Dear seventh grade me,    

You don’t know me yet, but I know you. I know that you wanted to play an instrument in sixth grade, but for some odd reason that even I’m not sure of, you decided not to. Maybe it was out of doubt of your ability to learn new things or uncertainty about what instrument to play, but whatever it was, it must have been big if it was enough to discourage you from something that you had been genuinely interested in trying. I know that one of your best friends has been trying to convince you to start playing percussion a year late. “Join band,” she’s insisted. “It’ll be so much fun.” I know that you gave in to those words before you had any clue how much truth there was to them.

To try and convey your ignorance of the importance that band will soon hold for you in its entirety would be far beyond the ambit of this letter, but let me tell you, twelve-year old me- there are a lot of things that you don’t know yet.  You don’t know just how important the moment a fellow percussionist hands you your first pair of drumsticks will be. You don’t know about the calm, reassuring feeling that will come over you when you listen to the hollow sound of wood clicking together as you carry them around in your backpack, and you’d be surprised at how closely that feeling can resemble a reassuring tone and a pat on the back from a friend when anxiety starts to slowly eat away at you.

But I know.

I also know that on your first day of seventh grade, you’re going to approach the arts wing of the school carrying a sense of excitement and readiness to try something new- an optimistic confidence that will swell up inside of you like a balloon as you nervously stride through the band room doors for the first time. As you take your first real look at the instruments that you’re going to eventually learn how to play, you won’t know just how short lived that confidence is going to be before a feeling of inadequacy bursts it like a needle popping a balloon. You don’t know how angry you’re going to get at yourself for not being able to play like you’ve been practicing for a full year, or just how heavy all of these feelings will get as you pick each of them up and try to carry them all. You don’t know that instead of trying to shrug the heaviest weights- the inadequacy and the self doubt- off of your shoulders, you’re going to consider setting down the easiest things available- your excitement and willingness to try something you’ve never done before. Your belief in your ability to learn new talents. Your drumsticks. Believe me when I say that you’ll be doing your future self a huge favor by not doing that.

It might not seem like it at the moment, but eventually, it will no longer feel like someone is placing a burden of inadequacy onto your shoulders whenever you walk into the band room. Band will eventually become a sort of safe place for you to escape everything wrong in your life- so much so that anyone who knows you well will start to consider you a denizen of the percussion section. By the time you get to high school, you could approach the music wing of the building with Hurricane Anxious wreaking havoc in your mind, tearing your self confidence apart like a poorly built house, but the second you pass through the doors of the band room, a wave of calmness and security will wash over you- like you’ve reached the eye of the storm. The band room will eventually become the one place where you feel like you can be yourself, free from the judgement of others. It will be the one place that you feel at home, safe and sheltered from the storm of self doubt and anxiety that constantly rages in your mind. As you approach the percussion section, the sounds of your fellow bandmates practicing before class starts will all mingle into a discordant disaster- trumpets blasting sour notes, flutes attempting to get their instruments in tune, percussionists and non-percussionists alike dinking around on the drums and mallet instruments- and yet, despite the cacophony that surrounds you, you’ll be able to get so lost in your own playing that it will feel like the rest of the world is fading away until there’s nothing left in the universe except for you and the xylophone, letting the music flow gracefully through the air like a clear stream of water. You’ll feel any negativity in your mind just melt away as the familiar, comforting weight of the mallets in your hands keeps you grounded, letting them become extensions of you as they dance and glide across the bars of the instrument with all of the skill and finesse of an adroit ballerina. With time and practice and dedication, everything will start to come naturally to you. You will grow to love every second of it more than you’ve ever loved anything before, which is why you can’t just erroneously assume that you’ll never like it and give it up- not before you’ve really given it a chance.

When you’re going into your freshman year, you will be faced with an opportunity to join marching band. I strongly encourage you to take that opportunity. If and when you do decide to take that opportunity, you will once again be faced with challenges that you’ve never taken on before, but by that point, you would have already done that in concert band, so you will be more than capable of it. Trust me, everything will become second nature for you, just like it did in concert band. You’ll eventually find yourself striding down the hall as if you were at marching band practice, planting your heel with assertion and letting the rest of your foot roll down naturally in your old and worn out Converse, and you won’t even realize that you’re doing it until you hear someone ask; “Why do you walk like that?” Your passion for it will grow so much that it will soon start to feel like you’d be just as lost in life without carrying your drumsticks as you would be at marching band practice without carrying the little notebook that tells you exactly where to stand on the field. Simply put, joining marching band will turn out to be one of the greatest decisions you ever make. Both it and concert band will come to be the sources of your happiest moments. You will never know any feeling as great as the immense satisfaction of receiving a I at festival, the excitement when you finally figure out a tricky part of a song that you haven’t been able to play, the pride and accomplishment the first time the band director can confidently ask for a full run of the halftime show- and just think, you’d miss out on it all if you made the decision to set those drumsticks down.

I Implore you to have more faith in your ability to learn new talents. The more you work towards that now, the less you’ll have to later. I know it’s frustrating when everyone around you knows what they’re doing and you don’t, but you can’t let that discourage you. It’s okay that you’re not as good as they are- you don’t have as much experience as they do, so of course you’re not going to catch up to them right away. You can’t expect to just magically pick up on every skill you need to play percussion within the first month. That’s not how it works- it takes practice and patience and perseverance. I know that you have the dedication it takes to bear the weight of it all, as impossible as it may seem at times; I mean, come on, the spelling of your last name literally translates to “to carry” in French! It is your obligation to live up to what that says about you- one that you simply have to fulfill, if not for yourself, then for your future. I’ve seen you do it before, and trust me, I know that you will do it again. In order to be able to do it, though, you must first have the confidence to set down the feelings of self doubt and inadequacy that you’ve been trying to carry. Once you’ve done that, then you will be more than capable of giving band a shot- even if it feels like you aren’t.

You have no clue how strong you are, seventh grade me. You will be put through countless struggles to test that strength, but, believe it or not, none of it will be from band. Family may mistreat you, so-called friends may forget about you, homework may stress you out, but get this- none of the percussion instruments at the Junior High that are probably all just as old as you are would ever do that to you. You hear that? None of them- not the triangle that you held to sightread your very first song or the vibraphone that doesn’t resonate nearly as much as it should or even the broken shakers that spill plastic beads whenever they’re used, wherever in the auxiliary cabinet that they may be hiding right now. The thing that's great about these instruments, as old and run-down as they may be, is that even when people that promised to always stand by you decide to turn on you, they'll never do that. In times when it feels like all hope is lost, when you have nothing left to lose and no one left to turn to, band will be the one thing that you'll always have to fall back on- no matter what. It will never give up on you, so don't you dare give up on it. You don’t know what difficulties life is going to throw at you, but just know that you’re going to face it with all of the optimism and determination that you have within you, sometimes even more. You don’t realize just how much that will inspire your future self as they try to face their problems, but trust me- it will. Believe me when I say that you have band to thank for giving you the confidence to persevere just by being a place that you can feel calm in and surrounding you with people to make you feel a little less alone through it all. That is precisely why you can’t give it up- especially not when you’ve hardly given it a shot. You’re a dreamer and a doer; circumspection has never been in your nature, and the fact that something seems impossible has never stopped you from trying new things, so don’t let this be the one time that you deviate from your usual disposition. Please, I’m begging you, don’t set those sticks down- for both of us.

Sincerely;

Your future self, who most likely wouldn’t even be alive to write this if you had made the decision to set those drumsticks down