At 28 I forgot life without pain.

When we strive to achieve certain goals which aren’t and have never been realistic, we end up chasing dreams at the genuine cost of our lives. And when the truth about real-life challenges in our profession remains broadly unknown and is thus not shared with us during our education, we end up unwittingly sabotaging our life’s work and dreams by acting out of line with reality. And when everyone around seems to be doing better, we feel lonely with our struggles and guilty for allowing ourselves to fall behind all the others. And when we feel lonely and guilty, we accept pain as punishment to endure, instead of searching for ways to heal and improve. And that makes life awful.

And despite living an awful life, we are still expecting ourselves to keep playing, astonish with our artistry, and smile.

This blog post took me months to process and write.

I hope that in sharing my story I can help others to seek hope and help they deserve, and to feel supported, included, and accepted.

Terrified by the vulnerability this requires, I present to you:

At 28, I forgot life without pain.

Did you know that 80% of musicians experience physical injuries? Until recently, I didn’t.

It’s just a couple months ago that I came across these rather disturbing statistics:

“8 in 10 musicians will experience an injury that interrupts their playing at some point in their career.
Of those, only 2 will make a full recovery.
One will leave music entirely due to pain and injury.
And 5 will continue on to have some kind of chronic pain or recurrent flare-ups.”

(Quoted after Cody Weisbach, physiotherapist specialising in working with musicians, author of the “Musician’s Maintenance” program.)

I’ve been uneasy ever since I read it. Because for a long time, I had been feeling rather lonely in my experience of physical discomfort. It’s been nothing outrageously bad, really; at the same time, it seems just sad that anyone should hurt for a long time. What added insult to (yes, ironically) injury is the fact that the music industry doesn’t exactly encourage talking about it. So for a while, I was rather secretive about a daily truth in my life:

That at 28, I forgot life without pain.

I know that this might sound like the opening of an indulgently depressive rant. However, I mean it in earnest, and want to talk about something I believe to be very important - the experience of physical pain among musicians.

The story behid it is very simple:

At the beginning of my studies, I had a stupid accident. Running in high heels is rarely a good idea, but sprinting for your life to catch the last late night bus home while carrying lots of bulky luggage can be outright dangerous. It happened quickly: I ran, I fell, I softened the fall with my right arm. Some skin was scraped, many tears were shed, nothing serious seems to have happened at first (apart from missing the bloody bus and having to take a cab. A nightmare for broke 20 years olds). My partner helped me get home, took care of me. All was good.

Until the next day, when I realised I couldn’t do anything with my arm. Intense pain would prevent me from doing any task or movement; no playing, no writing, cooking and eating with left arm only. But that’s understandable for a few days after an injury, after all healing takes time for sore muscles. However, a week has passed, and it was not getting any better. Over time, doctors’ appointments proved disastrously unhelpful - for them, an X-ray showing bones intact was enough to argue that I was well.

Fast forward, it took me months of desperate searching for alternative methods to finally get back to form - or at least get well enough to keep going with my music studies. I had overdue exams to play and write, and time pressure wasn’t making things easier, despite genuine care and understanding I received from my faculty headmasters. And although my situation was far from tragic, and despite all the compassion and support that seemed to surround me, I knew it couldn’t last forever and I need to resume the regular rhythm of tasks possibly soon.

So I got back to playing and to living my normal life. Or so it seemed from the outside; because I could still feel something was off with my right arm and shoulder. My elbow would hurt, hand be uncomfortable, and shoulder stiff. There was an unbearably annoying knot of pain between the shoulderblade and the spine which no one and nothing succeeded at relaxing. Mind that, it didn’t stop me from doing anything in the everyday. Only once in a while, when I was tired or stressed, I would hectically throw myself at any method I could think of to diminish the increased pain behind that stupid shoulderblade. Other than that, I just had to change a couple of habits.

So since one side of my back and arm always was in a mild, annoying pain, I learned to consistently sleep on the other side. To chew my food in the other cheek. To carry my purse on the other shoulder. To drag the suitcase with the other arm. Minor adjustments, nothing big.

Then I developed migraines flaring up on the side of my head I had to sleep on. My teeth started misaligning, throwing to trash 10 years of braces, and causing pain. One day a physiotherapist told me that I should re-learn walking, because my body’s moving irregularly. I didn’t think much of it - come on, I’m an adult, I’m walking just fine every day, who has time for such things?! And finally, my movement and walking patterns have become asymmetric enough that I broke my foot by simply walking down the stairs.

