I get asked a lot why I decided to go into music. It’s just about the only aspect of my high school decision-making that anyone is interested in; no one ever asks me why I wore a tiara to senior prom, for example, or why I marked up the grammatical errors in a boy’s love letter and returned it¹, or why I sat in the back of Spanish class and taught myself ASL² instead of, you know, learning Spanish.

No, people just want to know what made me go for a piano performance degree. What answer you get from me depends on what particular mood I’m in at any given point, because there are many reasons, and they’re all true. (“Because I wanted to, and the logic of a teenager is inscrutable” is the catch-all answer to that and all the above questions, but no one wants to hear that.)

One day my AP Music Theory teacher made a comment that most definitely planted a particular seed. As show-off nerdy high schoolers who play the piano are wont to do, I arrived early for class one day and (without permission, of course) sat myself down at the digital piano to tear loudly through the third movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata.

“I played that when I was your age,” my teacher said fondly. Then she matter-of-factly added, “I stopped taking lessons when I went to college—I think high school was the best I ever played the piano.”

A new fear unlocked in my still-developing teenage shithead brain.

It had not occurred to me that, at that moment with my whole life ahead of me, I could potentially already be at my peak and only get worse from there. I could not think of anything worse. And just so we’re all clear, I’m saying that I was scared of ending up like the whip-smart teacher I admired very much who had a stable, fulfilling job in music who, by the way, was still really good at playing the piano. (This is why I cannot believe that we let teenagers make major life decisions.)

It didn’t help that I went to the type of high school that was filled with mid-level musical prodigies, some of whose names were spoken reverentially by the Bay Area’s most well-respected pedagogues, and every year I watched them graduate and march off to be bioengineering majors at MIT and other such disappointments.

I was a kid afflicted with the specific type of mental confusion that saw this kind of thing (former child musicians making decisions to contribute positively to humankind) as a loss. I would not throw away my artistic talent, I decided, and so when it came time to pick the colleges and programs I’d apply to that would (I was told) determine the course of my career, it did not remotely occur to me to pick anything in even the distant vicinity of STEM. This, despite the fact that I’d gotten into my high school in the first place on the strength of having scored so stratospherically high on the math entrance exam that I was awarded what one of my friends later told me was “the scholarship they only give to geniuses.” (You cannot believe how tempted I am to get business cards printed with “Sharon Su, failed genius.”)

Nope, it was the humanities or bust for me!

I was so determined not to peak in high school that I’ve been running flat out ever since, terrified of every past year being my peak, and relieved every time that’s not the case. It’s maybe not the healthiest way to live, but it at least allows me to be kind of smug, which sounds bad but, you have to understand, is all I have sometimes.

If absolutely nothing else, you see, I know for a fact that I didn’t peak in high school, nor college, and that makes me feel better about my choices. Sometimes when I see my old music classmates living normal lives with normal jobs, looking perfectly fulfilled with friends and family and general stability, unbothered by the torment of maintaining an artistic career and still playing music casually for fun, a small gremlin in my brain—the one that never matured past high school and can’t consider that maybe others have figured out something I haven’t—goes, “Well, thank goodness that isn’t my life!”

I am going to keep going like this until I finally experience contentment or die, whichever comes first.

It only occurred to me the other day that I’ve spent years so focused on not peaking in high school re: playing piano that I didn’t notice I’ve been peaking at…well, everything else.

My high school self would be aghast at how bad I am at some things now. I kind of suck at math and…I can’t draw anymore? Who gets worse at DRAWING?!? How is that even possible? I was so deep in my anxiety over peaking at the piano that I didn’t notice I’d peaked at being able to draw things. I’d assumed that all the things I could do easily in high school—drawing human figures, discussing political issues in Spanish, delivering mean roundhouse kicks—were just things that would always stick with me.

By opting to keep my life at the piano, my younger self chose (unwittingly) to peak at everything in my life that wasn’t the piano. (RIP my math skills.)

Turns out, I peaked in high school after all, and you know what? I’m okay! I guess we all peak with the different things we do—not just in high school, but throughout our lives, and we have no way of knowing it’s happened until it’s too late.

¹ Not that it makes it better, but here’s my flimsy defense: it was not a love letter to me, but to a friend who deputized me to help with the cruelty of her response. I am, however, the one who agreed and physically marked up the letter, and was told that it did make him cry, so.

² I no longer know ASL.

Piece I’ve Been Reading

Leah Broad: Why we should care about ChatGPT's accuracy gap (Songs of Sunrise)

This accuracy gap was consistent across everything I asked. When I asked for a list of five compositions written about or during World War II, again it correctly gave me a list of five works by men. But when I asked it for five compositions written about or during WWII by women of colour, every piece it listed was incorrect for different reasons.

As someone who has been dismayed at the inaccuracy in AI summaries about marginalized composers, I find Leah Broad's deep dive both validating and extremely concerning. If nothing else, please do not rely on ChatGPT for specialized research!

Jordan Ritter Conn: Inside the Hidden Network of Resistance in Minneapolis (The Ringer)

TV news and social media feeds broadcast images of masked agents trying to detain immigrants, while protesters screamed through tear gas for them to stop. They showed chaos and danger, confrontation and violence. They didn’t show what I found to be a profoundly powerful network of resistance—ordinary people uniting to protect, shelter, and care for their neighbors.

I was deeply moved by this piece, which didn't restore my faith in humanity so much as it deepened it; I know I never shut up about Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built in Hell, but it continues to be relevant and ordinary people's responses to horrible events continue to prove her thesis correct.

Adam Serwer: Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong (The Atlantic)

McFarland’s remarks reminded me of something Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, had written: “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The “conditions and terrors” of immigrants’ “broken homelands” weren’t being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

This, obviously, pairs well with the previous article and shows exactly how the federal leaders sending ICE agents into cities (not just Minneapolis) fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the communities and people there.

Mark Sundeen: They Were Tracking Threatened Turtles. They Found Human Bones Instead. (Outside Online)

Of the turtles and the bodies in the desert, the biologist Tim Shields had told me: “I think of the contrast between these ancient, highly attuned desert organisms fully dialed into how to survive, and then these crazy monkeys running around offing each other. Tortoises are completely sane, because they can’t survive without being solely focused on it. We’re so pampered with resources, and we just piss things away.”

This is a piece about desert tortoises and the specific type of weirdo one has to be to track them. It is also a piece about how people keep murdering each other and dumping bodies in the desert. The connections between the two and the total futility of it all are, like the desert itself, strangely beautiful.

Jim Yardley: Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet (New York Times)

He did not initially tell his wife about the extent of the work, possibly because he was tying a rope around the chest of his youngest son, Davide, then 12, and lowering him to dig in small, darkened openings.

“I made sure to tell him not to tell his mama,” he said.

His wife, Anna Maria Sanò, soon became suspicious. “We had all these dirty clothes, every day,” she said. “I didn’t understand what was going on.”

I laughed so much at this article (which is several years old, but which I only recently encountered). There's something so funny about a man who just wants to live his dream (opening a humble trattoria) and who keeps living someone else's dream instead (discovering thousands of years of history in an amazing archaeological dig). Please, someone give this man his trattoria.

Oh my God how I do hate species & varieties

You just have to read this very short piece, which features real complaints Charles Darwin wrote in his letters. Every single one makes me feel an incredible kinship with him.