Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos The Jimi Hendrix of the Cello (with Joshua Roman) About this episode Joshua Roman has been playing the cello everyday since he was three - but then on a concert tour he caught Covid. The illness wouldn't go away and sapped his ability to play the music he loves at the level he was used to.
How can things like music help us feel better during tough times? And what can tough times teach us about appreciating and reappraising the activities we sometimes take for granted?
Check out more of Joshua's music at https://www.joshuaroman.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:00 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
2:06 Laurie Santos? This season of the Happiness Lab is all about coping strategies. And one of my favorite go-to coping strategies is music. With just a few clicks on my phone, I can pick a track that will help calm me down in times of stress, or pump me up when I'm facing a challenge, or transport me back to happier times when I'm feeling blue.
2:25 Laurie Santos? But as a professional composer and celebrated cellist, my guest on today's episode has developed a way more profound relationship with music. Joshua Roman began playing a child-sized cello at age three and gave his first public recital at age 10. He's now played with great orchestras and collaborated with some of the top names in classical music. Joshua was a huge rising star and driving himself to ever greater heights, until he was struck down by long COVID.
2:54 Speaker 04 And it took a debilitating condition to strip me of all ability before I let myself just be. And that has changed everything about how I feel with music and really with life and the people around me.
3:14 Laurie Santos? So to continue our journey into the coping strategies that real people use to tackle real problems, I've asked Joshua to explain how music has not only helped him during times of adversity, but also how those times of adversity have helped him to regain something he'd lost in his relationship with music. But before jumping into all that, let's start at the beginning, the overture, as it were, Josh's childhood.
3:39 Speaker 04 It's hard to know exactly the moment when the love of cello took over, but I do remember the day the cello arrived. I was three years old. I remember the house I was in. We only lived in that house for maybe half of a year. The UPS delivery lady with her brown shorts, and the box was bigger than me. It was a small cello, but still. And I don't remember ever not loving it. And I know that by six, I was telling people that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But there's not really a moment where there was a transition. It just feels like it was always going to happen.
4:18 Speaker 00 And so tell me a little bit about your childhood and how cello fit in. I'm kind of thinking about the things that you went through and how cello was helping you cope back then.
4:25 Speaker 04 Well, I grew up in Oklahoma and it's not the place with the biggest infrastructure for classical musicians. My parents were church musicians that are recently retired now. My dad was the choir director at that point, getting his degree or whatever it is that makes him officially a reverend. So he's officially a reverend, but he was always focused on the community and engagement and especially music. So very much a musical family. My mom would play the piano accompanying the choir. And that's kind of what I fell into is just music being a part of our everyday lives and a part of our experience with the people around us.
5:03 Speaker 04 Music was something that happened at lessons on Thursdays or Wednesdays, or whenever that was. And you would practice and prepare for that, but in between, music was all the time. We were always singing, we were always playing whatever instruments were lying around. From a very early age, I was just taught to try it. Like, why not pick up the trombone, play the guitar? And that's something that I really cherish is just music as a way of being in community with other people. And that connection and shared experience, I think, is very powerful.
5:41 Speaker 00 It also seems like music was a bit of a constant for you when other things were changing around. I understand you kind of moved a lot as a kid. Can I describe what that was like?
5:49 Speaker 04 We did, we were in a lot of different houses. I think by the time I was 35, I'd lived in more than 35 places. And a lot of that was when I was young, but when I didn't know how else to connect with people, I could at least join the band. For example, when we moved to Mississippi from Oklahoma, I had learned to play the bass guitar. I would make the cello work in certain bands. I could find the pianists and play with them. Music was always a way of connecting with people pretty quickly. And you start to make sound together and you don't have to talk. It's great.
6:31 Speaker 00 It also seems like you started noticing the benefits of music really early on, right? One of the ones that we know from the science is that music is incredibly rewarding, right? Listening to music activates all the same reward areas as things like food and money. And it seems like music was sort of your go to reward for, you know, a lot of the time you were growing up.
6:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, looking back, a lot of that is reward and some of that might have also been the only thing that felt good in that, in that moment. There was lots of stuff going on. Scouts, orchestra later, that came later. Soccer, I was always in soccer. I loved studying too. I was, I was a real math nerd. I loved all those kinds of things, but with music, I could work on it in the room alone. I could shut the door and say, my brothers and sister have to stay out because I'm practicing. And I could make progress. I could get better at something. I could go, oh, this is cool. I, I really want to do that now. And then I could go share it with people.
7:30 Speaker 04 Music let me have what felt like, I guess, better interactions or more rewarding or meaningful interactions with people because I brought something to the table. And that was maybe a version of what you're talking about for sure.
7:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. It also seems like music is super good at helping us regulate our emotions, whether we want to kind of get pumped up and kind of hyped up, or whether we want to wallow in our kind of sadness, but kind of have a beautiful thing to wallow in.
7:57 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
7:57 Speaker 00 Is this something that you found with music early on too?
8:00 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. And I would do that with the cello, of course, but I would also do that with the radio and with tapes and CDs and sometimes records. And there's a lot of stuff that I, I guess I didn't understand or have the right context for how to process. You know, teenagers have so much, so much going on. And music was a place where even if I couldn't work through the details, I could feel it. I could express it and get some sort of sense that that was okay.
8:38 Speaker 00 There's also lots of evidence that music can kind of make us feel more present. It can make us mindful. And I think especially when you're playing music, you can get in this state of flow, which is this kind of wonderful happiness inducing state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talked about a lot, where you're kind of in the zone, time is passing, you're kind of forgetting your bodily needs, but you're just like feeling great and kind of challenging and pushing yourself. And it seems like especially early on, this was something that you got out of playing the cello a lot.
9:05 Speaker 04 I would obsess over flow, not just in the cello. I think cello was where it was most accessible, is most accessible to me because you're doing so many of the things that flow requires in terms of openness and focus at the same time. And I mean, I would really geek out about this. I, pretty young, read The Inner Game of Tennis, which talks about flow, but I was always really into that basic idea that you could find a state of awareness or of being that allowed you to have that feeling like time didn't exist.
9:41 Speaker 00 And so you found a way to get these benefits kind of permanently as your career. I love that you announced at six years of age, like, oh, do you play the cello forever? But you actually kind of went good on that. I announced at six years old that I was going to be a dolphin trainer, but I did not make good on that.
9:55 Speaker 04 There's still time.
9:57 Speaker 00 Still time, right. But you jumped in early. So tell me about the path to becoming a professional cellist.
10:03 Speaker 04 Oh, my gosh. Well, I guess I'm glad that I didn't know what I was doing when I said that. And no one around me knew either. Again, no infrastructure for classical music in Oklahoma. I was studying with a violinist. I didn't even have a cello teacher. I was playing the cello and he would be on the violin demonstrating and I would copy on the cello. But basically, my parents' thought was, we can't find the cello teacher that we want. That we'll agree to take a three-year-old. So we'll do the next best thing. We'll just find the best musician that will take a three-year-old. And that happened to be a violinist.
10:43 Speaker 04 So from the very beginning, it was kind of a hodgepodge of things that on one hand had these very deep values. You know, we're gonna do the the best possible with what we have. At the same time, it was a lot of different things pieced together. It was a violin teacher. I was in Oklahoma. Most of my formative chamber music experiences were with rock bands, essentially. Me and my friends, often I would be on the cello. Sometimes I would grab a different instrument or just sing. I think my first string quartet experience wasn't until I was 13 or something. And I'd been playing for 10 years at that point, which is a long time to go thinking,
11:27 Speaker 04 this is what I want to do with the rest of my life and not experiencing what the usual path would be.
11:35 Speaker 00 But you were able to kind of jump into this profession. You were thriving in your career. You were killing it.
11:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, as a classical cellist, I don't know what people think of that career or what it entails. The particular thing that I do as a soloist is I don't regularly play with any particular orchestra. I'm not a member of an orchestra, a member of a group or anything like that. I don't teach at a university. I travel around as the guest artist with an orchestra when they play what we call the concerto, where there's a spotlight on the guest artist, who's the soloist. The piece of music they're playing is often from centuries ago. Sometimes it's brand new, but it's always a big feature. And this was my dream. It's incredible to be able to do this at all, let alone make a living doing it.
