Mr. Underhill’s question seems important: Are you ok? Or even more unusual, and more necessary: How are you feeling?

What I study, when I study the piano now, isn’t how to heal. It’s how to be out.