When I started taking clarinet lessons in fourth grade, I was the last person in my class to coax a sound out of the mouthpiece. I’m surprised I remember that now, but at the same time, it’s pretty significant given where I ended up. Being good at the clarinet sort of crept up on me; I truly had no idea until I was the first fourth grader asked to join the fifth graders in playing the first clarinet part. Soon, I was excelling at solo competitions and routinely representing my school at local festivals. Later on, I was principal clarinetist in my high-school band and at music camp and was eventually told by my college instructor that I had the natural talent to play professionally. Not bad for someone who took weeks just to figure out how to vibrate a Rico #2.5 Reed.
Meanwhile, in the corner of my bedroom here at Tuck sits the electric guitar I’ve spent two and a half years not being able to play. I can’t play my guitar because every time I pick it up, I expect to have miraculously turned into Eddie Van Halen since last I played, as though listening to “Panama” on repeat could possibly have the same effect as the physical act of building up calluses. Faced with my continued inability to shred, I sigh dejectedly and place my guitar back on its stand. I am, in short, bad at being bad at things, and, in adulthood, I’ve found that I lack the wherewithal I had as a nine-year-old sitting in my parents’ living room with a disembodied clarinet mouthpiece.
Yesterday, I put my clarinet together for the first time in three years and pulled out a Brahms sonata I’ve had since high school. I needed to be reminded of what it felt like to be good at something, and Capital Markets and Accounting (OK, “Financial Measurement, Analysis, and Reporting”) were not fulfilling that need. Fall B is rough in a way that leaves me longing for the comparatively halcyon days of Fall A, which is something I was told to expect but didn’t fully believe would happen until now. Every resource upon which I have come to depend to get myself through difficult periods has more or less abandoned me in this environment. My resilience, my ability to produce under pressure, the fact that I thrive when overscheduled and forced to multitask — all vanished into the ether, leaving me without a clear path back to where I need to be.
Which is why I keep coming back to that girl with the mouthpiece. What was it that kept her attention on the task at hand in the face of seeming futility? When did I cease being the type of person who saw the need to make a comeback as a welcome challenge instead of as an overwhelming threat? Given where I started, it’s funny that I now reach for my clarinet when I need to be reminded that there are still things that come easily to me. I sincerely doubt that there will ever be a time when, faced with a new and daunting task, I will reach for Walmart’s Consolidated Financial Statements as a diversionary and enlivening tactic enabling me to soldier on (sorry, Professor Robinson). And I will never need to sit first chair in Capital Markets. I just need to get a sound out of the mouthpiece.
Read the full article: On being bad