And all that while pursuing music studies, working as a musician in a different city, and trying to start establishing a music freelancing career.

If this event was to be my wake-up call,

then it was spread thin into an infrasound rumble of a lengthy warning - it took me almost a year to heal the foot, a shocking experience for a young and healthy person I thought I was. A year of wondering why my body is not responding to the therapy as it should. A year of painstaking process of learning and growing awareness. Of realising that by then, my body was a messy stack of ever so slightly malfunctioning body parts with conflicting interests, each trying to compensate for its shortcomings with the stamina of neighbouring organs and tissues. Nothing really worked as it should, but it didn’t matter as long as I could keep playing, forcing the mismatched parts together into a unity with the strength of my will and the power of adrenaline.

During that time, I played concerts internationally, did a bunch of recordings, and started a business.

In the process of trying to reestablish order amongst all this mess, I learned a lot about physiology, the motorics of a musician’s body, inflammation, healing, physiotherapy, psychotherapy, stress reduction, profession-related disease prevention etc. And on every step of acquiring this knowledge, I was confronted with the incredulous question from doctors and specialists: how come musicians don’t know about all this?

Precisely.

How come we don’t know about all this?

The problem is not a lack of access to resources, such a statement couldn’t be further from truth in the online era in which we’re living. It is also becoming standard for music universities and academies worldwide to implement health and safety measures and provide professional support of psychologists and physiotherapists, often on site. However, the problem is deeply rooted in our collective psyche; if a subject is considered taboo, one is unlikely to openly seek advice, and unfortunately lone research is always inevitably less effective than group effort.

To put it bluntly, a single person will always uncover far fewer resources than if they have the support and engagement of their environment - and that is of course only possible if the feelings of shame don’t stop them from trying any research altogether. If you cannot rely on the advice of more experienced or more knowledgable people around you, you’re unlikely to find out all the answers to your questions, and a lot of the (already limited) found material can be of doubtful quality without you realising.

Anachronistic ideas which romanticise suffering and maintain the notion that a figment of artistic genius will fully provide for your life’s musical career are blatantly toxic, yet still thriving nowadays. Assuming that if divine inspiration is not enough for you to “make it” (because, for example, you find yourself in need of medication, specialist massage, or even rest) then you’re not “divine” enough to be a worthy artist, is a surprisingly common view in the artistic industry - although often held subconsciously. When we strive to achieve certain goals which aren’t and have never been realistic, we end up chasing dreams at the genuine cost of our lives. And when the truth remains broadly unknown and is thus not shared with us during our education, we end up unwittingly sabotaging our life’s work and dreams by acting out of line with reality. And when everyone around seems to be doing better, we feel lonely with our struggles and guilty for allowing ourselves to fall behind all the others. And when we feel lonely and guilty, we accept pain as punishment to endure, instead of searching for ways to heal and improve. And that makes life awful.

And despite living an awful life, we are still expecting ourselves to keep playing, astonish with our artistry, and smile.

3.06.2024

***

Writing things down puts thoughts in order.

But order and precision make the punch harder.

I have known for a while that something is off, but as long as I haven’t tried expressing it explicitly, I couldn’t point my finger to what bothers me.

After I wrote the passage above the asterisks, I was not able to continue writing this text for a quarter of a year. Seeing my own testimony organised in a concise chain of causes and results honestly intimidated me with its gloom. But this is precisely why I need to share this story: to spread awareness, to help those who suffer feel understood, noticed and empowered to rid themselves of the feelings of guilt and loneliness. If truly “the more you know, the less you fear”, then opening up about such experiences will help us find strength in vulnerability and trust in companionship, despite the hardships of our competitive, demanding and stressful industry.

I hate vulnerability.

I fear it. I would rather be perfect and invincible. But this is and will always be impossible. What I can do instead is start talking a little about what scares me, so that the fear gradually loses its power over my life and conscience. Does physical pain make me worse? No, neither it does make the statistical 80% of musicians who experience pain in their careers.

What physical pain means is that we are working in a physically demanding profession and have not been equipped with tools and methods to prevent or heal it. Education and access to quality information are a privilege; it is not your fault if you haven’t been taught about this. And if all this makes you feel shy or embarrassed or overwhelmed, the following is a good starting point:

The “normal” amount of pain is no pain at all.

At 29, having found excellent physiotherapists and a great orthopedist who supervises my work-related health, I am humbled and happy to finally be living a “normal” life.

Thank you for taking your time to read it.

If you find value in it, please consider forwarding this text to whoever you think might benefit from reading it too.