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Transcript
- I didn’t just pick up drumsticks because I wanted to learn a skill; I picked them up because my life had become so quiet, and I was terrified of the noise inside my own head. You know that feeling when you’ve been scrolling for too long? When your thumb moves on its own, swiping past tragedy, beauty, cats, and political outrage, until your brain feels like it’s been put through a blender set to puree? I was living in that static. For months, my days were a blur of emails, deadlines, and this constant, low-level hum of anxiety that I couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud. It was persistent. It was the sound of holding your breath underwater while everyone else is laughing on the surface. And I thought, if I could just find something tangible, something physical, something that required me to be here and now, maybe I could drown out the rest of it. So, last Tuesday, after work, I walked into a small studio in Brooklyn that smelled like rosin and old wood. There were no mirrors. No instructors shouting corrections. Just four kids sitting behind kits that looked like spaceships landed in a garage. I sat down, crossed my legs, and held two sticks that felt heavier than they should have. What’s the texture of this? I asked myself, not really knowing what I meant. But I knew I needed to feel it. Let’s dig into the velvet of this moment, because it matters. The instructor, a woman named Mara with silver hair tied back in a messy bun and a smile that didn’t judge my stiffness, told us to close our eyes. She said, 'Don’t think about the beat. Think about the space between the beats.' That sounded poetic, sure, but it also sounded impossible. How do you focus on nothing? How do you count silence? I tried. I hit the snare. It sounded like a dull thud, a mistake. I hit the hi-hat. It clinked weakly, like a coin dropping on carpet. I felt ridiculous. I felt like an imposter in my own body, these long limbs flailing around, trying to make music without making sense. But then, Mara started playing along. She didn’t play over me; she played under me. She created a bed of sound so rich and warm that my clumsy hits suddenly had somewhere to land. Suddenly, my bad rhythm wasn’t bad anymore; it was part of the conversation. I realized I wasn’t supposed to be perfect. I was supposed to be present. And there is a huge difference between being perfect and being present. One is about performance. The other is about survival. Tell me more about that feeling. Because once I stopped trying to read the sheet music in my head—because we weren’t even reading notes, just listening—I noticed something strange happening in my chest. The tightness I’d carried since October began to loosen. It wasn’t magic. It was physics. Sound is vibration. When you hit a drum, you are creating a wave that travels through the air, through the floor, through your bones. You are literally shaking yourself apart. And in that shaking, the knots I hadn’t even realized I was carrying started to unravel. I learned later that drumming triggers the release of endorphins and dopamine, but I didn’t need a study to tell me what I felt. I felt lighter. I felt louder. For years, I had been taught to shrink, to be polite, to keep my voice down, to take up less space. Drumming is the opposite of shrinking. It demands volume. It demands impact. It says, 'I am here, and I am going to make some noise.' And for a woman who has spent her career curating other people’s voices, finding my own was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. My arms hurt. My wrists burned. But my mind? My mind was finally, beautifully quiet. We need to talk about talent, because it’s the biggest lie we tell ourselves in the creative industries. We look at someone like Buddy Rich or Karen O, and we see genius. We don’t see the thousands of hours of boring, repetitive, frustrating practice. We don’t see the calluses forming on their fingers, the blisters popping, the moments they wanted to throw the sticks across the room. In those beginner classes, I watched women in their twenties, fifties, sixties. I watched a man who was clearly a CEO by day struggle to keep his left hand independent from his right. We were all equally terrible. And that was the gift. There was no one to compete with. There was no leaderboard. There was just the next note, and the next, and the next. I used to think that art required a certain kind of polish, a certain kind of inherent gift that you either had or you didn’t. But drumming taught me that art is mostly just showing up. It’s mostly just persistence. It’s mostly just deciding to hit the drum again, even when it sounds wrong. Especially when it sounds wrong. Because the wrong note is still a note. And it’s still yours. There’s a deeper layer to this, one that connects to something bigger than just stress relief. Rhythm is ancient. It’s primal. Before we had words, before we had written language, we had the heartbeat. We had the clap, the stomp, the drum. In many cultures, drumming is a communal act, a way of binding people together, of syncing their heartbeats to a shared pulse. In a world that increasingly isolates us, that keeps us behind screens and in separate rooms, coming together to make noise is an act of resistance. It’s a refusal to be silent. It’s a claim to joy. When I leave that studio, sweaty and exhausted, I feel connected to every human being who has ever tapped a foot or clapped their hands. I feel part of a lineage that stretches back thousands of years. And that connection, that sense of belonging, is worth more than any viral post or accolade. It grounds me. It reminds me that I am not alone in my chaos. That my rhythm might be different from yours, but it still fits into the song. So, here is my challenge to you. You don’t have to become a drummer. You don’t have to buy a kit or join a band. But I want you to find your own form of rhythmic release. Maybe it’s dancing in your kitchen while dinner cooks. Maybe it’s typing furiously in a notebook. Maybe it’s walking fast enough to hear your footsteps echo. Find the thing that makes you feel alive in your body. Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for it to be good. Just start. Listen to the space between the beats. Notice where you’re holding tension, and let it go. Let the noise out. Because the silence inside us can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be empty. It can be full of potential, full of power, full of a rhythm that is uniquely, unapologetically yours. And if you’re ready to try, there are studios everywhere. Or you can just start tapping on your table. Start today. Start now. Let’s see what happens when you stop hiding and start hitting back. Thank you for letting me into your ears today. Keep listening. Keep beating. I’ll see you next time.