The first year at school I did great on my exams. In my second year I did well on everything except piano performance. I froze during my exam and could not play. I am still trying to understand the reasons for my freeze.

Part of me felt I could swing on talent alone—no real, consistent practice needed. Part of me became too confident in my second year, too good to fail. Part of me felt blessed. Part of me felt lonely and alone in my journey. Nothing in life is solid or stable, but somehow I thought I was set at eleven years old. I thought I had it made, even though part of me was always hungry, always in pain, and always missing my mother while living at boarding school.

How did I become so confident? I do not know. Maybe I made it up in my mind. Maybe I lived in a fake reality. I felt like I was riding a wave.

Silvansky  (my piano teacher) was always late to my piano lessons, with one foot in Ukraine and one foot in the United States. My mother I only saw on weekends, in fancy apartments.

The school was beautiful: Kyiv State Music Lyceum named after M. V. Lysenko. My teacher was Sergei Sylvansky, the son of a famous composer in Ukraine. He dreamed of escaping the Soviet Union and immigrating to the United States. Leaving the Soviet Union was considered a betrayal of your motherland, so he kept his dream on the down low. He pretended to be a loyal member of society while secretly planning his escape