Throughout my life, and especially in my youth, I have struggled to achieve a sense of belonging. There were glimpses growing up but, only ever with adults, one at a time and only until I said something unexpected. Something unfiltered. Something that violated some unwritten rule about exactly how much transparency is too much. There were only a couple exceptions to this. People who stayed present regardless of how weird I was being. Those people were life lines.

It was in college that I experienced belonging within a group for the first time.

It wasn’t as though I magically got the hang of socializing. But I did find a magic connection point.

Every Monday morning, the music composition students would share the pieces we were working on with one another and our professor. If what we were working on had an element worth building on (and sometimes even if it didn’t, but we had previously demonstrated that we were capable of producing something worth building on) we would reward one another with a precious gift: critique. The feedback was substantive, specific and almost always about the essence of the piece. We trusted each other to work out the little details on our own.

My peers were sharing pieces of themselves in a way that my brain understood. I came to know that though Pat seemed like a laid back, easy going guy, his music revealed a deeply philosophical concern with life. James, while soft spoken in person, his music revealed a desire to make grand and gorgeous declarations. Matt was not just nerdy, his mathematical mind plotted out of this world courses through more time signatures and key signatures than anyone else dared to put in one piece and it was refreshingly innovative and playful yet sincere and calculated.

I’m not sure what my music revealed about me. It was overly serious, neurotic at times, deeply romantic and highly metaphorical, but it is not as though any of those characteristics are well kept secrets. Regardless I felt a group of people, for the first time, lean in instead of away.

Prior to all of this, the world had well established that I was beyond understanding and yet, here, in this space, through this medium, I was able to create something that drew people to me.

My sophomore year of college began bright and promising but things were starting to unravel for me. I, like most of my music major peers, had barely dipped my toe in my liberal education credits in my freshman year. I was excited to take a couple on non-music classes. But no matter how hard I worked to stay on top of my work, it felt meaningless to me. I couldn’t get my brain to engage.

I was connecting with peers in a whole new way. I even went to two different parties, where I was miserable and couldn’t understand the mindless frivolity, but…still. I thought I might be getting the hang of being a human.

I excelled where many of my peers (guitarists) did not, and this was in reading music. While the measure of success would certainly shift between freshman year (can you read music?) to senior year (is your improv slaying all the beasts?), for the time being, I was at the front of the pack. Somewhere between my eagerness to connect, the pathway being in producing material and the vehicle being feedback I let anyone in who seemed to lean in. I had no insight into the degree to which I was being taken advantage of. I thought that all adults wanted what was best for me. I didn’t realize that while I was using these relationships to soothe my own insecurities, others were doing the same thing. But really, these were gaps neither of us could fill for the other. Perhaps it would have been a harmless failure at humaning, if not for the power differential between us.

I figured that the more content I produced, the more connected I would feel. So there came a time when the only place you could reliably find me was in my Monday morning composition class.

But these connections weren’t working as I had planned. People started asking me questions about my work – the story or meaning behind the piece, my writing process etc. And then I would make the mistake of answering authentically which unintentionally but unavoidably severed the connection. I was, once again, too much. I learned to give non-answers that seemed to leave the relationship, shallow but intact. The world was not enough for me.

Rather than re-evaluating I just kept producing. I thought, the better I write, the better I play, the better I will feel. But I the music I wrote which drew people in most deeply, came from a place of deep depression. Which encouraged the overly serious and conflicted approach I was taking to life. And as I wasn’t connected with anyone independent of things I was producing, no one realized how far down I really was. I think they thought I was just becoming a better writer.

When I left the music department I had a lot of grief to process. My identity was solely that of “musician.” I found that my friends and I had really nothing to talk about, that we really only played together. And anyway, with my departure, there were openings in the ensembles I had played in so of course I understood they were readying for those auditions. It gutted me to see them play when I could not. The end of these relationships was unspoken but abrupt. And any goodwill I had earned in all of these shared moments simply vanished.

Of all the things I have processed since that monumental change of major, at the age of 38, I still desperately grieve the absence of that level of critique. And yes, I had an unhealthy attachment to it and yes, my memory of it is likely deeply romanticized. Point is, we often view criticism as an act that must, by definition, cause harm. And, I guess I am just saying, it can be a precious gift that says, “I believe in you so deeply and am so invested in your success that I want you to know…” For some of us, it is our love language.

And, feedback that lacks specificity and care is worse than no feedback at all. Or feedback, whose only specificity is targeted at surface level things of no real consequence given the cycle of iteration.

My struggle to feel authentic connection to other people is unlikely to be solved by anything other people do.

And the truth of the matter is that I have had the quality of feedback that has been a catalyst for transformation before and… I don’t know how to stop wanting more.