After nearly 30 years, I'm returning to public performance. This five-part essay traces the journey from childhood trauma through artistic suppression to rediscovering my voice — and why performing my own music in 2026 represents more than just a concert.
In previous parts, I shared how childhood traumas (Part 1), performance anxiety (Part 2), and decades of artistic suppression (Part 3) led me from Paris to Boston to Los Angeles, where I built a successful career writing in others' voices. In Part 4, I explained how three friendships helped me understand the difference between being a craftsman and being an artist. But truly embracing that artist would require confronting what I'd been running from all along.
Part 5: It All Connects
Escaping my teenage traumas — both at home and at the piano — and my failures in live performance only delayed the inevitable: I would have to face them instead of running from them. To acknowledge them, analyze their impact, and slowly rebuild myself apart from them.
Although I never wanted to see myself as a victim, I was at least clear-eyed enough to recognize that I was dealing with real trauma. I think I had always known I would need therapy at some point in my life, but also that, as long as I was functional, I could survive without it. And survive I did, for better or worse, for twenty five years.
It all came to a stop in late 2020, when my father-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer in an unexpected fashion. An otherwise completely healthy 60-year-old, he was gone within six weeks of his diagnosis.
My in-laws had been, for the past 20 years, in countless ways, my adoptive family. They had welcomed me with open arms; their house in the Paris suburb soon became my second home. But more than that, they showed interest in my life, asked me questions about my work, about my career. They visited us in the United States (something my parents never did), spent time with our kids, vacationed with us. They were present, they were inquisitive, they were involved — the complete opposite of what I had grown up with.
It wasn't the first time I had to deal with losing someone close to cancer, but my father-in-law's sudden illness and passing had an immense emotional impact on me, as if losing an anchor, a point of reference. It put me in a really precarious mental state. I wasn't functioning properly anymore — to the point where I became concerned for my own life.
This time, I wasn't going to be able to deal with it on my own.
This time, I needed help.
For this, and for so much more.
Four Lives
Within the first few therapy sessions, I distinctly remember expressing that even though I was still shy of being forty, I thought I was already dead — not biologically, but emotionally, mentally, psychologically. There was no life left in me.
It took a few months to come to the first breakthrough: my adult life had really started at 25 — fifteen years earlier — and, statistically, I had another 45 years to live. Which meant I had, theoretically, another three potential lives ahead of me.
So why did I feel my life was over?
It took many more sessions to unpack it all — to go through all the traumas, all the hurt, all the rejections, all the misunderstandings. To explore this deep-seated feeling that I had never been, and would never be, enough; that I lived a big part of my life performing a role that wasn't truly me; a life in which I would never fully be, because it had never allowed me the simple space to ask myself: Who am I?
In effect, although I had lived many happy times, my brain had been stuck, for a long, long time. Reacting, avoiding, adapting. A prisoner of its own traumas, playing the part as best it knew how to. It's a small miracle that it found joy where and when it did — joy it surely needed to keep going, one day at a time.
Survival, first — always.
Even just figuring that out took many months. But little by little, as knots became untied, as clouds lifted away, therapy gave me the most important gift of all: clarity. And by helping me build myself back up, it gave me the self-confidence I had been missing all my adult life. And not just the confidence to face my past knowing I would be okay doing so, but also the confidence to face my present to live as the deepest version of myself — the version that had been slowly and steadily growing thirty years prior, before trauma and neglect derailed its path.
And this is why I can say now: therapy saved my life. Or rather: it gave me my life back.
Massive Changes
With my desire to finally live as my true self taking shape, came the essential question: how would I live this truth? And once I started living it, would the people around me acknowledge it, accept it, support it — or refute it, unable themselves to see and to adapt, sometimes unknowingly too comfortable in their own relationship with the prisoner I was in my past?
Searching for these answers led me down a path I'd sworn to avoid seventeen years earlier — my divorce — with all the pains it brought and risks it entailed.
A divorce which I knew would lead me to relocate to Paris, forcing me to face my past head-on.
In my previous "life", this very idea would have been absolutely terrifying: taking a new, deeper look at my then-relationship with my parents, with my siblings, and with my friends. But also facing everything connected to my childhood and teenage years: Paris and its train system where pedophiles roamed; neighborhoods where I grew up and got bullied by teenagers; the elementary school where I spent a year alone with no friends; or, epicenter of it all, the home where I grew up, and especially my parents' living room where the sexual assaults at the piano took place.
The years I was going back to were not happy years.
But I faced all these fears with the knowledge that I was in the right mental space to do so (although I smartly continued therapy as I was navigating it all). After 9 months, I concluded that I would be ok, and put the therapy on hold. And now, after two years in Paris, I can confidently say I'm not afraid anymore, and that, to my surprise, I've found a much better life on this side of the pond than I would ever have expected.
A life which had the surprising bonus of making me reconnect with some of my artist friends from 25 years ago, and meet new ones, which led me to explore the world of live music in Paris: its numerous concert halls and music venues, its eclectic programming, its deep pool of musicians and engineers.