12:25 Speaker 04 It's very difficult. There are only a handful of cellists in the country who are able to do that and not also do other things. So I felt like despite all of my insecurities, I was really, I was really on the right path.
12:41 Speaker 00 But what happened in March 2020 when COVID hit?
12:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it was March 12th. My manager calls and an entire year of work was just wiped off the calendar. At the time, I was also doing a residency for composing, so I was living in Santa Barbara. And so all of my belongings were in storage in New York City. I had no fixed address. I was not in any of the systems that you needed to be in to get unemployment. So that phone call where everything was wiped off the map was like pretty devastating.
13:18 Speaker 00 Was that a time that you turned back to music to kind of cope?
13:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Lori, I'm curious about this. I don't think I did it in the most healthy way. You know, like, I don't actually have any home at that point. And I'm very lonely because I went out there for solitude, for beauty of nature, to have inspiration to write music. And I don't feel like I had much of a choice but to double down on that. So I did. I doubled down on that. I was trying to compose. I started doing a live stream every day for a while. Yeah, just trying to feel connected to people, but I was actually just alone. So music was kind of that desperate lifeline.
14:06 Speaker 04 And it's hard to say that it made me happy, but I guess it kept me going.
14:12 Speaker 00 But a lot of things changed back in early 2021. And so tell me what happened that fateful day in Florida.
14:20 Speaker 04 Right, so 2021, COVID had been going on, this was January, so for a good nine, 10 months, almost all of my concerts were canceled. One of the only ones that wasn't was this performance in Florida and You know, it didn't have as many restrictions and the orchestra was extremely careful and great. So I felt comfortable going despite everything else. And there was no way that I was going to cancel one of the only opportunities that I had in a whole year to perform and also frankly, to work and get paid. Not only was this an important
15:02 Speaker 04 concert because it was one of the only concerts, it's also this incredible piece. It's the Sinfonia Concertante, the Symphony Concerto by Sergei Prokofiev, which is a mammoth work. The cello is just crazy. It goes all the way up to the heights, serene. It plummets down to the depths. It's wild and frenetic and chaotic. It's so difficult technically. And this was my first performance of this piece ever with an orchestra. I got to Florida and played the first concert. We're so excited. The next morning I woke up and I couldn't really taste the toothpaste very well. The thing that I remember is thinking, uh-oh,
15:47 Speaker 04 and grabbing a box of Altoids and stuffing my nose in it and nothing. And I was just, oh no, this is not good.
15:55 Laurie Santos? It wasn't good. In fact, it was about to get far worse than Joshua ever expected. But more on that after the break.
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17:30 Laurie Santos? Case in point, MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be. That was the motivation behind MassMutual's Living Well Rider. Now available with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance, it provides policy owners with access to wellness benefits at no additional cost. 175 years comes with a lot of knowledge. Today, MassMutual is proud of using that knowledge to help people live well, so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness.
18:14 Laurie Santos? That's massmutual.com/wellness.
18:24 Laurie Santos? We left cellist Joshua Roman on a concert tour frantically sniffing toothpaste and Altoids, checking to see if his sense of smell really had disappeared, a sure sign that he'd caught COVID.
18:35 Speaker 04 I panicked a bit, got a test, and of course, it came back positive. The orchestra canceled that concert. I found a place to hole up for a while. My infection was not that bad. It was kind of weird. I mostly had the unrecognizable symptoms. I wasn't coughing, but I was short of breath. I wasn't sneezing, but I couldn't smell or taste. There were weird things going on with fatigue that didn't just feel like being tired. And then I just never got better.
19:10 Speaker 00 That's so awful. And so describe what that fatigue was like.
19:15 Speaker 04 It was really strange. It's like I'm wearing a coat of heavy metal or armor underneath my skin, embedded in the muscles. Like, everything is just so difficult to move. Or if you've ever woken up at the wrong time with jet lag and not been able to sort out how to lift your arm, that's a similar feeling.
