Ukulele Therapy
I picked up the ukulele. It helped me lay down my trauma.
By Rebecca Hopkins
I
got it for free from another American expat friend who was moving away from our shared town of Palangkaraya, Indonesia. It was in her pile of faded clothes and no-longer-used DUPLOs—things that weren’t worth packing up and moving. I thought it was just a small toy guitar for kids. I brought it home and it mostly sat against a wall, plucked at occasionally by one of my kids or their friends, its strings sounding off-key and rude. Then a few months later, when I had just a little breather from homeschooling my kids and hosting house guests, I picked it up. I had my reasons to try something new. Actually, I had quite a long list. In the past handful of years, we’d been through crisis after crisis: an airplane accident, an evacuation, life-threatening emergency surgery for our three-year-old son, and the death of a close friend in my husband’s arms. While the various moments of trauma were over, I was on edge and couldn’t sleep. Some days I could barely breathe. Somehow, I figured out it was a real instrument, that it had a name—that it was actually a ukulele, and that it could be tuned and learned. 19
Among Worlds
And now that it had a name, it seemed like this tiny instrument deserved a chance to be heard. YouTube could teach me how to tune it. It showed me chords and songs. And with softer and fewer strings, YouTube argued, it’s easier to learn than a guitar. Softer and fewer. Just what I needed. Music had been a childhood friend of mine. As a kid in America, I learned piano from nearly a dozen different teachers because I moved a lot. And I lived in an Army community that moved a lot—my piano teachers moved, too, even during the years when I didn’t. Thankfully, my piano went with us, bouncing in huge moving trucks that knocked its notes out of tune as it crossed state lines. I could play that piano loud and hard, or soft and smooth, and these methods all had gorgeous Italian names. I couldn’t have put this into words as a kid, but I was trying to make sense of a transitory life by playing the orderly Bach inventions. And I was grieving lost friends and homes by leaning into the dramatic arabesques. And I was figuring out who I was by connecting to something beyond myself and something deep within myself.
