How do you tell stories to yourself about yourself?

For me, music is dreams that my family and friends and I create together. I have been walking from one dream to the next, without knowing where my next or final destination is.

My musical dreams give me life directions.  As a kid, I dreamed to be a musician and pianist, without knowing any difference between the two. As I continued to learn the piano, I aspired to be a pianist. It was perhaps the satisfaction of playing music, or the high marks I attained in music exams, that pushed me toward a musical career. During high school, I started teaching piano. I realized how fortunate I had been, nurtured in an encouraging environment and surrounded by a loving family, teachers and friends. I wanted to be a very good piano teacher, and I deemed it socially responsible to teach the right life and music matters to other people. A while later, when I was thinking about my future after college, a musicology professor told me I could pursue musicology. This seemed to go in line with my dream to be a leader in society, and to make this world a better place. I will be a knowledgeable and caring teacher, a music outreach leader, a cultural critic, and more. Dreams come one after another, and it seems that I will not eventually become a fixed object. Musical dreams always give me directions to somewhere. But what makes me dream? What makes my dreaming about music possible?

“I thank you [audience of the recital, mostly my family and friends] for making me who I am,” I wrote in the preface of my debut piano recital’s program booklet. It would be selfish not to acknowledge that the people and the environment around me influenced my identity greatly. But up to this moment, I cannot relinquish my ego, and I shall blatantly pronounce that I am the ultimate agent and an important partaker of my own life. My family and friends and I create all the musical dreams together. (Yes, it is in present tense.)

 Why did I write this essay? Why did I try to theorize my musical life in one page? A musical life is much more than that. Indeed, the messy brainstorming sheet is a far better reflection of my story! Without the artistic talent to reasonably reflect my musical life and its nuances by words, I hope the photo above will say something for me.