19:43 Speaker 00 Okay, I've had bad jet lag, but my arms have always worked. Like, when traveling to, like, Europe or Asia, this is a new one for me.
19:50 Speaker 04 Well, I, the only times that's happened to me are, yes, traveling to Asia or something and then waking up totally at the wrong time. And your body's so confused. If anyone listening has felt that, drop it in the comments. I love the ways that we describe sensations because it's really difficult to pin down whether we're talking about the same thing.
20:14 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:14 Speaker 04 So much of the time. But the quality of this fatigue is not sleepiness. It has nothing to do with, I need to go to bed. It has everything to do with, I don't know how to get the energy to move something or to lift my arm. Or when it comes to thinking, last night I was laying on the ground and I realized in conversation with my fiancee that I couldn't think, I could only speak. Like, I couldn't conjure up words unless I was saying them. And I don't, I don't know exactly what's going on with that. But physically, cognitively, this fatigue is debilitating and sleep doesn't fix it.
20:57 Speaker 00 You also had this condition that I've heard of with long COVID called dysautonomia.
21:02 Speaker 04 Yes.
21:02 Speaker 00 What's that? And what did that feel like?
21:04 Speaker 04 Well, I still have that one, though it's a lot less inhibiting than it used to be. It's a nervous system condition, and this is my bastardization of something that I heard from a doctor somewhere. And so please forgive me, but the nervous system generally takes an input, like a temperature change. And then the output would be what the body doesn't respond. So sweating to cool you off, for example, or in the other direction, shivering to warm you up. And similarly, when you're, you're running a marathon in mile 21 or whatever it is, when your body is really trying to slow you down,
21:47 Speaker 04 that feeling is the nervous system giving you signals because of the information it's receiving from the body. Otherwise, you wouldn't have that feeling. You would just keep going and damage tissues and all that sort of thing. So dysautonomia is when those signals are mixed up, when those wires get crossed. Yesterday, I was walking up the subway stairs. I had to stop three times for one flight of stairs. And I know that my muscles can do this, but my nervous system, using the sensation of fatigue and heaviness, is screaming, you've done way too much.
22:29 Speaker 04 It's a mix up. It's a mix up of signals in the same way that sometimes I will start shivering uncontrollably, feel incredibly cold, and everyone else is in shorts and a t-shirt. Fine.
22:42 Speaker 00 So give me a sense of how these changes affected your life. Like, what was your kind of morning routine like before long COVID kicked in versus now?
22:50 Speaker 04 Well,
22:53 Speaker 04 let's start with the sleeping. Four hours was kind of what I considered the necessary. Six was great and anything past that was a waste of time. So if I went to bed at four, I'd be up by 10. If I went to bed at midnight, which was very rare, then I'd be up by six. And Vipassana meditation, an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. And charge at the day. Let's go run six miles. How close to a hundred pushups in a row can we do? Can we clap in between? What if we do a workout class where we lift weights and then a yoga class? So that the brain will be really clear.
23:36 Speaker 04 And then I can jump into composing or practicing.
23:41 Speaker 00 And so what's it like now? I get the sense that it's very different.
23:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's funny. You ask me, again, my fiance, Anna Louisa. It'd be funny to get her perspective because we met since I've gotten along COVID. It's been over four years now, so I've had to adjust to this to a certain degree. She doesn't know the difference. She hasn't seen me wake up and run out the door. I mean, now I wake up and meditate as close to 20 minutes as I can get. And sometimes it's not a full 20 minutes. And I take about an hour and a half or so to wake up. My body just feels weird. It has these extra sensations all over that are not really comfortable.
24:29 Speaker 04 And they stop me from being able to move with ease. My brain similarly have to be really careful. Because if I do too much, let's say if I do the Saturday morning New York Times crossword puzzle, then I'm gonna need a break. So I really have to think about what's coming in the day. Spend a lot more time planning. I go to bed at 10:30 and I get up at 7:15 every night. It's a different world.
25:00 Speaker 00 And how has that changed your cello practice?
