"No," Maya admitted. "I cannot stop thinking about everything that could go wrong."
Dr. Holloway closed the lid of the piano and turned to face her fully. "Let me tell you a story," he said. "About my first major concert."
Maya looked at him with surprise. In all the months they had worked together, Dr. Holloway had rarely talked about himself. She knew he had been a performer before becoming a teacher, but he never spoke about those days.
"I was twenty-three years old," Dr. Holloway began. "I had won a competition that gave me the chance to perform at a famous hall in Vienna. It was supposed to be the start of my career. Everyone said I was destined for greatness: the newspapers called me a prodigy; the critics said I would be one of the finest pianists of my generation." He paused, his eyes distant with memory. "The night of the concert, I was terrified, just like you are now. I could not eat, could not sleep, could not think about anything except all the ways I might fail. When I walked onto that stage and saw the audience—hundreds of faces staring up at me—I felt like I was going to be sick."
"What happened?" Maya asked.
"I sat down at the piano. I put my hands on the keys, and then... nothing. My mind went blank. I could not remember a single note of the piece I was supposed to play. I sat there for what felt like hours, though it was probably only a few seconds. The audience started to whisper; I could hear them wondering what was wrong with me." Dr. Holloway's voice was heavy with the weight of old pain. "I managed to start playing eventually, but I was not really there. I was somewhere else, trapped inside my own fear. I made mistakes I had never made before: I rushed through passages that should have been slow; I played loud when I should have played soft. By the time I finished, I knew my career was over before it had even begun."
Maya felt her heart ache for him. "That must have been terrible."
"It was," Dr. Holloway said. "And for many years, I blamed everyone but myself: I blamed the audience for making me nervous; I blamed the critics for putting too much pressure on me; I blamed my teachers for not preparing me properly. But eventually, I realized the truth."
"What was the truth?"
"That I had forgotten why I was there. I had gotten so caught up in what other people expected of me, in what success was supposed to look like, that I forgot about the only thing that mattered: the music. I was not on that stage to prove anything to anyone. I was there to share something beautiful with the world, and I let my fear take that away from me."
He looked at Maya with an intensity she had never seen before.
"I do not want that to happen to you. You have something I never had: you have a connection to the music that goes deeper than technique, deeper than training, deeper than anything I can teach you. When you play, you are not performing. You are telling the truth, and the truth does not care about nerves, or fear, or what the critics might say."