Chapter 35

It was the end for classical music in my life. 

I knew it and after speaking with some of my other friends who did private lessons for music, they seemed to be of the same sentiment. All that hard work for the RCM along with all those countless hours spent learning theory and history would be coming to an abrupt halt soon enough. As our time from high school came to an end, a majority of all the Asians who did classical music training privately were about to evolve into a very different caliber of identity. We were about to go through a transformation replacing music with STEM. Just as our parents had intended.

In university, there would be very little time for music for anyone who isn’t in that program. Since I was about to go into Biomedical Sciences as a major, I knew this change was coming. When I initially thought about this transformation, the first thing on my mind was how I would now perform with regards to my GPA. I wouldn’t be given access to the easy music courses that netted me such high grades in highschool. How will this play out in university where class sizes were bigger and we had much precedence on our collective GPAs? 

Most of the people in my science undergrad had some aspiration for med school or something of the like. A high GPA was now absolutely mandatory if you wanted a fighting chance at a professional school application. With music no longer filling in my day to day schedule, I got worried that I would now simply be a mediocre student with mediocre performance in all the prerequisite classes for Optometry school. 

Aside from the disappearance of music leaving my GPA at the hands of my science knowledge alone, I also felt like I would miss music beyond just my grades being boosted. While unquantifiable, I would say music gave me a type of solace towards all my troubles. Its constant presence in my life had remained a staple and with time, a means to normalize all my thoughts. Classical music was timeless. Its persistence even after hundreds of years is proof of that. I only knew it for my very limited lifespan and even then, this timeless quality rubbed off on me already. My problems just feel much smaller when you remember that the music you are listening to has been around since 1600 and the world hasn’t ended in all of its existence. 

Aside from the timeless quality of classical music itself, I also got solace from my personal journey through classical music. It’s also easy to see why I felt this attachment to music. I had gone through the ringer and survived classical music’s most toxic side, ending up on the other side as a more mature and self affirmed competent individual. Without music, I would be leaving behind all of the trials and tribulations I had gone through. Would I even be the same person anymore? Classical music gave me a sense of identity and that gave me a sense of stability. Without it and without it in my life defining me, how would I even manage? 

This was something I had thought about when applying to university for STEM. It was easy to find the solution for this too. Just don’t stop classical music in your life. In most universities, there were clubs and councils. In the University of Waterloo where I spent my undergrad, this was no different. There was a University Orchestra club that could be auditioned into and which took very little time out of the week to attend and be an active member for. I bet all of my classical music withdrawal on this club. I hoped that it would be enough for me. At the very least, it will allow me to slowly come to terms with my new identity which swayed away from that of a classical musician and was more centered on learning sciences. 

Like with my inevitable withdrawal from classical music, I tried to account for all the issues I may have when entering university before university. Even so, I was still kind of scared to go to university. The University of Waterloo was far from home for me. It was about an hour and a half away from Toronto and the entire landscape, people and culture would be different. While Toronto had been an urban center, Waterloo was more of a suburban town.

I wasn’t sure what kind of life I would lead in Waterloo or how well I would handle such a large change in scenery. My biggest worry? With a smaller town and a smaller world in university, my anxiety would go rampant. Previously, in Toronto, if I had to worry about one thing, it would only last a small amount of time because in a very short period, I would be on to something else I had to do. My anxiety could only get so much real estate in my head when I had so many activities going on. I recalled how, in the past, I would worry about a test I had for a science course in school for about an hour after the test was done only to be stopped in my train of thought by the need to rush to orchestra practice. Anxiety, when lost in a sea of other things going on in life, seemed small. But now that the sea was the size of a pond and my world had shrunk significantly, I shuddered at how much of a perfect environment anxiety had to thrive. Speaking of which, I knew the perfect place for anxiety to take root. 

Remember my imposter syndrome from my music competitions? Well, now I would be facing a very similar scenario. As I said before, I had thought about whether or not I would still be a student in good academic standing like I had been in high school without the music courses to boost my GPA. But the next question logical question beyond that was:

“What if I’m not exceptional in university? And what if I never was?”

What if high school was just a fluke? Anxiety had a strong presence and its most vile form was known as imposter syndrome. In my science undergrad, this seed of doubt would trigger anxiety way more severely than anything I’ve experienced before in music. It did not help that in university where the test grades and exam grades all counted towards something, I was now never on a break in the competition with my fellow peers. The classes were bigger and now the competition was much bigger too. Before, all I had to worry about in the music competition was the other people who signed up. This was maybe 5 or 10 people for Kiwanis or around 50 maximum for the RCM awards. Now my class size was easily a thousand or so. This meant that every little thing counted. You absolutely had to stand out. You needed a good GPA and when you weren’t in school, you needed to pad your resume to the brim with experiences and awards that showed you weren’t a slacker of some kind. Even when not in school or on summer break, there was always something you had to do. My schooling suddenly became a race for the best resume, GPA or any other aspect of the med school or professional school application process. 

While my living conditions, extracurriculars (especially with music) and general life outside of school had become smaller, in stark contrast my class sizes got bigger and so did all the threats to my future. The most immediate threats were those among the thousands of other students who stood at the highest end of the normal curve. These were the students with perfect GPAs and a resume that would seem like they were applying for godhood. These were the super elite type-A brainiacs I worried about the most though they were by no means the only ones standing in my way. My goal was for the Optometry school program at Waterloo. This was a program that was exclusively offered at my university and took in only 90 students a year from the entire country. That’s right, I wasn’t just competing with students and the brainiacs from Waterloo, I was also fighting with unknown students and unknown brainiacs from across all of Canada.

Generally in life, I think you can expect that the stakes will get higher and higher as you get older. While this increase in stakes does calm down at some point in the future, knowing this fact does nothing about the ups and downs you will experience. 

In the next few years in my undergraduate experience, I would go through the peaks of high expectations. I would find myself with the most stress I have ever experienced as I try to fight for a shot at my future career. I would experience the limits of my abilities and various amounts of failure along the way. 

It was around this time when I would develop a new personality. While it is not completely different from the high school version of me, it is definitely an extrapolation of a small and very toxic side of me. 

You can get a hint of how that version of me does things just by the new mantra I was about to adopt. It goes something like this. 

Suffering is Temporary. GPA is forever.