What does it mean to have lost your music?

Is it even tangible?  To some people it means they have lost a general sense of joy in their lives.  To others it is completely literal, that they find themselves unable to sing or play their instruments.

I have been in this place before.

It was dark there.  It felt sticky, and confusing.  And in all of the stickiness there was also hidden sharp blades that occasionally would scrape along my skin and draw thin lines of blood that burned.

I have always sang.  So much that it honestly was taken for granted.

When I was growing up I learned to play the violin, and then taught myself guitar and clarinet.  Because I was THAT musical nerd. Music meant so much to me that I was in every musical group I could be during high school.  And I felt amazing. My soul was always dancing, and even on the darkest days I was still singing.

Then I stepped out of my safe bubble of high school and into college.  What a shock, right?

My violin skills were BAD.  My clarinet, due to only having played for one year, were worse.  …we will not speak of the guitar.  

In my shame I didn’t pick them up again.

But my voice?  They loved it.

Opera!  You will learn opera!

…my enthusiasm was less than stellar.  I didn’t WANT to learn opera. I wanted to teach music, and sing showtunes!  My voice wasn’t anything fancy. It just was something that I had, and never developed or cared much about.

Now, suddenly, my college career depended on it.  How utterly strange.

When I went home from college, I tried joining some professional choirs.  I passed auditions! I was part of them. But my depression due to not finishing college was very real at that time.  

I stopped singing.

I lost my music.

Even in the car I didn’t sing with the radio.  I would have music on… but just listen. It wasn’t until three years of dating that my first husbands family realized I even COULD sing, and that is because I sang for his father’s funeral.  This is a common theme for me. I jokingly call myself the Deathsinger, because I sing at the memorials. Their favorite hymns… songs… what have you. I do it for them, because I feel like its honoring their memory.

It just didn’t matter.  I didn’t have the drive or desire.

I would pick up my voice and stare at it every so often.  Turning it around in my hands like a dusty old gem. “This was once beautiful, I think.”  But then I would shake my head and put it back down. Confused and frustrated as to how to ever make it shine again.

My voice stayed quiet, unused, for almost ten years.  Depression surely was the main reason, but also just being exhausted with being a first time mother and a young one at that!  I was a creature alone, as all of my friends were child free. I couldn’t keep up.

Time passed, and after the opening of my marriage I met a man who was even more driven by music that I.  A man who ended up becoming my second husband, and so very important to me. I remember him standing in front of my old, neglected piano in the farmhouse.  Stroking his strong fingers over its wood. “It’s so out of tune… when was the last time it was played?”

I couldn’t tell him.  I didn’t remember.

So then he opened it up, and stroked his fingers over the keys.  The tune of The Entertainer came spilling out from it.  It was out of tune, but ragtime music loves an out of tune piano.  And I felt my heart flutter. Already he and I had teasingly sung a few duets in the car to The Music Man (theater nerds, unite!), and now I was speechless.

I felt my music wriggling back into my heart.

Once we were in Virginia I found myself singing more, and then when we joined our current UU Church we joined the choir.

Suddenly I was singing.

Suddenly I was soaring.

I found my music again.

It still slips out of my fingers from time to time, but those who love me will hand me my violin and smile.  “Play along with me…” they will murmur. And suddenly I am flying again, and happy again.  

I suppose the moral of the story is that you don’t ever actually truly lose your music.  Sometimes it just gets quiet. It takes being brave to reach out and give it another go, and let it free so you can remember how good it feels.