- ‘How are you?
- …’
I am a violinist.
That’s the answer I give when people asks me what I do for a living. Sometimes, I say ‘I am a musician’. The answer never seems to be enough. There is always a reaction. Curiosity, misunderstanding, fascination or simply lack of interest. From the ‘ok, but what do you do for a living?’ to ‘I used to play de violin when I was a kid, but it was like torture’, or ‘Did you play with someone I know?’… I could make a list.
What all those questions showed me is that my profession, like many professions from the art industry continues to be misunderstood.
Let me crash some myths.
No, being an actor, a dancer, a musician or a graphic designer doesn't mean we need to live in constant torture and hopelessness to perform well. The myth of the necessity to be misunderstood, alone against the whole world was good during the industrial revolution maybe. I blame Sand, Musset, Wagner, Berlioz, Verlaine and Rimbaud for throwing this image of the suffering artist as a sort of necessity to be a good artist. For musicians, it has been so embedded that some of us play through excruciating pain - physical and psychological - just because ‘it’s normal, and the society expect us to suffer in order to excel in our job’.
I want to go deeper in the subject of mental health. Being hopeless, going down in the chaos of your thoughts and the darkest corner of your mind, plunging so deep that the world makes you suffocate. Not being able to talk, avoiding the reaching hands, avoiding the talks, avoiding others, because you don’t want to drag them down with you. Feeling loneliness as a curse and not being able to move, or think, or even feed yourself. Blackness and absence of thoughts. That is how I feel depression. This non ending black hole from which it seems impossible to get out, despite being surrounded by the most caring people.
I hadn’t felt the crippling state for a long time and didn’t realise that my way of coping with it was through playing music, sharing beauty, sharing humanity, laughing, mourning and loving through my instrument. Playing the violin for and with others is my own coping mechanism for life.
I realised this through this lockdown situation. 10 weeks without playing with my friends, my colleagues, my weird extended family. The 5 first weeks, I didn’t touch my violin, I felt lost, helpless, and the depression state started crippling on me. I became apathetic, brain dead, without energy. I would try and pick up my instrument and I would cry. Not because I was relieved to play it, but because I was missing the connection with others.
Weeks passed by and I tried to keep busy with other things, I tried to share in other ways - online teaching became my number one priority as well as finishing the diploma I started with the Global Leaders Program. Finding creative and social solutions for the world that is awaiting for us after this situation stops. Keeping my mind busy for the dark buzzing doesn’t surface again. A constant battle between myself and I. Dr Jeckyll and Mister Hide. Then, yesterday, I had a revelation. I played for a new initiative started by the generous hearts of Ed Taylor and his mum who happens to be a nurse - ‘Thankyou NHS Music’. I played and chatted for about an hour for nurses and doctors in a hospital here in the UK, I can’t remember what I blabbered abound, but I felt the connection. Despite being behind a camera, despite the sound cutting, I felt someone was on the other side of the line. When we stopped our exchange, I felt relieved. I felt alive. I felt high on a very powerful drug: human bond, life.
I am a musician, and I feed on those moments.
I don’t have holidays, or weekends, or even evenings when I am working. I don’t have a social life, I don’t go out for drinks, dinners or barbecues. I don’t go on holidays in foreign countries. When I go abroad it’s because I am working. If I go out in the evening, it’s because I am working. If I come back with the last train, with faded make-up and a worn out face, it’s because I was working.
When I work, I am connecting people together, I am sharing the experience of being alive and a human being that is a channel of feelings and thoughts. I happily work when everyone rests because I can give solace, I can share a state of being, I can meditate, mourn, dance, sing, and embrace the world with the sounds I am making.
Maybe I play with fire for my mental state, but sharing strong emotions, memories and opening my hearts is my way to keep well. Making sounds and bonding is a way to stop the noise in my head, stop my inability to find the right words.
Sometimes we don’t have the words, we don’t have the clarity of mind to form a sentence and we just need… to feel.
- ‘How are you?
- I feel again.’