“Connection”
Connection is one single thing. If you are able to connect with your mother, you can connect with your dog. If you can connect with that, then you can connect with everything.
This conviction, which today I can formulate with clarity, was not always conscious. It was learned slowly, through experience, absence, observation, and longing.
In my early years, I felt ignored by my parents because they were deeply connected to each other. I could see that they did not connect with me in that way. My sisters, who were fifteen years older than me, also knew how to connect very well; they understood each other perfectly. I wondered what it was that united them, something I interpreted with jealousy, because I wanted it too and did not have it. I always felt excluded from the conversation, as if connection were a language everyone spoke fluently except me.
My mother, without ever giving me a formal lesson on the subject, perceived my frustration and decided to teach me in a much subtler way: through practice, not explanation. She used to say:
“Look me in the eyes when you speak to me, because the eyes also speak, not only the mouth.”
“Stand up straight when you address another person, because your arms, your hands, and the expression on your face are different elements that want to express themselves together, and you must be ready to let them communicate.”
“Bring your mind here when we are talking, because if you are thinking about the walk you are going to take later with your sister, then we will not be able to communicate; we will only be making agreements, which is much more boring than communicating.”
Over time, these indications became embodied knowledge rather than rules. Later on, she began to resume conversations she had started with me and left unfinished, suddenly picking them up again even days later, so that we could create complicity and continuity. By doing so, she wrapped me into that connection with everything, and that was how she taught me to connect with everything. Little by little, I began to feel part of her relationship with my father and my older sisters, no longer as an observer, but as a participant.
However, when I turned eighteen and the time came to go to university, connection became elusive once again. I did not know what to study. It was not easy for me to choose a job, a professional role that I would like and to which I could dedicate myself fully, while at the same time feeling fulfilled. I was seeking to feel connected to a career, and I could not find it. But who really does? You who are reading this: do you truly feel connected to your work?
Because I had parents who had achieved that level of vocational integration, I felt deeply confused when the moment came to choose a path. Until then, I had never known anything that interested me enough to immerse myself in it completely and enjoy it fully. I spent my entire adolescence feeling that I would never find meaning for my life, that I would live an empty life, incapable of falling in love with my work.
My indecision became a serious problem. In an attempt to resolve it, I tried all kinds of workshops: dance, painting, hairdressing, cooking, various sports, sewing. I even volunteered at an animal breeding farm, until I ended up feeling repulsed by horse manure and overwhelmed by my multiple allergies to dust and animal hair, and finally hated the idea of becoming a veterinarian. I went through everything like that: seeing blood made me faint; I liked books and history, but becoming a psychologist, lawyer, anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philosopher seemed far too boring to me.
However, paradoxically, throughout all those years of vocational crisis, there was one constant in my life. I was always collaborating with the music teacher at the school where I studied. She directed the women’s orchestra and the choir, and she also coordinated biblical reading groups that always included music. At fifteen, I began coordinating the children’s biblical group; later I was assigned the guitar workshop, and afterward I led the Taizé gatherings. Even so, it never occurred to me that I could dedicate myself to this. Although my sister was a teacher, I always felt that there was something more, something that would move me even more deeply.
Then the violin appeared.
Before entering the most intimate dimension of that encounter, it is important to contextualize the environment I entered. When I began studying the violin, I did so without yet being aware of the complex and, in some cases, toxic dynamics that coexist within the world of music.
In the musical world, extremes coexist. There are deeply beautiful, sensitive, evolved people, connected to the subtle and the invisible: souls capable of translating emotions that cannot be expressed in words. But in that same world, narcissistic structures can also develop, sometimes silently and unconsciously, other times in an evident way. The most complex part is that many of the people who embody them are not fully aware of it. They have spent years navigating highly competitive and dehumanized environments, where personal value became tied to performance, external gaze, and applause. In these cases, narcissism is not born from malice, but from unconsciousness.
Here a necessary distinction must be made. The development of narcissism is not inherent to music nor an inevitable consequence of artistic practice. However, the musician who develops narcissistic traits often does so slowly and almost imperceptibly, as a response to certain environmental dynamics and unresolved personal histories. In those cases, the process begins with endless hours of solitary practice. In the midst of repeating scales and solos, not only to master the instrument, but to pursue a promise: to be seen, to be recognized, to be admired. Applause then becomes emotional nourishment. It is no longer just celebration; it becomes validation of existence. In the absence of that external reflection, some come to experience the sensation of fading away.
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Constant exposure reinforces this structure: stages, lights, interviews, awards, praise, comparisons, competitions. The musician becomes visible, elevated, applauded again and again, and little by little begins to become confused. They may come to believe that their talent makes them superior, when in reality it has made them dependent. External recognition replaces internal contact. Ovations cover ancient wounds that were never addressed.
In that world, the ego strengthens as a survival mechanism. Narcissism disguises itself as confidence, charisma, or genius, but behind it there is often a deep fragility: fear of not being enough, terror of silence, inability to exist without being reflected in the eyes of others. That is why constant applause becomes necessary: because without it, a void appears that they do not know how to inhabit.
