In elementary and middle school, I was a child piano prodigy.

You know those little kids on YouTube who play concertos with orchestras, their fingers sliding deftly over the ivories even though their feet can barely reach the pedals? That was me.

I grew obsessed with watching the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team in London this summer. But every move, I came to discover, was calculated. A wrist flick, a twitch of the ponytail, a cheesy smile carved in place — these things drilled and re-drilled until solemnly committed to muscle memory.

Piano competitions are kind of like that. As artistic as the music industry purports to be, my musical years were all about brittle vigilance. Once a year, I was allowed to learn four songs hand-selected by my piano teacher — a concerto, a baroque piece, a classical sonata and something from the romantic or contemporary era — and practice them until each slur had been smoothed, every grace note lithely flicked.

Drill, rinse, repeat. Five hours a day was necessary, six hours preferable.

Competing in music competitions can completely warp your sense of reality. You spend a lot of time with your Tiger Parents on the road, driving past cow pastures and obscure grain mills in the Midwest to play on an out-of-tune piano in the hope that three strangers will deem you the no. 1 musician of the Baldwin National Music Teachers’ Association. If you win, the award money is not even worth the gas used to get there.

You start to think that dropping 40 grand for a grand piano is a “steal.” You own a lot of frilly velvet dresses that you rotate out when competition season starts to swing into gear. You form silent rivalries with other similarly dressed pianists and engage in blistering conspiratorial discussions that may or may not be reciprocated by your nemeses.

We had an ecosystem of people we regularly saw at these competitions. The hierarchy (June, first place; Jennifer, second place; Steven, third place) was pretty rigid, slightly shuffling if a particular batch of judges preferred one interpretative style to another.

It was a small group but not a particularly tight-knit one. My parents and I would come home from a competition and spend hours dissecting footage of the event. "Oh look, June's foot slipped off the pedal,” we'd crow, winding and rewinding the tape until the magnetic strip gave out. Sometimes, one person would vault out of the group and land onto a higher piano level, only to find another cluster of like-talented individuals with which to grapple for awards.

None of us were particularly interested in going into music professionally. At best, we would end up like our piano teachers. At worst, we would end up like our piano teachers.

Those years instilled in me a disproportionate sense of self-worth. I had one teacher who liked to segregate her students into “musical” and “not musical” categories when they began taking lessons from her. The “musical” ones got to go to competitions, attend master-classes, meet famous visitors. The “not musical” ones were relegated to the back of the room and surfaced once a year to play at the annual Halloween festival. At these recitals, we’d been instructed to scrunch up our noses at those not gifted enough to have perfect pitch or a handspan that could stretch above an octave. Musical apartheid.

I cried a lot back then. I cried when I was practicing, twisting my fingers into unrecognizable shapes as I tried to get the right combination of phrasing and dynamics. I cried at competitions — a little before, a lot after. The judges have a sadistic way of announcing the winners a half hour after the last person of the day plays, so if after hours of waiting and listening, the award you end up receiving is the dreaded honorable mention, all you can do is publicly congratulate the winner, pack up your things, skulk away and yes, cry.

I should say there were some good things. Winning was awesome, of course. And there were moments of true, Dali-esque surrealism. In 6th grade, I went to Russia to study at the Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory. On our first day, all the students were invited to a grand concert featuring the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Toward the beginning of the performance, jet lag came over me and I fell asleep. When I woke, I cried, devastated that I had missed hearing my idol, Vladimir Ashkenazy, play live. The next morning, I attended a master-class and played a simple Chopin nocturne. From the back of the room, a man clapped. “You are very talented,” he said. It was Vladimir Ashkenazy.

I continued piano lessons throughout my senior year of high school, but eventually, I fell out of the competitive piano circuit. To curious well-wishers, I tell them I “lost interest,” but the reality of the situation was I didn't have enough talent. Somewhere, somehow, a new breed of competitors had surfaced, people who had earnest conversations about Horowitz vs.