Chalked Up to Hormones

On overwork, self-doubt, and gaslighting intuition

There is a resource within us that is wiser than all the self-help books out there. I know because I’ve read them all.

I always knew it was inside me somewhere because I’d had early glimpses of my inner wisdom in adolescence. Friends came to me for advice. I taught myself to practice the cello mentally when I had tendinitis and it worked. It was difficult to access, though, buried as it was deep under layers and layers of parental dictates and other people’s ideas and opinions. I had the sense early on that life was going to work very differently for me than for my parents; I not only felt it, I willed it, because I longed for a very different life indeed, one of artistic expression and creative chaos.

Some ambitious families worship at the altar of mathematics, science, medicine; others at the altar of the arts. Mine was a family of classical music and athletic worship. Like many immigrant parents, ours sought to equip us for the world by investing in our education and instilling in us an urgent need to be Better Than Everyone Else, a fundamentally unattainable status, especially in the arts. I don’t blame my parents; it was their survival strategy. As an adult, however, I’ve had to rigorously identify and turn around all the beliefs around this project that have led to exhaustion and self-destructive decisions.

Overwork and striving for recognition are strategies that worked for my parents’ generation—to a point. It worked in the sense that it generated a certain amount of wealth and financial stability—but at what cost?

My education was built on this same pattern: extreme overwork beyond exhaustion followed by collapse followed by depression. When I look back, I want to give that girl a hug and tell her to go out and have some fun.

I spent my first year at Juilliard drifting. I was often unable to play the cello that was supposed to support me on my path to a career; I was in treatment for tendinitis, but had not yet experienced a miraculous recovery. I did have friends, at least, and we did teenage things together: we watched movies, we went for walks in Central Park and around Greenwich Village, we went for cheap Indian food in the East Village and to the one bar on the Upper West Side known for serving underage kids. It was during that year, though, that I started to see how the tide of ambition was engulfing me in a very painful and destructive way. Every time my hands got closer to recovery, I overdid it, trying to make up for lost time and ‘catch up’ to my classmates. The excessive practicing reinforced the injury and rendered me unable to play again and again throughout the year. My peers moved on without me, my classmates were winning prizes and competitions I couldn’t even begin to prepare for. I couldn’t participate in the required orchestra or chamber music rehearsals and concerts, I went to lessons unprepared. It felt like I was being punished and granted a reprieve at the same time.

Punished: because music had given me my identity, my importance, my agency in the world for as long as I could remember. It was also what I turned to for spiritual connection. Now all that had been taken away. Music was my vehicle of achievement, and without achievement, I had no right to exist—my self-worth was based on output, awards, performance, and praise.

Reprieve: because it had always been painful and illogical to treat music as a means to achievement. Wouldn’t it be better to just let music be music and abuse something else in the name of the ego?

Towards the end of the academic year, an ominous letter summoned me to the dean’s office. The dean was a stern, religious man who held Christian prayer meetings every week for the students. Many of them loved and admired him. He drew the corners of his mouth into a straight line—was it an attempted smile?—and pointed out that I had been unable to play in orchestra for most of the year, and that if this continued, I would have to think about terminating my studies. I looked into his face and searched for some hint of compassion or even pity but found none. Tears welled up in my eyes and he gave no appearance of having seen them. I told him I was going to physical therapy and doing everything I could. He said they would be keeping an eye on me. That eye sounded more predatory than nurturing.

Things came to a head that summer. My cello teacher had encouraged me to apply for a prestigious music festival. I didn’t have any current recordings to send for the application because of the tendinitis, so I sent old ones that I had made the year before. Even so, I was chosen to attend along with about 24 other students. I was among the youngest at 17; many participants were in their mid-twenties and well into their professional careers by then.

The festival was in the flat, hot Midwest, far from my beloved Rocky Mountains, home of the Aspen Music Festival that had been my summer stomping grounds from age 12 to 16. Aspen had been a huge, sprawling festival in a lively town with 800 students and thousands of visitors every year. It was very easy to disappear and do your own thing, to find your people and avoid not-your-people. At this new festival, I was one of an elite two dozen who had been hand-picked to participate on full scholarship. We were all assigned to fixed groups and were expected to work with them for the duration of the program, five weeks. Hearing this at the beginning of the summer gave me a tinge of claustrophobia. It was reminiscent of picking a lunch table at the beginning of the school year and committing to those friends for a whole year.

