Analogies

Do you wish you could return to a moment in your past?
           Ever since I was very young I read books. My parents, being the overly supportive people that they always are, read to me and with me for every day of my childhood. As I grew older and entered school I never really had to study for grammar and wording tests; I could just read the sentence out loud and if it sounded nice it was correct. During my sixth-grade year we took a sixty question test about analogies and similes and per usual I didn’t expect to do well. Our teacher was intensely engaging but the class was very difficult. Because of this, when the teacher announced that I had gotten the only perfect score in the class I was astounded.

            I was a young and naive 6^th grader who was in a position I had never been in before. I had gotten a perfect score on a test; outperformed my entire class. Later on, I did what I usually do and insensitively asked my friends how they did. The school was very small and my usual socially awkward introvertedness wasn’t there because I knew everyone so I talked loudly. From across the room one of my classmates overheard me and shouted back, “Well we all know what you got.” To this day I wish I could go back and slap some sense into younger me.

            I have always been sensitive of how other people perceive me and the utterly disgusted tone that my classmate had when he spoke floored me. I was used to being a quiet unnoticed kid who observed rather than participated and so suddenly being thrust into a unwanted spotlight was terrifying for me and I hated it. I remember freezing; I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to apologize to him but instead I just fell quiet and walked away. My non confrontal attitude towards this situation has carried through to today and has resurfaced in a few unexpected places recently.

            About six months ago I started playing piano. I have been playing string instruments, violin and viola, for over 10 years and suddenly switching to playing an instrument that required two hands was a drastic change that I was not prepared for. For the first 4 weeks of lessons I didn’t even mention to my teacher that I played violin. She remarked multiple times that I was unusually significantly better at reading treble clef compared to bass clef. Had I told her then and there that I had been playing violin for 12 years and that I could read treble clef perfectly but could read a single measure of bass clef, my experience with learning how to play piano could have been much easier.

            I practiced hours a day for the few weeks coming up to my first piano recital. I really wanted to do well, but I was having an awful time memorizing the left-hand part of the piece which was written in bass clef. Had I given special attention to learning to read bass clef would have helped me in the recital. Instead, my self-confidence was once again destroyed by disparity in what I said and what I should have said. The performance did not go well.

            If only in some small way, my failure to perform in piano was a product of my lack of self-confidence that was induced by the 6^th grade analogies test. If I could go back to that day and change what I said and how I reacted I would truly be a different person today. However, this is not possible and I accept myself for who I am and not who I wish I could be. I can use this knowledge of myself to become what I want to be.