What this musician’s identity crisis teaches us about navigating change

0:00This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode of the latest. The job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person.

0:43Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

1:02Were you one of those lucky people who knew exactly what you wanted to be when you grew up? Cellist Joshua Roman was. You know, I went through a phase when I was 10 or so. A few of these kinds of things were like, oh, I could be a fighter pilot or a firefighter or it was always something heroic. The fastest man in the world. But only if I break my arm and can never play the cello again. Oh, wow. Then I'll join ski patrol. It was that sort of thing. He has always spent most of his days practicing his cello. It's pretty all-consuming. It's a practice, not just practicing the cello, but the practice of sitting with a friend and working on something together.

1:57All of the things that I think other people might explore and really get into, I would do that, but it was always kind of on the side. I never put more effort into anything than I did into the cello. Was it love at first sight or was it more of a slow burn? You know, I don't remember my first time playing the cello. I was three years old. But I do remember the UPS lady at the front door. And we had one of those glass doors and a wooden door. And the wooden door was open. And she was standing there in her brown shorts with this box that was bigger than me. And I was so excited. And yeah, I don't remember ever not loving the cello.

2:45So it's been inseparable since memory began.

2:57Growing up in Oklahoma City, music and faith were two sides of the same coin and what his family stood for. By the age of 13, Joshua practiced cello five hours a day, often at church alongside his father. When I was growing up, it was very religious. We went to church all the time. My dad was the music director. He's Reverend Paul David Roman. We were at church almost every day of the week my whole life. And music was a service to God. That's how I saw it.

3:40Eventually, Joshua went on to study music. He joined the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. This is him on cello playing Shostakovich. At 22, he was their principal cellist, their youngest ever. At 24, he left to pursue a solo career, playing with orchestras around the world, live streaming on YouTube from Carnegie Hall in 2009, Introduced by Yo-Yo Ma. Occasionally, I get to meet an extraordinary young musician. Such is the case with Joshua Roman. Tens of thousands of fans online, traveling the globe, life with his cello was exactly what Joshua had hoped for ever since he was a little kid. By the time I was six or so, I was telling everyone, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

4:32And I just knew it. It wasn't a question. It wasn't a consideration. It was just, that was what I was going to do. No question.

4:43I think a lot of people, or I won't speak for a lot of people, I'll speak for myself, which is that I'm envious that you had that clarity at such a young age. You know, you can imagine that's something that I get told a lot or asked about quite a bit. And I think it cuts both ways. For me, it's been great. It's been great. But it's also been something my whole life has revolved around. And my time has always been limited. Because of your commitment. Because of my commitment. That commitment to his craft gave Joshua Roman the focus to become a world-famous classical musician. But like millions of other people, in 2020, his life shifted when the pandemic happened.

5:35Not only because he couldn't tour or play concerts, but because after Joshua got COVID, his body completely changed. His health, which he had always taken for granted, became fragile. And his old friend, the cello, it was like they hardly knew each other anymore. Today on the show, an hour with cellist and TED speaker Joshua Roman. An identity crisis that nearly ended his passion for his cello. And how he had to rethink his approach to life and music so he could love both. But first, let's go back to a typical day for Joshua. Oh, wow. In 2018, before all that happened. A typical day pre-COVID was packed.

6:25It was all super intense. So I used to practice anywhere from six to 10 hours a day. I was always reaching, striving to make myself better, whether at the cello or some skill or more reflective learning meditation. But it was all 100 miles per hour. My idea of relaxing was to sign up for a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation course. And you're really grounded, but I wouldn't call it relaxing in the sense of not doing anything. And that's what I would do to take a break. And I would get up early. I would run. I got my mile under six minutes again the year before the pandemic. while I was bouncing around.

7:21I had been so busy, gone about 80 % of the time playing concerts that I decided I didn't want to bother living in New York anymore. And so in 2019, I left everything in storage. And I just, for the first six months, I just lived in hotels and host family homes while I played the concerts that I had and occasionally needed to add an extra night or crash at my sisters. So I'd spent a long time kind of just roaming, being a kind of nomad. And it had been, I think, eight or nine months of doing that when the pandemic hit. Hi, everyone. What a day. What a time. All the concerts were canceled that March 12th or whatever it was.

8:10Concerts that have been canceled between now and May. It's for the best. I got a phone call from my manager that wiped out the entire future income that I had, except for, I think, one concert. And I immediately went into a kind of musical response mode. Welcome to Cello Bello. And started doing daily live streams on Facebook. I was doing this project called The Musical Journal. And I would record these multi-track cello things. When I would get somewhere and unpack, the first thing I would do is set up my recording equipment, my little mobile studio, and record an entry into the musical journal.

8:56And that was what music was doing for me at that point. It was an outlet to serve.

