It's sitting in the corner, in its silver kevlar-made case, in my studio Colorado apartment right now. A majora's mask emblem, from the famous video game that shaped my childhood, adorns its head. It inspired a comment from one of my past student's husbands. "That cello case is badass." I've long since lost the consistent motivation to play that which it guards; a beautiful, wooden masterpiece of time spent by Robertson and Sons, an Ohio-based luthier guild that has passed on its techniques form father to son. A cello that I convinced my father to buy because I needed it for the Cello performance degree I was pursuing in my early 20s. A cello degree that had been created a year before i enrolled in a college that was better known, although famous, for its audio engineering and modern music program. I wanted to learn how to play cello and bring it to modern music. I learned so much, met so many amazing people, including those that Victor Wooten, one of the best bassists in the contemporary world, has based his books on. The Music Lesson.

In college, I had a magnificent teacher that cared about not only the artist I had the potential to become, but the person I was. However, Ive always had a meloncholy in my disposition since the 4th grade. Perhaps because of the sexual abuse to my sister, perhaps the divorce, the ostracization from family when I was 19, I was a deeply depressed 24 year old who had to put on a senior recital that year in order to graduate.

The college program was known for its jazz classes. Every instrumental musician that graduated had taken at least 2 years of Advanced Jazz Improvisation, passed it, and incorporated it into their senior year recital in an acceptable fashion. When I first enrolled in the mentioned classes, my senior year, after already performing a pop and classical based Junior recital; I was immediately challenged by the new chords and scales I had to learn on my instrument. An Advanced Jazz improvisation class was required for every student that graduated in performance from this college. My private lessons teacher hadn't mentioned it before I was forced to enroll. I had a deep kind of subsconious depression that kept me from truly rising to that goal, and I fell short of being able to improvise over the 2-5-1 progressions the class required, impeded by the fact that I had never delved into jazz before this occasion. 2 Months before my senior recital was to be performed, I was practicing in the Church congregation room, the room I had taught countless students of the cello discover the love that I had for the instrument. And I realized, as I practed the 50th 2-5-1 chord progression in a row, in a major key, that I wanted to kill myself. Truly, I wanted to end the suffering that a college degree, paying for rent, pleasing my liberal-elite parents and all the societal pressures included in the former were forcing upon me. Death seemed like a good answer, even when considering my devoted girlfriend waiting at home in my coackroach-ridden one-bedroom apartment.