Ukulele Therapy Rebecca Hopkins

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. 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.

It took all my courage to live my life well. I didn’t have enough left to put it into words.”

I loved playing the piano so much that I majored in it in college. But then I ran into one teensy problem. I hated performing. I only wanted to play for myself. My piano was my cocoon. With my dad’s wise urgings to find a course of study that would end in being gainfully employed, I knew I needed to find something I could actually share with the world.

I became a writer instead. Writers can write all by themselves with no one watching. Then they can edit it, change it, erase it, redo it. Then maybe they can get it published, leaving it for distant readers to enjoy…or not. It felt like a more forgiving art.

I thought of my ukulele, my own pinhole of light. In that moment I felt my own courageous voice return.”

But then the dark years of trauma came. The losses, grief, failure, trauma, PTSD, and a resulting faith crisis were surrounded by upside-down stories I couldn’t figure out how to right on the page. In the midst of all that, I also went through a major writing failure. My literary agent for a book I’d labored over dropped me. I entered a season of “not.” Not enjoying the process of writing. Not publishing. Not knowing when it would get better. Not knowing when I’d feel safe again. It took all my courage to live my life well. I didn’t have enough left to put it into words.

But the ukulele was light and forgiving. I first learned it during the evenings while my husband Brad was away on a flight training trip. I most often played while the kids were getting ready for bed. It was when I had time to myself. It was also when I felt the most fear. I played next to the window so I could watch the wind blow through the palm trees in my yard.

Family picture from Indonesia taken by Susan Wyatt, Rebecca Hopkins’s mother.

I added a new chord every time I played, enjoying the process of learning. The happy major cords invited joy, reminding me of reasons to be grateful. The minor ones gave me a way to be sad.

During a particularly difficult week, Brad sent me off to a pretty lobby of a hotel in our Indonesian town and told me to go write. He meant it as a gift. But my stomach tightened and my breath got shorter. I went through the act of packing up my laptop, but I planned to read instead. Or maybe get a massage at the spa. If it wouldn’t have been weird, I would’ve brought my ukulele. Writing was still too hard.

I settled on some chocolate cake, a comfy chair, and a book about writing (close enough, right?) called Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life.

“Start small,” author Dani Shapiro wrote. “If you try to think about all of it at once, the world you hope to capture on the page, everything you know, each person you’ve met… you’ll be overcome with paralysis. But it is possible to describe a crack in the sidewalk, the scuffed heel of a shoe.” Those small things can then become a “pinhole of light to a story, a character, a universe.”

I thought of my ukulele, my own pinhole of light. In that moment I felt my own courageous voice return. Whole sentences entered my head, some smooth and soft, others loud and strong. They ran onto my keyboard like tinkling scales. Many came out a bit rough, out of practice, needing editing, but some came pure and clear, like a long-memorized etude. I had ideas for blog posts, journalistic pieces, novels, comedy routines, poetry. I penned the first poem I’ve written in a decade, then wrote down character ideas, and then a start of an essay. I felt like I’d been holding my breath, and now, with words, could let it out.

I didn’t finish the chocolate cake. I did finish this story.

Rebecca Hopkins spent the first half of her life moving around as an Army kid and the past fourteen years trying to grow roots on three different Indonesian islands while her husband took to the skies as a pilot. She now works in Colorado for Paraclete Mission Group and writes about issues related to nonprofit and cross-cultural work. Website: www.rebeccahopkins.org