9:08Looking back, I think that I was really ignoring my personal relationship with the cello. I think I was using the cello as a tool, trying to extract all the good that I could from it in a way that would make an impact for other people. But I wasn't really considering what does this sound, what does this practice mean for me? I was on a mission and that was it.

9:42and then we get to january 2021 that's right and like the vast majority of us you got covid yeah yeah where were you i was in jacksonville florida the one concert that wasn't canceled and I just I will always say for the record the Jacksonville Symphony did a great job with their safety protocol and measures no one else got COVID they canceled the second concert we played the first concert I woke up the next morning and I had a I couldn't smell couldn't smell the altoids stuck my nose in the box and I couldn't smell a thing I was like this is not good so I took the test and then you know in those days you would cancel the whole concert.

10:32And I was just kind of stuck. And I had no idea what it was going to do to me. But from the very beginning, it was an ordeal. Yeah, because like, it's really hard to remember, which is so weird, because it's not that long ago. But I think, you know, it's not fun to think about. But let's just remind ourselves that for some people, it was no big deal to get COVID. And for others, it was an extremely big deal. How did your symptoms progress? And at what point did you realize like, oh, nuts, this is not good? Yeah, it was weird because I didn't feel like I had such a bad COVID. I mean, it was strange.

11:12What I didn't have is the extreme regular flu-like symptoms. I basically had the weird stuff that COVID brings and not a whole lot of traditional sick stuff. I wasn't, I had a lot of trouble breathing. That was a thing. And I had incredible fatigue, which was like nothing I'd ever experienced where it wasn't being tired because I had done something or being sleepy. It's this feeling like I'm wearing weights inside of my body or something, but I just, the lifting an arm can be so difficult. It just feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. And the brain would have similar things. I was really struggling with brain fog.

12:01It was very difficult to read. And it was very strange. I didn't feel sick. I felt like I was inhabited by something else. Like I'd been possessed with some weird thing. And then it just didn't go away. Ugh. And I'm very, very lucky that my primary care doctor knew about and understood enough about long COVID both to suggest that that might be what I had and also to say you need to get extra help because I'm not an expert in this.

12:44When we come back, Joshua puts away his cello, unsure he'll ever return to it. That was probably the lowest point. Nothing on the calendar. No confidence in my ability to recover. A crisis of faith about what music meant at that point. It was a really dark time. More from my conversation with Joshua Roman. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to NPR's TED Radio Hour. We'll be right back.

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14:55Hear unfiltered expert advice from CEO Anne Morris and Harvard business professor Francis Fry on how to build, regain, and maintain your confidence. Find Fixable wherever you listen. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. We are spending the hour with cellist Joshua Roman. By age 26, he had a flourishing and frenetic career. By 30, he was traveling the globe, playing the world's biggest venues. But when the pandemic hit and Joshua developed long COVID, everything ground to a halt for him. including the pleasure he'd always gotten from playing his beloved cello. I was facing the possibility of never playing this beautiful music again.

15:45Here he is on the TED stage. In January of 21, I caught COVID, and unfortunately, I never fully recovered. I could tell something was wrong when I continued struggling to read, even after my initial infection. Sometimes even basic sentences wouldn't make sense. A few weeks later, I was returning from the trip I'd been on when I got sick. And when I arrived home, the simple act of walking up the stairs to my bedroom completely laid me out. I only made it halfway before falling to the floor on the landing, unable to continue or even to lift myself to a sitting position. I was there for half an hour, frustrated and crying.

16:35So what happened next after that? Well, eventually I made it home. Well, home. I made it to New York, to the last place that I had been staying. And I only had two concerts, but they felt so important. So I kept those concert dates. Oh, wow. That was wild. You know, of course, my manager and I had a big, several conversations about it. Am I going to be able to do this? I worked my way up to playing the Saint-Saëns cello concerto. It's a solo cello with orchestra piece, and it's only about 20 minutes long, which is unusual. the big cello concertos the famous ones are 30 or even 40 minutes long but this one was only 20 minutes long and it's one that a lot of kids learn so I had learned it when I was 12 or 13 or something I don't know and if there was any piece I was going to be able to perform at the level that I expected myself even with long COVID it was going to be that piece so I got it ready it was nuts.

17:51At first I could only play two to five minutes and eventually I got up to 20 minutes and I could do that but I would have to rest so much to be able to just play the cello for 20 minutes. So when I did that performance I definitely had to recover

18:15but right after that I was working for the very first time with Edgar Meyer and Tessa Lark the only way some concerts went on was that they were videotaped and so that's what we did at Edgar's house and we were able to spread out our work over the course of a week so that I could manage it and it wasn't until after I pushed through those two things that I truly truly just crashed. That was probably the lowest point. Nothing on the calendar, no confidence in my ability to recover, a crisis of faith about what music meant at that point and whether I wanted to continue at all, it was a really dark time.

