a new beginning

Written by Kelsey Zachary
Published: February 12, 2015 at 3:21 AM [UTC]

Here's a quick introduction of me to help get this off to a more amicable beginning. I (Kelsey), am a violinist, violist, pianist and composer and all around music nut. I've wanted to be a professional musician since I was 7 and by the age of 9 I could tell you the names of the teachers I wanted to study with and which schools they taught at along with the audition requirements.

I was lucky and despite some challenges along the way, I made it into music school and eventually got paired up with the teacher I wanted to study with. Soon after my post-secondary adventures began, life decided to throw me a curve ball. As I'm sure anyone who has been through music school can tell you, surviving music school and coming out on the other side still wanting to play is a challenge in itself. You are tested and pushed in so many ways to be sure it's really what you want to do.

I began developing severe symptoms which would later be attributed to fibromyalgia. Numb hands, loss of balance, insomnia, muscle and joint pain to name a few of the things I had to figure out how to deal with during school. It ended up having a huge impact on my education as well as other areas of my life. Just as I was beginning to adjust to life with fibromyalgia and was finding a combination of diet, meds, exercise etc that enabled me to do most of the things I enjoyed, things got crazy again. Nerve pain. It's the most excruciating pain to experience and in my case, it's all in my head....the nerves that is, I'm not imagining things. Imagine having someone taking an icepick and shoving it into the side of your head and then cutting across the side of your face to your nose, to your chin and to your eye, and then starting the same process over and over again. That is one of the ways I can describe the pain that trigeminal neuralgia produces. The debilitating pain can be triggered by eating, talking, bright light, a gentle breeze, brushing my teeth and so many other things. You never just when it's going to strike and you spend much of your time fearing it's attacks. Without going into more detail... it sucks. A lot.

Now, I'm not just a "diseased" individual, but I've had and continue to have my challenges. Through it all, I've tried my best to keep my head high and to enjoy the things I love most as well as to develop other hobbies that I can enjoy if my body is giving me a rough time.

So....after that kind of long little blurb about me, here's some of the things you might expect to see/read about here should you continue to visit my blog! You can expect to enjoy musings on photography (and see some pictures), baking/cooking, knitting, music, chronic pain, being a musician with a chronic disease, hiking and all manner of other things!

Welcome to the blog and I look forward to writing more soon!

Cheers,
Kelsey