My story starts when I was younger. My whole life has been influenced by music and for the most part I loved music. I love to listen to, dance to, and create music. Music helped me to find my identity and who I am. Nowadays, I am grateful for music: I enjoy playing and going to band with all my friends, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I hated making music.

My parents wanted me to start playing the piano at a young age. My older sister started playing when she went into kindergarten and when I was old enough to start school I started taking piano lessons too. I hated playing the piano, but my parents said it would be good for me, so I did. I guess it has proved helpful but I definitely didn't think that when I was still taking lessons.
When the time came that I could join the school band, I did. I chose to play the trombone like my mother and sister do. I played all through middle school. There were never more than two people in my section, including me, and none of them played the instrument for more than a year. By 8th grade our band wasn’t really a band and the whole COVID pandemic didn’t help. I was the only trombonist in the whole 7th & 8th grade band.

Through my middle school career I had three close friends and that was it. I went to a small school with about 50 kids in my whole grade. I was always very quiet and didn’t talk to people much. I always kept to myself. To be fair, though, it’s hard to make new friends when you’ve been in school with the same people since kindergarten. My friends and I were all in band class together. But there were very few kids in the band. So, as you can imagine I wasn’t at all ready for what the band would be like in high school.

When the time came for me to go to high school, I did not want to join the band. I hadn’t enjoyed band in middle school and none of my friends were going to continue playing in high school. And at the beginning of the year we did marching band, which meant I had to go to band camp before school started. And it wasn’t fun. Technically I wasn’t alone because my sister was also in the band. But she was a senior and would mostly just hangout with her friends. I also knew someone in my section who was a year older than me, but she also mostly just hung out with other friends too. So that meant I was all alone.

After the first game I realized that I actually thought it was fun. I started feeling better about myself and feeling like I could be myself. I realized when talking to people that I am not alone. I have a lot of my classes with fellow band kids and I made a new friend from band who is also in my science class. We started to hang out more and I met some of her friends and now I feel like I am really part of the group, a part of the band, and not just someone looking on from the sidelines.

When I joined the band I realized that I was not alone. I realized that there are other people who also feel the same way as I do and like doing the same things as well. No matter how antisocial and introverted you may be, being a part of something bigger really shows you how you don’t have to go through life alone. People who are like you can help you figure out who you are and who you want to be.

© Cara. All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.