Back in 2015, I was so lost and confused but I had music.

As I turned on the radio, I would listen to music

all day while being obsessed and mesmerized Playing the piano had always been amusing for me since I
was 7 and buying a 3-octave keyboard was never so satisfying. Growing up one of my friends told me
about a piano class and Ms. Nadya who is a piano teacher there and I thought that maybe this is the
place where I belonged. I visited the place where she taught and on the first day, I got to know that Ms.
Nadya is Russian. I also told her that ‘I want to learn singing’ and she proceeded to tell me that you
should not learn singing unless you have learnt music theory so I went on to choose the only two
options that were piano and theory, now to be honest, reading the five staves and a billion notes and
practicing classical piano for hours was not the greatest pleasure but I assumed that it was a great
treasure so I was able to push myself for a lot of hard work. A few months later, Ms. Nadya was blown
away my progress in just less than a year.

Things were going really well and the appreciation of my talent was all I was looking for. Almost a year
in, my schedule was changed to a week day and I had to travel an hour-long distance all alone after
school in less than an hour. I never got time to eat my lunch but I didn’t lose any of my joy in doing that
because I was too passionate for music. On that Tuesday as I walked in, she gave me a wide-eyed gaze
and started to talk about my appearance. Behind her fabricated words I could hear her saying that ‘you
don’t look good’ while she made comments on my acne and my body. She said ‘you have ruined
yourself’ and ‘I can’t wait for you to be a pretty girl’. Her words lowered my self-esteem.

One hour later, the class was over and I still remember how terrifying it was for me to go back home
in a metro as I felt like I was being judged a lot. I went home and cried and took her opinions as my only
description, that was the worst pain. I thought about beautifying myself so I changed my hairstyle and
let my mom dress my hair, I ended up loving it so did all of my friends at school, I was so happy, no love
was greater to me than self-love. Another day, another piano class and she tells me that ‘Ritika !!!, you
should change your hairstyle if people look at you, they will think that you’re stupid’ in an aggressive
tone, I was like ‘really?’, that was too much. Once she questioned my future so I told her ‘I want to
become a singer’ she said ‘like Lady Gaga? Are you stupid?’ if you want to be something be a pianist!’
and told me it was too late for me to be a singer and that I needed to be trained since a really young
age.

I found out about this vocal workshop that was being conducted by the opera singer Ms. Larissa and I
agreed to attend and perform. I told her that I never took singing lessons but I'm passionate for it. When
I was done singing, I was blown away when she said ‘let me tell you that this is the first time in my life
that I have had goosebumps twice in the same song’. That was the first time I heard someone describe
my voice as ‘powerful’. After hearing that, it was safe for me to chase my dreams of being a singer and I
also learnt that music is the proof that beauty runs deeper than the soul.