Popular thinking separates pain into physical and mental states — two problems, two drugs, separate solutions. But art doesn’t work that way. Music grapples with heartbreak and loss but rarely with morning back ache. The line between physical and emotional pain is blurrier than we admit.

For almost three decades I lived with formidable pain in my wrist. I shattered it on my first — and last — hang gliding attempt at 13, abruptly ending what had been a serious trajectory as a classical pianist. When I looked down at my folded, flopping wrist after the crash, the instructors misread my streaming tears as physical pain. I was in a state of panic, fearing I’d never play again.

Through the botched work of a distracted ER doctor, the wrist was incorrectly set. A year later I still couldn’t play for more than half an hour at a time — which explains the anxious rushing of Animus. In a strange positive turn, the limitation opened a door into goth, rock, and alternative sound; worlds where not being able to practice Hanon exercises for hours on end was beside the point.

In 2012 I began losing control of my hand movements. X-rays revealed severe deformities pressing on the nerves. The doctors kept asking: aren’t you in a lot of pain? No — I genuinely felt nothing. Boston’s best orthopedic surgeons advised operating immediately before the malformed bones reached a critical point. Spine marrow extraction and the titanium plate shown above finally fixed the wrist. After a year of physical therapy, flexibility was almost back.

That’s not the interesting part. Over the decades of training myself to ignore the physical pain, I had inadvertently turned off the emotional bandwidth too. With the discomfort gone, waves of feeling returned — as if an entire spectrum of color had been shut off and was suddenly visible again. It turns out that suppressing physical sensation and suppressing emotional response are not as separate as we think. 2012 was a pin-hole aperture where the shadows of the past met the light of the future. Music is the x-ray that makes both visible at once. This blog is part of what came through it.