Scratch

I was the kid who locked himself in his room to play with Legos. I would spend long hours building cars, buildings, airplanes, spaceships, proceed to play with them for awhile, and then destroy them. I was obsessed with destroying and rebuilding the Lego city that took up over a third of the floorspace of my bedroom. As I grew up, I would do the same with mini-universes in my favorite video games, Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and the Sims.

My grandfather was a Methodist minister, social worker, and a psychotherapist at various points of his life. He once told me a story about Carl Jung’s descent into mental illness. Like so much of his stories he shared with me, parts of it may not be true and yet it has traveled beyond an accurate recollection to become allegory. Jung had a psychotic break and chose to exacerbate it with mescaline in order to study his subconscious mind. As a coping mechanism, he would walk down to the river behind his house and build cities by the water with stones, rocks, and sticks while he suffered from hallucinations. He built his own universe to avoid going completely insane, to prevent himself from being completely consumed by the madness he had stoked in himself.

Photo by derekGavey

I have to start from scratch every day in my practicing. One note at a time and incredibly slow, half, third, or quarter tempo. Regardless of where I’ve ended the day before, I have to come back to this spot. I’ve come home from auditions, recitals, and orchestra performances and immediately started work again, one single solitary note at a time. I need to be a beginner every morning: it has been the only thing that has neutralized the pendulum swing of “I’m amazing/I’m worthless” in my brain. It’s served as a practical unburdening of self doubt, starting from the moment where the work is clearest and easiest, music in its most distilled form: one individual sound. Simply, it has kept me from going insane.

My proudest new habit goes as follows: Before every practice session this month I’ve turned on my camera (well, the camera on my phone) to video a cold run through of an excerpt of music I’m working on. Sometimes I’ll do that again at the end when I’m properly warmed up and “ready”. Regardless, the work comes after I’ve sat with my shadow self pouring out of my phone and made my assignment for the next practice session. It has been one of the great challenges of my life, learning to accept unconditionally the sights and sounds coming out of my violin through the camera lens and my headphones.

I’m further along this path of self-acceptance than I used to be. While I’m enormously grateful for that, I’m keenly aware of the work to be done with Shadow Turner. On most days I’m unbothered by the road in front of me but some days it feels impossible. I sympathize with Jung struggling to hold his psyche together by the river, driven to the edge of insanity via yearning to understand. In these moments I worry I won’t ever feel better, that I’ve been struck dumb and can’t move. Like Jung before me, I have to sit with this doubt, play with it, stack it on top of itself, build a universe with it so I can return to normal and move with it.