“I want you to pick any piece you like and I’ll learn it for you for my senior recital,” I said to my mother, waiting for her response with a childlike impatience. ‘I’m such a nice daughter,’ I thought to myself as I stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I don’t want a piece. Just make sure it’s not horrible like the last one,” she responded, referring to my high school graduation recital. Her half smile did not hide her sincerity, and I said nothing. I turned away to walk up the stairs and hadn’t reached the second step when the tears hit my cheeks.

My feet carried me up the stairs and down the hallway to my bedroom door, which I pushed open blindly before curling up on my bed, my tears now wetting the covers around me.

She didn’t mean to be hurtful. She probably thought she was being funny, that she was just joking around. But not really. My mother is never really joking.

I piled my comforter up around me and hid myself in it, morphing into a ball of down feathers squirreled away in the corner of my big brass bed. I knew my little brother was going to barge into my room any second, see me in my utterly pathetic state and start laughing. He didn’t.

“You’re such a baby,” I thought to myself. “What the hell are you doing?! You’re twenty-one years old for god’s sake!”

I pulled up my t-shirt and wiped the tears from my face. Sure, I should have practiced more. I knew it. But even so, I still worked my ass off, and you can never practice enough. I’ve spent my LIFE not practicing enough.

I’ve never watched the tape of my high school graduation recital. I’ve even covered my ears and slipped out of the room when I’ve walked in on other people watching it.

Maybe I’m scared I played badly.

To be honest, I don’t really remember how I played. I remember the dress I wore. I remember after performing solo for over an hour, being utterly exhausted but having to finish the program. I remember fighting against the thick summer air, constrained by its weight. I remember feeling like I just ran a marathon when I lifted my bow off the string for the last time, sweat running down my face as I took a bow, breathing so heavily I could hear it over the sound of more than a hundred people clapping. I remember trying to escape and being overtaken by people - people hugging me, people kissing me, people giving me presents. I remember the happiness I felt, thinking it went really well, until my mother looked at me and said, “Well, at least you looked good.”

I pushed the covers aside and called my best friend from high school, who now goes to Juilliard. “Jen, be honest. Tell me the truth. Was my recital really that bad?” “Liv, what are you talking about? Which concert?” It was early in the morning and I had woken her up. “My senior recital Jen,” I snapped back, needing to know. I told her what my mom said. “Oh, the one in Jersey – yes, yes of course I remember. No, that’s totally unwarranted.” “You can tell me the truth, really – I want to know,” I said, hoping desperately she would lie if it was bad. “Liv, I’m not lying. I promise. You did a great job.”

A few days later, I had an idea for what to learn for my graduation recital, a piece that I’d love to play and have wanted to for awhile. In high school, my teacher had told me that I wasn’t mature enough to play it, and I had conceded in stubborn frustration. Now, grown-up and teacher-less, there was nothing to stop me.

Except good sense.

I called up my musician friends again: “No way. You’d have to practice for eight hours every day.” “But it’s so gorgeous,” I said, knowing all the while it was way too difficult. “Liv, we go to Juilliard and we can’t play it. You’re not even a music major.”

They were right. Of course they were right, what was I thinking?! I had chosen one of the most difficult concertos in the violin repertoire, and I hadn’t even been taking lessons in over a year.

But I had decided I wanted to play it and that was that. “You have no faith in me,” I said to my friends, knowing that wasn’t the case but needing to be a bit pampered after my mother’s cutting rejection.

“It’s not that we don’t have faith in you,” they explained. “You just haven’t played all the stuff you have to play before taking on such a difficult piece – you haven’t been doing any of the technique exercises. What have you been working on lately?”

Shit. I hadn’t been working seriously on anything. Not wanting to admit that my most vivid musical performances of late had been realized late at night after several drinks, much to the disturbance of my neighbors, I named a couple of pieces off the top of my head that I’ve played around with in the last couple months. But it wasn’t enough, and I knew it.

A little while later, I talked to one of my friends from Amherst.  He is by no means a musician and, in turn, thinks my drunk concerts are amazing. I presented him with two pieces, courtesy of YouTube, one of which was the piece my friends and I both knew I could not play.

“I think you can do the hard one,” he said, without having any idea of the magnitude of its difficulty. “The song sounds hard, but it’s purdy.” “You don’t understand,” I said. “I want to play it, but there’s just no way.” And then he asked the question that should have been apparent to me all along: “What’s going to make you happy? Playing something impossible and doing a decent job, or doing something less challenging really well?”

I didn’t even have to think about the answer. I have always been taught that you do something well or you don’t do it at all. “I don’t care if you spend two hours on this one measure,” my teacher would say to me. “Don’t go on until it’s polished.” My mother felt the same way, only much stronger: “How could you play that in front of those people? You can’t just play things whenever you feel like it Olivia – you don’t go in front of people unless it’s perfect!” She would have died at the jam sessions that went down once I left home and went to college.

A few nights later, still cooped up at home, I was practicing a piece I had played when I was little.

“I like that piece,” my mom called to me from the top of the stairs, on her way to bed. I stopped for a second and then kept on playing. I know, mom. That’s why I’m playing it.