What To Do When You Miss Your Cheater

I definitely relate to the startle response. So do a lot of people who’ve been through catastrophe. Anyone can be victimized and traumatized– from a homeless person to a classical music star to everyone in between. And though every survivor may be unique and individualistic, abusers are not and neither are shitty bystanders and victim-blamers. Consequently the trauma they induce can devastate people in the same general ways and sometimes exceeds the resources that victims have to process it.

After a workplace stalking incident, attempted sexual assault, criminal court ordeal and bully pile-up by the stalker’s flying monkeys, I couldn’t talk about anything related for several years without my voice shaking. I might feel perfectly calm and clear but, as soon as I opened my mouth to speak about anything with the slightest connection to sexual violence (basically everything important to me), the quaking would start.

It drove me nuts, gave me a complex and nixed any possibility of work that required public speaking but also gave me insights into someone I had met in college not long before the stalking drama. She was a former child soloist for the New York Phil who decided to quit music and go back to school. She was a brilliant student, basically brilliant at everything but you couldn’t help noticing that she had a chronic quaver in her voice. It made her seem like a bit of an duck, maybe even “bimbo-ish” and I got the feeling a lot of people underestimated her intelligence and strength. Their bloody loss. If anyone proved sensitivity isn’t a flaw, it was her.

One time she took me to the opera and I remember her sitting curled up in her balcony eating peanut brittle as if Lincoln Center was a second home to her. She was smiling, gasping and peeking at me to share her glee over the music just like a little kid. I’ve never seen anyone who loved music more than that in my life. It was infectious and I was in more awe witnessing her enjoyment than I was the music itself. But this made it seem like an even bigger mystery that she’d quit. Later she explained why and this also probably explained the quaver in her voice. It seems her parents had, over the years, stolen every penny she made as a child prodigy. She didn’t find out about it until she turned 18. Then her parents played victim.

Even if they hadn’t forced her into it, her family exploited and pimped her love for music and her natural talent for it for their own gain. The trauma of that massive betrayal apparently wed itself to the act of playing music if not to music itself and would cause flashbacks and flooding.

I realized her experience was equivalent to rape and later read a study saying as much– that “prodigying” children for adult gratification can cause the same degree of damage as sexually using a child for adult gratification. The fact that it was her parents doing this likely brought it closer to the bone for her than near stranger danger had for me. But one thing that was equivalent was the bystander bullying. Once when she mentioned that fellow Julliard alum referred to her as the “great has-been,” I was so stunned that I probably failed to say something supportive enough. But thank God she told me this because the whole stalking drama gave me a front row look at how sadistic some bystanders can be to injured people.

I feel so lucky that I wasn’t like those shitheads and not a reflexive victim-blamer because the punishment for it is built right in: precisely because misfortune can happen to anyone, I’m sure when their turns come, they end up instantly internalizing all the damage. Maybe that’s why she confided in me and I also feel lucky she did because the respect and empathy I felt for her may have been an added protection against internalizing the offense against me or the bystander blame or feelings of self consciousness over lingering trauma symptoms.

Okay so maybe I don’t play Sibelius solos like a god but I’m okay at a few things so, fuck it, I’ll draw a little vicarious self esteem by association:

Her voice shook, my voice shook. What of it? Maybe we weren’t born punching bags. Don’t drive a race car in a gravel pit.

I knew full well she didn’t deserve to be exploited so this helped me internalize that I didn’t either.

I knew full well the people who scoffed with glee over her traumatized reactions (I still see idiots in the classic music world sort of sneering about her as the poster child for “failed prodigy” in comment threads) were the lowest sort of losers, outright evil and had no excuse. So that summed up my detractors as well.

I was glad to hear that, about a decade or so later, she went back to playing music though mostly in small chamber ensembles and never on the level she once had. Maybe as time went on she was able to incrementally loosen the traumatic associations of her parents’ betrayal. At some point maybe she was able to play music again, just not in front of people. Then maybe in front of people, but not with a full orchestra and not in front of a big crowd. But, after listening to a recording of her playing a concert from a few years back, it’s clear she hadn’t lost any of her magic.

It’s the world’s loss that she’s opted for a quieter life but I suspect she probably still gets more joy out of an hour of music than the creeps who tormented her experience in their whole lives. I hope so. She deserves it, so let’s borrow from it and feel deserving too.