Thus, the same space that can be a channel toward the divine and the subtle can also become a distorted mirror. If the musician does not awaken, they may forget that music was not born to elevate them, nor to elevate the ego, but to serve as a bridge toward connection, to remember connection. And that is where the medium observes: it does not judge, but it sees. It sees that narcissism in music is not an isolated trait, but the symptom of a system that confuses brilliance with light, fame with consciousness, and applause with love.
In my case, from a very early age everything I did produced great pleasure and joy, because I had learned to connect with what I was doing. I learned not to do anything in life out of obligation, to disappear from places where I did not feel involved, because I could not connect; and when I could not connect, my performance dropped drastically in any activity undertaken without intention.
I learned from my father and my mother to carry out different tasks with devotion. I lived my parents’ relationship in a way that always made me feel that they were the most important thing in the family, and that if they were well — if they were connected and working as a team — then everything was well. From their emotional stability and their strengthened bond as a couple, they nourished us, sheltered us, and educated us. They endured months of separation: my father traveled abroad for work, and those trips lasted from one to three months. The household needed income. It was the time of the dictatorship; my mother stayed home alone with four children and my grandmother, while outside bullets and bombs coexisted.
I can say that this is one of the reasons why, at forty-one years old, I have been so selective when entering a romantic relationship, finding myself on the path of one and having had only two, each lasting ten years. I know how a couple functions at its best, and that knowledge is so deeply rooted in me that I can clearly recognize who can complement me and who cannot.
In the midst of this prolonged drama of indecision, I pursued a career that prepared me to work in accounting, financial statements, analysis, and balances, thinking that in this way I could help my father, but without a deep personal motivation. I began a career simply so as not to waste time, and along that path the violin appeared.
The first time I heard a violin, I was on my way home. For the first time in my life, I felt an emotional overflow so deep and infinite that it overwhelmed me. I could understand that sound with complete clarity; it captured my entire attention. I was fascinated. It felt familiar, as if I already knew it. It gave me chills like never before. That instrument could sustain such a deep conversation with me that I understood, for the first time in my life, what it meant to have a connection with something other than a living being. As the music was being created, I received images, aromas, textures, colors, heights, ideas.
My ability to connect developed until it became an advanced empathy, until it became easy for me to speak with the soul of things: people, animals, plants, everything. That is why, throughout my life, I have had so many problems with romantic interests that appear unexpectedly and demand a love they believe to be reciprocal, simply because with me they were able to open emotionally at levels they had never experienced with others. Many became trapped there, insisting for more, unable to understand that I live like this: with that level of emotional understanding toward all living beings, not only toward them.
When people are in front of me, every word they say, every movement, every look, and every gesture speaks to me. They feel intoxicated by that immense empathy.
For that reason, it was very easy for me to recognize true love when it appeared, because it was familiar to me. I could read it like everyone else, but multiplied by ten. The great difference was that, for the first time, I also felt read, seen, understood, welcomed, perceived, and analyzed at deep levels, as well as held and protected. With no one else in the world do I feel this union, this connection, and this empathy; I feel that no one understands me as true love does.
The rest of the story of choosing my profession is simple and brief. I spent fifteen years perfecting a discipline until reaching a professional level, and when that happened, the professional environment opposed my integration, using criminal strategies to prevent my entry.
I felt great relief and understanding in my life when, after true love arrived, I understood the reason why I had wanted to belong to that world. Now that this truth was integrated into my existence, I was able to find what I had been seeking to feel fulfilled in a career. Success was not guaranteed, but experience and wisdom would help me achieve it.
For many years I believed that I had chosen poorly: that my path was erratic, that my interests were scattered, that my vocation had arrived late or taken an incorrect form. But only after completing that first profession with absolute dedication, and only after understanding it deeply, did my true vocation appear, along with true love. For a long time I did not understand why I had needed to follow that order, but I needed to deeply develop my connection with music — and more specifically with a particular type of music — because love would arrive through that path.
The answer was not in the profession, but in the awareness of connection. From that point on, I understood that my relationship with the violin would never be sustained over time, because it was not about applause, external validation, or social recognition. I had not come to music to be seen, but to see; not to be celebrated, but to listen. I studied the violin not to belong to a world, but to pass through it with awareness, to sustain a bond between the visible and the invisible, between emotion and meaning, between the other and myself. I understood that my first profession taught me to read the human being, and the second prepared me to nourish and develop them, giving them tools to find that spiritual bond that is so easy to access through music. Both careers were necessary. Neither was a mistake.
Today I know that not all choices are understood at the moment they are made. Some reveal their meaning only when life grants us the exact experience that makes them comprehensible. Connection is not immediate for everyone; it is almost always the result of a long prior process of learning. And sometimes, the true destination of a path is not the place we arrive at, but the consciousness with which we finally inhabit it.
Over time, I understood that without my first career I would not have acquired the necessary tools to connect deeply with true love, and that it arrived only when I was prepared to connect through music. Because true love does not come to complete us, but to reveal us. It does not appear to give us a new destiny, but to show us clearly the one that was always there. Just as with my professional path, true love was not an impulsive choice nor an emotional refuge: it was a confirmation.
When it appeared, it did not take me away from myself, because I had already found myself. It did not demand that I be someone different; it did not ask for applause, sacrifice, or blindness. On the contrary, it returned me to my center. It allowed me to recognize, without noise or urgency, what was connection and what was dependence, what was vocation and what was a search for validation. In its presence, everything fell into place.
