Prompt: Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? The Tempest Beethoven's seventeenth piano sonata, The Tempest, is my lifeline. It describes an utterly devastating thunderstorm. The first movement begins to paint a volatile sky that shifts between dewy calm and rapid bursts of rainfall. The second is a slow, stirring patter of rain, utterly serene and contemplative. The torrential third movement is a harsh gust of wind. Throughout my life, I've had the feeling of being caught up in this type of tempest. I often compare it to the feeling of being strapped onto a bullet train, helplessly watching your life whisk by at hundreds of miles per hour as you are unable to reach out and grasp it. Things just seemed to happen to me without any reason or solution. Like a Kurt Vonnegut or Murakami character, fate dragged me around. Whenever I play this sonata, it is as if my entire being is reflected in the notes, as the storm of emotion resonates in perfect harmony with the music. This ingrained belief that I had no agency in life stems from the fact that my father has been depressed for as long as I can remember. From what I can gather, something horrible happened in his childhood. Exactly what? I can't say. Some sort of generational despair ultimately linked to my grandparents' hardships in postwar Korea. It entangles us all; my father, my brother, and me. Leeching from one generation into the next, my grandfather's plight is my father's struggle, and my father's pain has become mine to inherit. The insecurities I harbored propagated like weeds over the years and bore rotten fruit. Thoughts that would often surface included: - I am the caretaker of my own parent - I have no family - I can't trust anyone but myself And the most difficult to uproot: - I have no control over what happens to me I became a workaholic. In a sense, it was a tiny means of control- my only foothold toward stability. If I had free time, I would be forced to confront the eerily quiet house and solo freezer meals, the breakdowns and fighting, and the gaping loneliness that practically gnawed at my insides. So, I worked until I was too exhausted to feel sorry for myself. I lost ten pounds due to stress in a few weeks. I imagine I would have ended up working to death, grasping for an ounce of agency, if not for the following series of events. Now begins the first movement. I (Largo-Allegro)- I remember how you buttoned my coat: My mom is also a chronic workaholic who, like my father, was absent for most of my early life. She would clock in at seven and come home at nine (sometimes later), absolutely exhausted. That night was another late night. My mom had come home from work a short while ago to me quietly sobbing, curled up in a big red chair. I was practically swimming in a fuzzy button-up coat that felt like a hug. My dad had been gone since five pm the previous day. I know all too well that addiction goes hand and hand with depression, and my dad was a gambler. It had been more than twenty-five hours since he left. Twenty-five hours since he had likely eaten or slept. Twenty-five hours that I was worried he might not come back. My mom held me in her arms for the first time in a long time. "I know. I am so sorry." She sat me up and buttoned the fuzzy coat. "This is not how I wanted your life to be." Even though her heart was breaking, she held me until I fell asleep. To this day, this is the most vivid impression I have of true love and consideration. Intermission- Neuroscience: Along with work and music, neuroscience has been integral to my life. The brain is the control center, yet we know shockingly little about how it actually works. It's like an entity unto itself, a kaleidoscope of complex molecular interactions that fascinate me. Our whole means of interpreting the world- of existing- can be violently derailed with a single pill. And with a very ill father, my medicine cabinet was stuffed with many. Xanax Prozac Wellbutrin Haldol Abilify Gabapentin Adderall Zoloft I examined every drug in scathing detail, looking for molecular mechanisms of action, biomarkers of efficacy, anything that would help me unravel what I saw as the central problem in my life: depression. III (Allegretto)- "When the ground fell out from under me": Life seldom happens in the perfect order, and for me, the third movement came before the second. I will now tell you the story of when my life fell apart. One day, I woke up to screaming that would make all the hairs on my neck stand. My mom just learned how much money my dad had lost to his addiction. I don't want to get into the details of how it got this bad, more so what happened because of it. After hours of screaming and words that I will never forget, the guilt settled over my dad like a swarm of locusts. By that evening, my father was a broken man. I remember the crushing fear that my father would seriously harm himself or leave us. I looked at my mom's eyes as she wept. As I observed my broken family, something inside of me snapped. The fear and hopelessness evaporated almost instantaneously. Now, I was angry. Angry at the possibility of being left, angry that I had to care for my parents, angry that any of this happened in the first place. I was sick of just letting things happen to me, sick of being on that bullet train. A hug is a small act, but my father shook violently as I threw what felt like all my being onto him. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, that moment comes back to me vividly. This was the clap of thunder, the smashing of rain against the window, the torrential wind knocking at the door. II (Adagio)- And Again, I am Whole The chaos of that night was followed by the misty calm of the morning. Things had settled down quite a bit. In the following weeks, the serenity of the second movement enveloped my personal life. My dad agreed to go to therapy, quit gambling, and became present in my life again. My mom stopped working as much, and I had, for the first time, a whole family. The rainwater cleansed the earth beneath our home and breathed new life into a decaying family. No longer would I idly watch by as my life unfolded. No longer could I only rely on myself. I am slowly working towards finding my footing on this earth, one press of a key, one firing of a synapse at a time. I have pruned and hacked at that horrid lack of agency that I allowed to grow in my mind for so many years. When I return to the piano or the study of antidepressants, I remember these moments that changed my life. I let them stay for a while, not to control me but to remind me of my past. I know now that I will build a life that is beautiful and whole, but no longer will I be alone in doing it.
