There’s a photograph of me taken when I was eight years old
at my Oma and Opa’s 50th wedding anniversary. My mom, dad, brother, and I had flown to
Germany for the celebration and I remember being completely in awe of
everything I saw during this, my first international adventure.
The photo is black and white, taken by my cousin
Wolfgang. I’m dressed in a proper little
German outfit, my hair in pigtails, smiling into the camera. What is striking about this picture is the
light and life I see in my eyes. My eyes
look completely alive in this photo, as if I am alight with the sheer joy of
the moment. There is no worrisome past
or uncertain future. There is just pure,
unjaded innocence.
Whenever I see this shot of me I inevitably feel two
conflicting emotions. I always smile at
this young girl, almost as if I am gazing at an eight-year-old I’ve never met,
and think how happy she looks. Only when I am snapped back into the reality
that I’m looking backward in time at my own face am I overcome with
sadness. Where did the bright shining
light in that little girl’s eyes go?
Sometime after that picture was taken, the light in my eyes
began to diminish. I can’t pinpoint an
exact moment or event, but all subsequent snapshots of me show a young girl,
then a teenager, then a young adult, then an adult, all existing in
semi-darkness. I didn’t live my life out
loud, as the song says, but in a dark, quiet place. My attempts to hide myself, my talents, my
light, were not extreme. How could they
have been? Extreme anything would not
fit in my attempts to live my life in a state of perpetual retreat from
anything that would draw attention to myself. In a multitude of small ways, however, I began to retreat from who I
was, crawling ever further into the shadows.
My first recollection of attempting to take my life under
the proverbial radar of the rest of humanity was practicing my flute. Our band teacher made us practice for a
half-hour a night as our homework. This
produced a level of anxiety in me that I had never before experienced. My fear was having my parents hear me, but
how could they not? The house was not
very big and fairly quiet. They would
hear me no matter what doors I closed. I’m not even sure why I didn’t want them to hear me. If I was just beginning to learn a piece I
would sound pretty bad, yet if I practiced and got better I would obviously
sound good. I was afraid to be both bad
or good at playing the flute. I was
afraid to be.
I came up with a solution, however. I realized one day that I could actually
practice my flute almost silently. If I
fingered the notes to play each song I needed to practice but blew across the
mouthpiece at only about twenty percent of the usual air it took to make sound
come out, I could hear and correct my fingering of the notes, yet I was the
only one who could hear me. Basically,
it was like whispering. I
whisper-practiced all the way through high school. Which explains, obviously, why I always knew
and could play the notes and did fairly well finger-wise, but never excelled at
flute playing. How could I? I mean, the whisper-practicing, however
essential it was to me not being heard, did nothing to strengthen my musical
ability. My breath control, vibrato, and
all the other elements necessary to play well were never addressed. Basically, my tone was abysmal. The whisper-practicing was my first foray
into gradually retreating into myself. It would, however, soon get worse, as I continued to disappear into
myself for decades of my life. When at last I emerged, I was an overweight shell filled with nothing but anxiety.
