A voice that said: “not like that”

About ten years ago, when I was starting my postgraduate studies, I began to feel a very strong fear of playing.
There was no traumatic event, no extreme experience.
There was simply a voice.

A voice that said: “mmm, no, not like that.”

I heard that short sentence every time I played. Not like that.

It came together with a sound: an “sss”, made by pressing my teeth together and inhaling air.

When there is a voice constantly telling us that everything we do is wrong or not enough, it makes us doubt everything. I doubted everything.

I was afraid in every situation where I had to expose myself: I was nervous in lessons with my percussion teacher, in chamber music rehearsals, in orchestra rehearsals, when practicing alone in a room. Always.

My fellow students were much better than me. Everyone else could, and I couldn’t. My teachers were surely lying when they said that something I played was good.

Praise and positive comments from colleagues and from the audience were, at that time, either lies or simply mistakes in the perception of the person saying them.

I had moments in classes and internal auditions where I was so nervous and my hands were shaking so much that the only thing I wanted was for it to stop.

It was a torment. And, with no alternative, I became angry with music. I decided that maybe music wasn’t for me.

• I was substitute solo timpanist at Teatro Colón
• I was part of the Teatro Colón Orchestra Academy
• I graduated as a percussion teacher
• I was accepted into four European universities

Could this person really not play? How did he get so far while feeling so bad?

What if music wasn’t to blame for all of this? What if I felt this way for another reason?

It is too much to ask music to make us feel good. Music is something else.

Little by little, I began to free music from all of this, allowing myself to reconnect with what truly excites me.

And you — can you tell which sentence you say to yourself every time you play?