language

[excerpt from a chapter on the possibility of having autism]

When I lost my violin, I lost my language.

I can remember this moment, I was a little kid, I was walking down the stairs back into the basement. I had gone upstairs to complain about my brothers to my mother and got no help. And I returned to the basement to be chastised by my brother for being a tattletale. I had both not gotten what I needed from my mom and ended up in a worse situation with my brothers. And I learned that speaking would not get me what I needed, that I would essentially be punished as the cost would outweigh the benefit. That speaking would not make me understood.

I loved my violin because it allowed me to express my inner life in a way English never did. And it was without negative consequence as it was a form of communication both so precise and yet so veiled in specific interpretation. I could express everything I needed to express, I could reach catharsis. I never understood how people could play without passion. Even now, when I hear someone play, no matter how proficient they seem, if it doesn’t make me feel, it is not music. And then it makes me feel angry, as they get to play and I don’t.

And although hearing someone else play cannot bring that same catharsis, it can get close, because I get to hear someone else in my language. And sometimes I’ll go home and play back, even if it does mean almost immediate physical pain, increasing by the minute, sometimes lasting for weeks and that my ability with this language is not what it was so many years ago, there is still a freedom in the midst of it all. At least in that moment, I exist.

Guitar is my second language, I will never be as proficient, it will never be complete expression, but it does provide a release, a rest, a purging of my mind. And as my guitar case sits lying flat on my living room floor, hinges unlocked, always ready to be opened while keeping out the ravages of a dry climate on a wooden instrument, it is an expression of being loved. Because it was bought for me, knowing how little I could afford such an upgrade from that beginner guitar that was with me so long. And done so in a way I would actually accept, very far from a given in my realm. And while allowing me to purge my mind, daily, it is also, in a way, an expression of being understood. So very different from the threats that my violin, the one that sits in its case on my floor next to the guitar now, would be sold if I didn’t play it, an expression of how completely I was not understood.

And there is the mandolin. Somewhere in the middle as I play around with old songs from classical to fiddle tunes, or just fooling around as the intervals between the strings are still so much more natural to my fingers. Another language, and a third case in the line down my wall. Beneath my binary knit wall pieces, on the shadow (deep purple) wall I painted and beside the living edge walnut writing table I cut the maple inlay for myself to fill the natural form of the crack in the wood, a slab of wood paid for by my master’s thesis award, completing the space that says me.

Piano wasn’t really a language. I started it at the same time as violin. Piano was a thing I returned to when violin was gone. Learning the piano part for what I could not really play anymore. Pounding out Bohm’s Sarabande on the piano, having lost all its beauty, simply an outlet of angry, as if punching a hole in the wall with my fist, pounding on the piano instead of creating physical damage to an inanimate object I would never consider my pain worthy enough of inflicting.

I started violin at 3. I don’t think I would have done so well as a child without it. I think things would have fallen apart earlier. I still have the memory of it. I can still hear it all in my head, two-thirds of my life ago and I can still hear it. The odd time I play now, but it is like a tease, it does not sound like it did, it hurts within about a minute, it becomes very painful in about 10, and although it does not lead to chronic pain now without repetition, which means I once tried playing two days in a row, for so very long it did. It is like being tortured for talking, except it is my own body delivering the pain. It is a tease because once in awhile I can get away with it, but I don’t know if when I play, when I communicate, when I actually communicate, I will be punished.

I know there was a time when I was still playing, around grade 5 or 6, where I thought about quitting. I don’t remember it, I cannot connect with how it felt. It doesn’t fit with the story as I know it and I cannot connect with it.

I connect with that grade 8 girl kneeling against a church pew and crying so hard that her beige sweater had a patch dyed pink, as those hot pink pews, about the same age as me, bleed into me. I can remember it coming to an end but pushing as hard as I could to learn the first violin part of the Bach Double on my own so I could play it with all the other violinists at the opening concert at what I knew was bound to be my last trip to the University on Montana for a week of master classes in the summer.

I learned that next fall that perseverance is not enough and I lost my soul.

I lost my language.

And the consequences were more than I know how to write. Only within this last year, as I try to give myself as much space as I need to express, to create, to be, and not allow that to turn into new, harming obligations just because I am good at something, am I starting to feel like they could be reckoned with. But maybe that is just me trying again and hoping for what never seems to actually happen. Maybe it can’t be reckoned with.

At times it felt like it was my first breakup, that breakup that is harder than the ones that come later because you have never been through it before and don’t know how that feeling will ever end. And no actual breakup has matched it.

But it wasn’t a breakup, because I didn’t lose another person, I lost me.

As I have gained a voice now, as I have learned other ways to communicate, they still will never be as complete as that was. And I don’t know how I would have gotten through so much of life without it. And I don’t understand how an inanimate, human made object should be so necessary to my existence, but it is. It was.