We were housed on the campus of a suburban community college in large but spartan bedrooms with brown linoleum floors, metal bed frames, and a standard-issue table and chair. The scratchy woolen blanket I was given (despite over 100-degree heat) was laced with some previous owner’s dark hairs that kept surfacing after I thought I had extracted them all. There was no opportunity to personalize our living quarters and no kitchen to keep snacks, but there were no stores within walking distance anyway. All of our meals had to be eaten at the music school, to which we were driven in scheduled vans by young volunteers who seemed to have normal lives apart from this summer job, unlike us musicians. I envied their freedom to come and go. You could pay a small fee to have a phone connected in your own room; otherwise you had to use the phone in the hallway. I paid the fee, sensing that I was going to need that lifeline.

The older students were frighteningly dedicated; they took the early van to the music school, stopping at a new chain called Starbucks for caffeination, and practiced all day before and after rehearsals and lessons. The music school was on pretty, well-kept grounds with green rolling lawns, but I missed the mountains, the streams, the wilderness, the whisper of aspen leaves. Spending hours and hours practicing and rehearsing seemed meaningless without the surrounding beauty I had come to associate with music in the summer.

I realized very quickly that I was out of my league there. Not that I wasn’t talented enough; the teachers seemed to think I was, at least enough to be chosen out of many applicants. It was more that, like my older idols in Aspen, the other students there were prepared to make enormous sacrifices in order to pursue this as a career. And I began to see that I was not.

I was in one chamber music group where the violist and the pianist got into such bitter, vitriolic arguments that we had to stop playing together. But that was still not as bad as the other chamber music group. We were playing the Schubert cello quintet, an utterly divine piece of music and a reason in itself to play the cello. This group was being coached by a famous teacher who would stop at nothing to achieve perfection with us. Perfection was not subjective; it was an attainable goal (albeit with a constantly receding goalpost determined by the teacher) if we simply tried hard enough, which I was obviously unable to do. She made this very clear in lesson after lesson in front of the group by exhorting me to play this way, no this way, no, don’t you see: THIS WAY. I didn’t understand why her way would be superior to my way and the explanation was never provided.

Rehearsals with this group were led by the German first violinist, and when others made artistic suggestions, he overrode them with his first violin veto right. I made the mistake of calling him a Nazi one night after consuming an alcoholic beverage, not realizing, as an American teenager who had grown up watching Seinfeld, what it meant to say that to a German. Needless to say, it did not contribute to the harmonious workings of the group.

Rehearsals were no fun. Lessons were no fun. There was nothing to do there besides rehearse, practice, and have lessons. I did not feel I was being honed into a multi-faceted jewel as my fellow musicians seemed to feel about their daily participation in masterclasses and lessons. I felt I was having the pulp bashed out of me, and with it, my love of music, my self-confidence, even my grasp on reality. After long, tedious days at the music school, I went for walks around the dark, quiet suburban campus and practiced Kung Fu long forms just so that I could feel my body. So that I could feel I led an existence separate from the cello.

Late one evening after a particularly trying day with the Schubert teacher, I retreated to my room, from which I could still hear a string player practicing softly with a mute on. I picked up my private phone, which now truly felt like a lifeline, and made an expensive long-distance call to my boyfriend, who was at home with his parents somewhere else in the Midwest.

“I have to leave,” I sobbed into the phone, my head under the hairy woolen blanket so I wouldn’t be overheard. “Not just here. I have to leave it all. I have to leave Juilliard. I’m done with this.”

It was clear to me beyond any doubt that my life was veering in a very wrong direction. That was obviously what my aching, burning arms and hands were telling me, what I was feeling in this dark, solitary misery in a place that should have been heaven for an aspiring young musician. The only conclusion I could come to was that I was not meant to do this, I was not meant to be part of this world.

The next day, I got my period and I chalked it all up to hormonal overreaction, as so many women are conditioned to do. I put my shoulder back to the grindstone and finished off the summer with only an occasional tearful phone call to the boyfriend.

Over thirty years later, I think of that night and the insight my 17-year-old self had and I bow to her.

She was right and I ignored her.

Worse still, I gaslit her.

Through it all, she never left me.

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This is an essay about the moment a true perception gets dismissed as overreaction and the cost of believing that dismissal for thirty years.

Is there something you once knew and shut down so it wouldn't disrupt your life?

Notice what happens in your body as you ask.