Keeping the cello

When I tell people I decided against a career in music, they sometimes ask whether I still play. It’s a reasonable question, but I never quite know how to explain why the answer feels so obvious to me.

I still wanted the cello. I didn’t want the life I was being asked to build around it.

There were things about studying music that I loved. I liked working until a passage began to make sense under my hands. I liked hearing someone else play something I thought I understood and having to reconsider it. I also spent enough time around competition and deliberate unkindness to know that I didn’t want to keep organizing my future around that environment.

It was difficult to say so when being good at something was treated as an answer to whether I should do it professionally. I could explain that I didn’t like the life, and the response would still be about my ability. Those were different questions.

I’m studying psychology now. I’m interested in the conditions we ask people to learn under, including the ones we stop questioning because we’ve learned to tolerate them ourselves. Music is part of how I came to those questions.

I don’t have to make a living from the cello to want to pick it up. Sometimes I only want to play a passage I like. It’s pleasant to finish there without having to explain what I accomplished.