Playing Scared (9 page)

Still, it never occurred to him that he didn’t have to play the violin. His life had been laid down on a set of tracks that ran in only one direction, and he couldn’t imagine getting off. Without really thinking about it, in 1998 he headed to Juilliard in New York. It would prove a miserable experience. “Most people come around and realize they care about music, love the violin, and thank their parents,” he said. “That never happened to me.” His epiphany came during a dinner with classmates, when the conversation turned to what they’d do if they ever won the lottery. One said she’d start a musical festival. Someone else mentioned a music foundation. Kagayema didn’t have to think twice about his answer: He would put down his violin and never touch it again.

Then, in his second semester, he took a class with Don Greene, a former Green Beret who served as sport psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Diving Team and the World Championship swimming team. Greene had been invited by a voice teacher at Juilliard to help prepare four students for their auditions with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Of the fifty-nine candidates who sang at the audition, his four protégés came in first, second, fourth, and fifth. The results were so impressive that Juilliard talked Greene into joining its faculty. His presence would have huge repercussions for Kageyama, who, for all his success, recognized that he’d always played better in the practice room than in the performance hall. But
he had no idea that there was a whole field dedicated to figuring out why that might be. He had studied psychology as an undergraduate—mostly, he says with a sly smile, to get out of orchestra—and what he’d learned was what mainstream psychology then promulgated about performance anxiety: that it was a social phobia. The term first made its appearance in the 1980 edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, where it was defined as intense anxiety during a performance, be it music, acting, dancing, public speaking, or anything else. The definition cast a wide net. It applied to shy people who froze at parties, as well as those who became paralyzed with fear when they ran into an acquaintance at Safeway. For a truly phobic person, even that sort of mundane event can feel like a major performance.

The definition has changed considerably over time, with the 2013 edition of the
DSM
, the fifth edition, cautioning that “performance anxiety, stage fright and shyness in social situations that involve unfamiliar people (a potentially hostile audience) are common and should not be diagnosed as social phobia unless the anxiety or avoidance leads to clinically significant impairment or marked distress.” But while psychiatrists have argued over whether stage fright is a pathology, sport psychologists have long regarded it as a normal response to a high-stakes situation. They’re not interested in eliminating anxiety; rather, they see it as a positive force, to be harnessed and roped into service, like Prometheus’s gift of fire. Without it, Kageyama told me, there is no excitement, no passion, no peak performance. “Fear builds excitement. That sudden adrenaline burst? It’s a signal of something important
that’s about to happen. You’re always going to be nervous. You just need to learn how to channel it.”

Noa Kageyama
(Courtesy of Ahlin Min)

Like his mentor Don Greene, Kageyama considers himself a sport psychologist—though one who works specifically with musicians, athletes of the small motor muscles. In that capacity, he initiated our sessions by having me complete an Inventory of Performance Skills, a questionnaire of eighty-four statements designed to gauge a musician’s anxiety level. My answers underlined what I already knew about myself: “Going into performances, I expect to do well.” (Not true.) “I feel bold onstage.” (Hardly.) “I talk to myself in a positive
way.” (Not very true.) “I wish I could manage my nerves better.” (Duh.) Overall, my scores showed me to be fearful and anxious, running away from whatever I found difficult or scary. Fear of failure left me tentative, hesitant, and inclined to play it safe, shying away from bold musical gestures and expressiveness. Not surprisingly, I scored low on resilience, revealing myself as someone who became so distracted by a slipup that I had trouble continuing with the music.

It was, Kageyama acknowledged months later, “one of the more extreme profiles” he had seen. How bad was it? I prodded. He smiled, looking as if he were about to crack a joke on late-night TV, then caught himself and offered up the word
challenging
. I did my best, he told me, when I wasn’t completely calm. I thrived on some excitement, some adrenaline. I wasn’t happy at ninety miles an hour, but it was also clear that I didn’t function at thirty. I was a just-under-the-speed-limit pianist—forty-five miles an hour. There were a lot of problems in my profile: I lacked confidence, I avoided opportunities, I had difficulty focusing my mind on the music. On the other hand, I was capable of summoning my resources in a pinch and showed great determination.

Act and think like the person you want to be, he urged. Record your playing every day and then listen to it intently without critiquing or analyzing the music. Learn to really listen. Sing along while playing, as Glenn Gould used to do. (If you listen carefully—and sometimes not so carefully—you can hear him, humming along on his recordings in a low, near constant drone.) Kageyama called it “singing brain.”

These were the tools of cognitive behavior therapy, a psychodynamic approach aimed at driving home emotional insights with clear goal-oriented targets. Kageyama wasn’t interested in why I had stage fright; as far as he was concerned, everybody had it. The key, he said, was learning how to “center,” how to better cultivate a sense of interior calm. When I figured out how to do that, the anxiety of performing would melt away. He himself learned how to do it when he was a student at Juilliard, preparing for an international competition. As usual, he hadn’t prepared nearly enough. He was nervously pacing his apartment when he came upon a brochure about the powers of centering. As he studied it, he recalled the visualization exercises and other mental games his mother had instilled, and he quickly figured out what he needed to do. When he played at the competition, the result surprised him. “I wasn’t even prepared, but given my level of preparation I hit it out of the park—way beyond where I had any right to.” He made it to the second round, then realized that if he made it any further, he would have to disqualify himself. He hadn’t bothered to learn the required repertoire.

