You are not a violinist who merely switched.

I didn't want to play viola.

The story goes that way back in the days of daytime TV talk shows, Phil Dohahue featured several Suzuki trained violin students on his show. I walked into the room, probably about 5 years old, and was mesmorized.

‘That’s what I want to do.’ I said.

No one in my family knew anything about violin lessons. They saw violins for sale in the Sears catalogue, but that was the extent of it. However, we had a piano at my grandmother’s house, and they convinced me to try that instead.

Even while I was taking piano lessons and learning very quickly, I still insisted on playing violin.

I started violin late — at nine years old — which in the world of string playing already felt like starting a race after everyone else had a head start. So, after having dropped the piano to stick with my true musical love, I started thinking about going to conservatory for college. Having already decided I’d go to Eastman, my teacher had a conversation with me at 15 and told me I'd get further on viola, because there was less competition. I heard it exactly how you'd expect a stubborn fifteen-year-old to hear it: you're not good enough at violin.

I was a bit crushed, but decided to give viola a shot. And after having auditioned for the youth orchestra and only still made the prep orchestra on violin, I wanted to see what would happen reauditioning on viola in the fall.

I re-auditioned and got 3rd chair in the viola section. Not too bad!

That was the first time I wasn't comparing. I was just listening.

It took years — real years, not a summer — to fully stop thinking of myself as someone who'd been redirected and to stop comparing myself to everyone else. What finally did it wasn't one breakthrough performance or one glowing lesson. It was the slow accumulation of moments where the viola simply worked for me, in a way I couldn't have predicted at fifteen: the alto voice sitting right in the middle of a string quartet, holding the harmony together. The parts nobody in the audience notices but every other player in the room depends on. The sound itself, which I'd never even really thought about, turning out to be the thing I actually wanted to make and that defines my playing.

I tell this story now not because it's tidy, but because it isn't. If you started on viola by choice, this may not be your story at all — and that's fine. But if you came to this instrument sideways, through someone else's suggestion, a scheduling accident, a "there's less competition over there," a version of yourself that had to be talked into it — I want you to hear this part clearly:

You are not a violinist who switched. You are absolutely good enough. Whatever got you here — a teacher's suggestion, a stubborn streak, a summer of practicing out of spite — none of that is the whole story, and none of it gets the final word. The viola doesn't care how you arrived. It only asks what you're willing to hear once you're actually here.

I got third chair that fall after having decided to prove someone wrong. It took me a lot longer to stop needing to, and in fact, I still am working on this event today.

This is the first post in an ongoing series about the real, unpolished stories behind a viola career — not the bio version. If this one landed for you, I'd love to hear your version of it