I took my first piano lesson when I was six years old. Somewhere down the line, even as I became intoxicated with Mozart (first celebrity crush—no joke) and played the studio recitals and the school talent shows and the state exams, I got the notion I would never be a professional. They must have something I don’t have, I thought, or something my parents must know I don’t have: an inherent drive, an ability to practice insane hours, some natural gift for virtuosic repertoire.


Early on, I dismissed the idea of music school, which I imagined as a magical kingdom of prodigies who never needed to practice but spent all their time doing it, as something I could never attain. I went to college, grad school, found work, got married. All the adulting. I had stopped playing and it was okay.

But something was under the surface. The piano came back into my life, motivated by an unfulfilled desire, some need to prove I could do it: play the big pieces, log the hours, approach the pianist persona I had fantasized about. My first boyfriend, also a pianist, had been closeted to me until our thirties, and maybe that was part of it: he’d never love me—really love me—but he could listen up. My sweet, gentle, and deeply musical husband, an experienced collaborative pianist, had what I felt to be a patronizing manner when it came to discussing my playing, and that was part of it too. I didn’t want an uninvited spousal piano lesson. I wanted to be the artist.

So I fell in love with Romantic repertoire. I practiced and I obsessed and, in 2015, I auditioned for a summer chamber music workshop, something I had never done. I requested a piece that, when I’d first heard it in my teens, had seemed impossible, Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor, Opus 25. I couldn’t wait to tell everybody about it and started putting in 6- to 8-hour days at the keyboard, all the time thinking that this must be the experience that no one, myself included, thought I could achieve. I woke up thinking about practicing. I thought the Brahms opened up to me. I thought I was in great shape.

So dumb.

The week I left, I felt a burning sensation at the base of both of my thumbs and up my forearms. No no no this is not happening. I had prepared for this. This was supposed to be the culmination. My parents were coming from San Francisco to hear me play. I couldn’t cancel.

When I came home, I had to allow my body to feel what I had denied was happening. It hurt. Turning doorknobs hurt. Twisting the faucets in the shower hurt. Both my wrists and arms felt tender, swollen, burning, toxic, fundamentally off.

“You know it’s going to get better, right?” my physician asked, as I wept in his office. But I didn’t. A hand specialist on the Upper East Side wrote in my case file that I was “in no acute distress,” which seemed darkly inaccurate. Every night I surfed the web, Google searches for vivid phrases returning increasingly disturbing possibilities of conditions from which I would never recover. “Oh, carpal tunnel,” people would say, as if that would have been good news. “Your young tendons will surely heal.” “Have you tried acupuncture?” “Hope as you play less it gets better.” I didn’t want to play less. I constantly imagined a joyless, colorless future without the piano, without my teacher. I dreamed about playing and woke up hyperventilating. No no no this is not happening.


My mind replayed every choicepoint. If I hadn’t practiced trying to do pullups every other day obsessively for three years. If I hadn’t been so vain. If I hadn’t hammered that one section of the Brahms. If the piano bench had been a different height. If I hadn’t used the keyboard in my apartment. If I had practiced the repertoire in a different order. If I had requested different rep. If I had studied with a different teacher. If I hadn’t thought so much about my ex. If if if if if.

In one of his poems bearing the title “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” Frank O’Hara wrote the couplet, “The ability to sing is ordinary / The ability to play is exceptional.” Yes. The ability to play is one to be cherished. But the ability to play, and have to stop, and learn it over again from the ground up, is fucking hard work too.