By this point, though, it didn’t matter. He had just been introduced to “the zone,” and it was all he cared about. “Once you get there and you realize what it feels like, you don’t ever want to perform anywhere else than that,” he said. “Because it’s just too nerve-racking to do so. Once you figure out where your ideal zone is, what you’re paying attention to, that’s the only thing that ends up mattering. When there were times I couldn’t get there for some reason, how I played actually mattered less to me than getting to that place where I knew I could play well.”

Kageyama had ideas about how to help me find my own zone, but first he wanted me to write up an identity statement, a short mantra that would couple my greatest strength with my aspirations. It would be a way of linking something that was already true with something I hoped to make true. When, at our next session, I read my statement aloud (“My energy is formidable and I am the most magnetic amateur pianist in the Bay Area”), I could barely deliver it with a straight face. I was instructed to print it out, tape it to the bathroom mirror, and repeat it aloud every time I looked in the mirror. It will be your mantra, he told me, a personal affirmation that will drive you forward. The thought of seeing such silliness posted on my bathroom mirror made me cringe.

“We have this idea of who we think we are, and it’s not correct,” Kageyama went on, and assigned me to draw up a list of my top ten courageous moments. “If you look at that list, you’ll see what you’re capable of.”

I fretted over this second assignment, trying to come up with items that were worthy of inclusion. I considered the act of natural childbirth, which I’d managed to pull off three times, but crossed it off when I realized that both my grandmothers had accomplished the same and neither would have called herself courageous for doing so. Other occasions came to mind: moving to Italy to work as an au pair when I could barely speak Italian, hitchhiking across the United Kingdom, hauling lobsters in Scotland. But including them struck me as cheating: In my late teens and early twenties, these escapades had been taken as larks. Everyone I’d met on my summer swings through Europe had been kind and solicitous—one
old Scotswoman going so far as to invite me into her house, where she drew up a hot bath and set out an enormous breakfast of fried kippers and haggis. These were stories I told to give my life a certain flair.

But there was one story I didn’t tell, mostly because forty years after the fact, I still felt ashamed of my part in it. It happened when I was sixteen, hitchhiking from the summer camp in northern Ontario where I was a counselor to Toronto. The man who picked me up appeared pleasant and nonthreatening. He told me he had been driving all night from Sault Ste. Marie, a city far to the north. He was willing to take me all the way into Toronto, but first he wanted to stop off at his house in the suburbs, say hello to his wife and kids, and change his shirt. When I heard that he had a wife, I imagined I was safe and agreed. Of course, there was no one in the house. He made me a sandwich (roast beef with ketchup on Wonder Bread) and made a phone call to someone named Paul. Then, as I was finishing up my sandwich, he locked the kitchen door and dragged me through the hall, past the photographs of his children in their school uniforms, and into his bedroom. I opened my mouth to scream and nothing came out. My vocal cords were frozen. I was frozen. He threw me on the bed and I managed to whisper, “I have a boyfriend.” It was a ridiculous thing to say; in fact, I didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d never had a boyfriend, and even if I had, why would it make any difference? He took off his shirt and rolled on top of me. I caught a glimpse of a framed photograph of his wife in her wedding dress, and I squeaked out the only question that made sense in the moment: How can you do this to your wife? I’m not doing
it to her, he said, I’m doing it to you. He said it almost grimly, but with humor—as if he were getting to a chore that he’d put off much too long but that really wasn’t so bad. His words hit me like a bucket of ice water. I instantly came to life and did the only thing left to me: I sank my teeth deep into his arm, as far as they could sink. Sometimes even now, when I close my eyes, I can remember the taste of that flaccid, pink flesh and recall the way he howled and fell away, leaving me to jump up and make my escape.

Yes, I thought, that was courageous. I would give myself that. I had walked away, moved on, and pushed myself out into the world—traveling, working, taking risks without excessive fear for my physical safety. Why, then, whenever I sat down at the piano to play for an audience, no matter how small, did I tremble like a cornered animal? My heart pounded as wildly as if I were being attacked—but the one time I
was
attacked, I’d risen to the occasion. The girl who could save herself from being raped, with no weapon other than her teeth, was surely capable of summoning up some reserve of courage at the piano.

The existential psychologist Rollo May defined anxiety as “a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality.” That definition is hard to apply to a fear of spiders, snakes, heights, or bridges, but it is central to a fear of performance. Asking myself which of my own essential values were threatened, I saw the answer: There sat my mother in the audience. I’d swallowed her values whole. For years, she had conveyed that music was the best part of me. If I failed at the piano, what did that signify?

Kageyama said I should do something every day that was outside my comfort zone. We would rate the activities on a scale of one to ten, beginning on a three and working my way up from there. We would structure them into an adventure. Ever since my first airport “recital” with Ellen Chen, I had begun dropping by Terminal B in San Jose. “My energy is formidable and I am the most magnetic amateur pianist in the Bay Area,” I whispered to myself as I laid out my books of music: Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Tcherepnin, and Piazzolla. Kageyama deemed it a seven on the adventure scale.

After a few of these performances, I occasionally forgot about my mantra. Sometimes, a small audience of skycaps,
baggage handlers, and travelers with time to kill grew around me, and as they sipped their Peet’s coffees, I played my heart out. Once, when I stood up and gathered my things, they actually applauded and called out their thanks. I thought of my mantra, which suddenly seemed all wrong. I went home and wrote up another: “I am someone who has begun to overcome her fears and I enjoy playing for people and bringing them beautiful music.” It wasn’t much better, but it didn’t make me cringe.