Alex Cousins

The night before I turned thirty, I was standing outside a Target in Florida waiting for my family to come out of the store, and somehow that ended up being the place where the whole thing hit me. There wasn’t anything remarkable about the scene. Just people finishing their errands, carts rattling across the pavement, headlights sliding slowly through the parking lot. The kind of ordinary moment you usually forget ten minutes later. But the air felt good that evening. After a couple of cloudy...

I’m about to turn thirty, and I’ve been playing the cello for sixteen years. Over that time, I studied with about five main teachers. They were different people, with different ways of hearing and explaining things, but they all kept circling the same instruction. At some point in nearly every lesson, I’d hear a version of it: just play the cello. I understood the words, but I didn’t know how to live inside them. I’ve always been an emotionally intense person. Feeling has never been abstract...

Most people don’t expect to hear that I started cello at fourteen. In the classical world, that’s late enough for people to write you off before you even begin. And plenty of people did. I was told I’d never catch up, never make it into a conservatory and never build a real career in classical music. I didn’t accept that. I threw myself into the instrument. Within four years, I won the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition and performed as a soloist with the Buffalo...