This story was originally published on Medium on January 19, 2016. You can find the link to it here.

Say hello to my oldest friend, my clarinet.

He and I have an odd and trying relationship. Band was offered in my school when you entered the fourth grade and I wanted to learn drums. However, my family told me that as a girl, I wasn’t allowed to play something so masculine. Instead, they told me I could learn the flute or the clarinet. I reluctantly chose the clarinet.

I knew at the time that I wasn’t going to be a musician for my career, I just joined band because I thought it looked cool and I did have a love for music. I never had a natural talent for it like the other students, and it took me a while to reach the notes in the higher register key.

It was through my clarinet that I learned the meaning of discipline and practice. For the first few years of playing I hated practicing, and my mother began to grow irritated. As a fifth grader it seemed so boring to sit in front of a sheet of paper filled with dots and lines and play difficult parts over and over again until the notes came out smooth as silk.

But one day — after not practicing and making the bed for a whole week — my mother came home furious. I knew from the sound of the door slamming shut that she was out to get me. I retreated to my room and she stalked me there. She demanded to know if I practiced at all today, to which I timidly said, “No,” and she disciplined me.

An hour later I played Mary Had a Little Lamb with tears streaming down my cheeks, where it pooled into my mouth. My instrument felt tainted, corrupted.

You can see why my relationship with my clarinet is so trying. I felt like he was responsible for my suffering, even when I didn’t want him in the first place. But I continued with it, for whatever reason.

When I finished 7th grade, I was still attending band, but my family was preparing to move. Solectron — a company where my entire family to my grandfather, parents, uncles, grand uncle and grand aunt were employed — decided to outsource to China. The high rent of living in Silicon Valley quickly sapped my family, who struggled to make ends meet when neither of them had a college education or a good grasp of the English language. Through my uncle they found houses in Sacramento that boasted a bigger living space and cheaper rent. My uncle quickly moved there with his wife and children, and urged us to do the same. So, on almost every weekend during 7th grade, I was forced into the mini-van where I suffered the two hour drive to Sacramento, and proceeded to sulk as my family looked at model house after model house. Then to my relief and dismay, my family settled on a two story cookie cutter house.

It was during that summer when my family picked up and moved that I said goodbye to my beloved friends and left.

We had a giant U-haul for all of our things, but we still had to make two trips. I was finally given a room of my own, as was my brother. Everything in the house smelled like paint and of course the first things we got inside the house were our beds, and in the chaos of moving, I saw my clarinet case lying there in the middle of my new room. I figured one of my parents put it there to help me relax, but the sting of it being the ‘feminine instrument’ was still there.

In 8th grade I enrolled in my new middle school’s band program. Well, I think my mother enrolled me, she was pretty adamant that I continue playing my clarinet. “We payed $800 for it, so don’t waste it!” By then my depression levels rose to an all time high. The first day of school I spent hanging around the pillars near the cafeteria, far too shy and scared to go in there and eat. And I definitely was far too shy to talk to anyone. This quickly led to a minor eating disorder, and a social/people phobia that still resides in me as a perpetual shyness. Gone was the bubbly, smiling Jenn. I ended up finding some friends, but these friendships frayed and disappeared except for Stacy. She and I were the shy ones in the group and she became my best friend throughout that painful year. And in my new band I got my first real boyfriend.

But music didn’t help me cope as well anymore. I was still shy, and it didn’t feel like I was getting better at playing my instrument. I still wasn’t able to hit the higher notes. Concerts were rather ridiculous; I remember once we played Spongebob Squarepants because our band director was too afraid to have us compete.

In my freshman year I again was separated from the friends I made in middle school. This prompted my boyfriend to break up with me because he and I were going into separate high schools. (I’m not bitter about it, I’m actually glad he did it). Again I was enrolled in band but this time it had a different atmosphere. I met Ariana, and Maija, my two closest friends, Amaretta, Rae, Catherine and Kelsey, Sarah, and Steve, all of whom I spent lunch with near the band room. Ariana and I were able to progress into Marching Band, where our school competed with other schools in the state. This led to my first real argument with my family. To compete every one of us in band would have to travel on a school bus out of town during the weekends. My family — brainwashed by the news and scarred from the Vietnam War — believed that taking a step out of the house would lead to a very painful and agonizing death by either a kidnapper or a rapist. Of course, I found this ridiculous and prepared for battle.

I fought, I screamed,I slammed doors and succeeded in scaring my parents. What happened to timid, obedient Jenn? The argument escalated in my room, where my brain became wrapped up in the unfairness of the situation. Time after time, my parents said no to every social outing with friends, including birthdays, and phone calls were never private because my family would listen to the other line. In anger, desperation, and absolute pity, I cried.

My mother couldn’t believe I had stooped to something so low as tears, and they let me go to my first competition.

My sophomore year was filled with much merriment. We had an awesome band with very talented musicians. But the next year our seniors left, along with our leadership. In the middle of my junior year, I begged to be dropped from marching band. I couldn’t tolerate the jerks, couldn’t tolerate our band teacher who just yelled at these people but didn’t deal out punishment, and I couldn’t take how music, which was so vibrant and moving in my freshman year, had turned stale and gray.

I dropped out of band for the rest of my high school career, and didn’t return until college, where I saw some of my friends from middle school again. (Along with my ex). I joined college band for a semester and stopped. I’ve been without band for several years now, but I can still feel the pull of it. I still remember the tangy, dry taste of my reed, how the key to the high C gets stuck every now and then, or the loose screws around the keys to the A. I remember using our ears to work together as a band when we were about to hit a harmony or a single note together, and I found it so beautiful that we did this without saying a single word to each other.

Perhaps if the calling is loud enough or my soul wants it hard enough, I’ll go back to band. But for now my clarinet is going to sit on the shelf a little longer. I’ve contemplated selling him, but I wondered if I’d be selling away the memories I gathered. In the mean time I’ve set my sights on learning the violin and wondering if she will be a better friend to me.