The stage was ready for me to turn my successful therapy into something even more life-affirming.
On Auroras and Twilights
Around summer 2024, I had started writing a new album of intimate, piano-focused music for Audio Network. Although it didn't start out that way, On Auroras and Twilights naturally became inspired by the events of my life and those around me. Thanks to therapy, I was able to see clearly through all these emotions, and they were naturally being channeled as I was writing the pieces.
The resulting album is a journey through highs and lows, joy and despair, moments of calm and moments of turmoil. But, as for all my other Audio Network albums, never without an optimistic point of view. While I could attest that things were hard sometimes, I also wanted to show that behind all of the darkness, the sadness, the loneliness… there was hope. Beauty. Joy. Rebirth.
At the very least, I wanted to convey that emotions were inherently good: after all, if you feel, it means you're alive. So yes: hurt, cry, scream — but also rejoice, smile, exalt.
Feel.
And as it should have happened to someone finally growing their self-confidence enough to listen to their heart, I started to create from the heart, too.
The album became so personal that, although very much focused on completing it, I began to develop the pieces much more than I needed to — or, actually, than I should have. The music team at Audio Network kept trying to steer me back to the original brief, but I wanted to break free. I'd been searching for my voice — after decades of pretending I didn't need to have one — and now, at last, I was ready to let it be heard.
As the pieces were getting longer (too long), I wrote new ones (too many). At some point, I had to make a decision: if these pieces weren't going to make it on the album, then what was I going to do with them?
The Suggestion
One of the things that I learned through therapy is that Life sends signals all the time — ones you'll miss if you're not ready to notice them.
In late 2024, I mentioned to Alya, my girlfriend at the time, how the desire to create pieces I believed in sometimes conflicted with the practical limits of an Audio Network album. Herself a visual artist, Alya casually wondered, "why don't you consider performing these pieces in a concert of your own music?"
A few years prior — a few months, even — I would have immediately dismissed this idea. But on that day, in the intimacy of that moment, with my mind willing to listen and my heart on my sleeve… I was ready to receive it.
Small. Intimate. Personal. Yes… somehow, this felt like the perfect music to share live.
And since the album was about feelings… wouldn't it be perfect to be able to make other people feel, too? In this day and age where we are more and more disconnected and hiding behind our screens all day, shouldn't we try to feel together when we have the chance to? I had certainly experienced how liberating it was to allow myself to feel. But providing that to other people? What an achievement that would be!
The vision quickly crystalized in my mind. The stage. The lights. The ambiance. The musicians. And me sitting at the open upright piano.
I saw it.
Lingering Fears
From that point on, I knew I had work to do. Work that would require a conscious effort, a willingness to break new ground for myself, and to accept a healthy dose of uncertainty.
So much could go wrong, from so many standpoints: logistically, technically, musically. I'm a perfectionist at heart, and it's much easier to worry about perfection when you have full control in your studio, during recording, or in post-production. You can spend countless hours on the small details, with a microscope if needed. I've been very comfortable with that amount of control.
But in a live setting, you're naked.
That's scary, especially when you have scars from past traumas, which also raises the stakes — much more so than anyone would realize unless they knew about all the history. The concert carries weight on a professional level too, of course — I don't want to look like a fool — but even more so from a personal level. Which, in a way, is how any good concert should be.
It helps that over the past few years I've learned to be vulnerable to my friends, first, then to my family, then to my colleagues. I've learned to appreciate when that vulnerability is met with support and positivity. And I've learned to accept that sometimes, it doesn't, and that those connections simply aren't meant to be.
The same goes with sharing your music with the world at large: the ultimate test, in the end, is allowing yourself to be vulnerable to a wide audience. And that's perhaps where the greatest value lies. Being your authentic self is the only way to be truly original — truly different — truly singular.
A few weeks ago, as I was practicing the first few pieces of the concert, my mind started to wander. I was on the stage, in the dark, a lone, warm spotlight on me and the keyboard. The faceless audience — mainly comprised of my closest friends and family members — was breathing at the same time as me, feeding me as I performed, as I tried to do the piece justice while savoring this shared moment of reflection, of tranquility. Of peace.
This image brought the most amazing emotional response in me — figurative goosebumps in my head, literal tickling in my spine. It was a wonderful feeling of joy, from survival, from success, from overcoming the odds.
I suddenly realized that no matter what happens, playing my music live will be a tremendous experience. A transformative one. A defining one. As I get closer to that reality, there is fear, yes, but also hope, and impatience, and excitement at sharing my world, my truth, my inner being with other people.
It's like offering a small piece of myself to the audience and saying, with an open heart…
"Here I am. This is what I feel. I hope you feel it, too."
This concludes 'Finding the Echoes: An Artist's Journey From Trauma to Rediscovery'. I hope you've found it insightful and enjoyed reading it as much as it was important for me to write it.
The next chapter — the concert itself — will be written in spring 2026. Until then, if you'd like to share your thoughts on this journey, or on your own path toward creative authenticity, the comments are open below.
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