19:09I abandoned the daily practice routine that I'd been cultivating for over 30 years. I put my cello in its case and I left it there. Doubts that had been lurking for years came to the surface. I'd been stuck in a gig mentality for much of my career, waiting for the phone to ring, afraid to say no to any opportunity, and completely unaware of the exhaustion that ran through my body and spirit. I've always wanted to feel like what I do matters. But after decades of ambitious effort to play every note in tune, make every phrase clear and powerful, I was having trouble seeing that possibility through my fatigue.

19:58With the difficulty I had even lifting the bow, let alone putting in a decent practice session, I lost hope that it mattered. You say you put your cello in its case and you left it there. Yeah. How long did that break last? It was like two and a half months, almost three months. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. That was probably the biggest break you'd taken ever in your life, basically. Yeah. Because my rule was, somebody told me when I was a kid that Heifetz said, I've never looked this up because I don't want to know. If I miss a day of practice, I know. If I miss two days, the critics know. If I miss three days of practice, the whole world knows.

20:49and even as like a six-year-old that was the mentality that was drilled into me so almost three months was inconceivable what do you think your cello thought of this i'm starting to think of them truly as your life partner yeah they're not happy about i can tell you midge is her name and she she had been put in the closet a few times i'm sorry to say but always because I had another cello that I would be playing. It was never me not playing the cello. But there's something about cellos when they don't get played for a while, they get stiff. It's hard to get a sound. You don't have a lot of sound.

21:31It's kind of crazy how much this wood changes when it's played and when it's not played. So she was very unhappy, but also my fingers, I had pretty much lost my calluses, which is something I think any string player will understand what I'm saying with that. I had pretty much lost my calluses. When you were in the midst of that, of not playing, did you miss it? Did you miss Midge? Did you start thinking? No. No. I started thinking about other things I could do. I mean, it was not, I don't think I was very in touch with myself. And we talked about earlier, I knew from such an early age and people, a lot of people look at that and think that's awesome.

22:23But that flip side is real, that there are all of these other things that just got pushed to the side because I knew what I was supposed to do. And so I wasn't going to let anything that would counter that narrative become real. So when I did put the cello away, I was flooded with those doubts that had been shoved down. And it was the first time that I'd truly voiced those things that had always kind of been there.

22:59I want to try and understand that why you don't know if music is going to do it because physically I don't feel able because wow I haven't given the rest of the world a chance in my life was it that you still had long COVID and you were just like I'm just so damn tired I'm just going to sit in this not knowing like what exactly you know this is getting this is cutting to the quick of it When I was a kid, I grew up in a church. Music was a service to God. I was able to have incredible ambition to serve in this place where there's meaning attributed to those things which can't be articulated sometimes by science so well.

23:52So spirituality, really. And I left the church when I was 16 or 17. And at the point that we're talking about, it had been, gosh, 20 years of not being a Christian. But I hadn't yet figured out how music was going to save the world if it wasn't through God and Jesus, the way that I had thought when I was a kid. and so a lot of what I had done for service was kind of like automatic and in this moment all of that that had been building up just came down on me and I didn't know if I could believe anymore that music would save people because I didn't believe in the construct that had given me that in the first place, and I hadn't yet found a new one.

24:51So COVID almost forced you into confronting this confusion in that you just stopped playing. A hundred percent. It totally forced me into facing something that I could have faced a long time ago. In those very dark days, you got a call from a friend that ended up changing things for you. What did they say? Like, I know you're struggling right now, but would you consider playing just for us friends? It's so funny to me because I had this friend who asked me to play for her summer solstice party. And, you know, I said yes. At that point, I wasn't really sure if I was even going to continue a career as a cellist.

25:43and I think I had in the back of my mind, you know, I can just cancel, it's fine, she'll understand. But then I procrastinated actually thinking about it, and so I couldn't say no anymore. And that is actually when I picked up the cello, it was the day before this party, and that's why I took Midge out again and started playing.

26:17and that's the moment where I everything changed for me

26:28there's there's a place on probably most if not every cellist's chest that has marks on the skin from where the cello touches it and for me it's right on the breastbone, slightly to the left, close to the heart, which is kind of crazy.

26:55And when I started playing the Bach prelude after not having touched the cello for so long, I think I was extra sensitive to the vibrations. You can feel the whole cello vibrating. You're holding it with your knees. It's against your chest. Sometimes your head is touching the scroll a little bit. You feel it in your hands. I know that that vibration wakes the cello up. This is something that we know. It's studied the effect that vibrations have on the instruments. And I think that was one of the only moments in a long time, maybe the only moment in many, many years, that I let myself feel the vibrations from my hands touching the cello and the cello leaning against my chest and against my knees, just waking me up.

28:03I started crying because it was something that I really needed.