Just Sell the Violin

In the past week, there had been anger. Little eruptions of rage flaring up like spurts of lava.

When I saw my son echoing his father’s lack of compassion. When my landlord raised an already obscene rent - while my ex-husband pays less on the mortgage for the five-bedroom family home he still lives in.

And also what I see in the wider world. The jobs that at best are superfluous and at worst damage our collective existence are the ones being rewarded, while the vocations that are life-enhancing, that improve our lives - teachers, body workers, artists of all kinds - seem to be struggling more and more. And the discrepancy keeps widening between those who have and those who don’t, those who can thrive and those who can only survive. The greed and the exploitation that is not only rewarded but exalted.

I often think that what we experience in our individual life is like light refracting through a prism. What happens out there is refracted in our private lives, and, if we’re not careful, in our inner lives too.

When I made the decision to step away from being a working musician, I was disciplined about staying focused on what I was moving towards: more ease, more financial stability, an easier schedule for my changing body and for my kids. I stayed away from the why I had got to that point in the first place. I, who had dreamt since the age of four of nothing other than a life in music.

I had married believing I was joining my life to someone who also wanted an open, welcoming house, full of music and musicians, artists and creatives of all kinds. I believed I was entering a partnership that was mutually supportive, both inside and outside our careers in the music industry. I thought I would be raising our children together. When this didn’t happen, I adapted to his preference for isolation, I compensated for his parental absence, and I did my best to be emotionally self-sufficient. The opportunities where he could have supported me came and went. When the children were born, I was actively discouraged from pursuing performing projects. And I let it happen. I kept myself small, moulded myself to conform to the role he had assigned to me. When I think of those years I get a dark, sick feeling in my stomach. I remember how alone I felt, how numb.

After my second baby, I went back to therapy and started to build my career for the first time without putting my husband first. I created a chamber orchestra and began fundraising for projects. Then Covid happened, pulling the rug from under my feet, and it coincided with my divorce. In our financial hearing I had to listen to his lawyer say that if I needed money, all I had to do was sell my violin, because my career had “never amounted to much anyway.” And the judge in my custody hearing - a woman - told me that my work as a musician wasn’t real work, that I would have to get a stable job, like stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s, if I wanted to look after my kids. The financial settlement was unfair bordering on punitive, as was the custody arrangement. By the time the dust settled, I was suffering from acute CPTSD.

Waking from this nightmare, I found myself faced with a choice: returning to a reduced freelancing scene with a body and nervous system that could no longer sustain the rigours and uncertainty of late nights and extensive travelling, of union fees 17% lower in real terms than they were in 2010 - or choosing something else.

While all this was happening in my private life, the politicians were running an ad campaign telling artists it was time to “retrain.” Without any funding help, of course.

You see what I mean? The refraction.

So I “retrained”, determined to find a more lucrative and socially appreciated vocation than playing the violin. For the first time in my life, I was no longer taking my instrument out and making music every day. The calluses on the tips of my fingers disappeared. And, probably as a result of the desk job I took on in order to receive universal credit, I developed shoulder tendinopathy.

I have been waiting for an MRI on the NHS for eight months. A generous friend gave me access to an osteopath, and the rehabilitation exercises she gave me have improved things drastically, but I am far from my normal range of motion. I am far from being pain-free.

So there I am, face down on Nico’s massage table, having deep tissue work on a shoulder that has been giving me pain for eight months - a slightly stuck T6 that gradually became a tendinopathy, “with complex presentation.” And, as often happens, the release of tension in the body also released the emotions that kept it there.

Specifically, my anger. My enormous rage and fury. A tsunami of revolt against the world, the culture, the man I was married to for 17 years, the system. The wail I stifled when I heard my custody sentence, right there in my shoulder tissue. The obscene rent I have to pay while my children’s father lives on in our five-bed family home. The emotionally stunted ideas he passes on to my beautiful boys. The exhaustion of holding down a part-time job while trying to build a coaching business with no investment to help me on my way.

All of it screaming in the fibres of muscle being stretched.

And then he moved his attention to my arms and my hands - the ones that had spent a lifetime honing this magic, the bringing of Schubert and Schnittke to life. That’s when the grief erupted.

By now I thought I had made peace with the fact that my life is no longer shaped by the rhythm of my music. But when he started rolling his fist inside my palm, digging up lumps of pain from between my fingers - I felt again the grief that over the last couple of years has occasionally turned up and turned me inside out. Like when a friend took me to the Wigmore Hall to hear the Belcea Quartet play Beethoven, and I sat there and wept for forty-five minutes, my whole body shaking, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and into my lap like heavy pearls. Heartbreak at having let go of the dream. Grief at never having reached the point in my career the trajectory was set for. The price I paid for putting him first. Maybe if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had to give up my music. Who knows. I try not to spend too much time thinking about the what-ifs.

The same wave that brought me to my knees in a violin dealer’s studio, when I thought I would have to sell my instrument to keep a roof over my head. He still remembers how I arrived at his house, took my violin out of its case, handed it to him, and crumpled to the floor. A heaving, sobbing pile of despair.

I would be lying if I said there weren’t moments through the divorce process where I really didn’t want to carry on living. But there is something precious about touching rock bottom - provided we can kick our way back up again, of course.

I now know it’s there. It is no longer an uncertainty. I know where it lies. And I know I can swim myself back to the surface.

Some other lessons were learned too. These days I sometimes joke that my two long-term partners were my greatest teachers. I learned to clarify and enforce (a big one for me) my boundaries; to walk away when apologies are not accompanied by a change in behaviour. To know, deep in my body, that no matter what situation I find myself in, I always have a choice. I feel it most days now.

And who knows. Maybe one of these days I will find a way of being financially secure enough that I can return to my beloved violin.

In the meantime, I’m learning to roll with the waves.

If you’re curious about my work, my free e-book The Next Right Step is a good place to start - a tiny practice for busy days.