25:03 Speaker 04 Well, when I first was trying to play the cello again, I would play for two or three minutes and that's it. That's all I could do in a whole day. Just moving the bow was so exhausting. And I had one other concert and I had two months, a little over two months, I think. So I was trying to practice every day. Eventually I got up to 20 minutes, which was the length of the piece that I was playing. And that was huge. So for a few days, that's all I would do is once a day I would play that piece. And then I decided to try to practice it. And practicing is different than playing. When you're just playing through something,
25:47 Speaker 04 you know, you're just having fun or you're just going through it. But what I was doing was I was thinking, okay, is this in tune? Could this sound different? Would this be better if I used different fingers to give it a different feel? You know, those sorts of analytical decisions. And instead of 20 minutes, it was about a minute or so. And I was shaking, had to have help putting the cello away. I couldn't open my eyes. I had a complete crash. And it was a real lesson in the different ways of engaging with music that I was going to have to start paying really close attention to how I was treating the cello
26:31 Speaker 04 and then later realizing how I was treating myself as I practiced.
26:37 Speaker 00 And this led you at the time to make a really tough decision. What was that?
26:41 Speaker 04 Well, after that concert, I put the cello away. I just gave up. I thought this is too hard and I put it in the case. There was nothing on the calendar. So I wasn't really in danger of letting anyone else down. Basically, it was a choice. Do I wash the dishes today? Or do I try to practice for a few minutes? I was pushing myself so hard and getting pummeled by my body for pushing it. I was just dragged down so far that I didn't think that there was anything on the other side of all of this work that was going to make it worth it.
27:16 Speaker 00 And what was that like? I mean, my sense is like, a lot of people, you know, put their instruments away. But this seems like it was the first time your cello was away for more than like a few hours in your life.
27:25 Speaker 04 Yes, I don't actually remember what the longest amount of time I had ever gone without practicing was before that. But suffice it to say, in the past, if I had, let's say, a flight, I would practice in the airport. Or I would sit with the cello in a hotel room after it's too late to practice. And I would move my left hand to practice and I would kind of fake the right hand so that I could still be practicing. I was obsessed. And for me to intentionally say, I'm not going to practice, even for one day, was such a wild, radical concept.
28:10 Speaker 04 But to put the cello in its case and say, I don't know when I'm going to pick this back up again. I didn't think that would ever happen to me.
28:17 Speaker 00 I mean, it strikes me that this wasn't even just like an instrument. It was almost like your friend.
28:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I played since I was three. It's human size. It's, it's the little things like the cello has to fly in a seat on the airplane. So cello Roman has been traveling next to me, taking the window seat because, you know, you can't climb over in an emergency. So I, for, for years, you can make all the jokes and everything, but it's, it's also real. Like, that's a real relationship. The vibrations coming from the cello, moving through my body is something that is second nature. My body has grown around the cello. My right shoulder is shorter than my left shoulder. My left fingers are substantially longer than my right fingers
29:05 Speaker 04 because from the age of three, they were stretching and moving in ways that my right hand was not. There's all of this stuff that, you know, we, we grew up together.
29:15 Speaker 00 And now it was in a box.
29:18 Speaker 04 And now it's in a box.
29:20 Laurie Santos? I find it so heartbreaking that Joshua, who was once described as the Jimi Hendrix of the cello, was so sick that he could no longer even hold his instrument. But of course, the story doesn't end there. We'll hear more after this quick break.
29:37 Laurie Santos? An anniversary gives you reasons to look back, but the most valuable kind of experience is one that you can harness to help you move forward. Case in point, MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be. That was the motivation behind MassMutual's Living Well Rider. Now available with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance, it provides policy owners with access to wellness benefits at no additional cost. 175 years comes with a lot of knowledge.
30:20 Laurie Santos? Today, MassMutual is proud of using that knowledge to help people live well, so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness.
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31:39 Laurie Santos? Long COVID was wreaking havoc on the career of concert cellist Joshua Roman. Since the age of three, the instrument he loved so much had been a constant presence in his life, but months of overwhelming fatigue forced Joshua to put his cello down, unsure if he would ever play it again.
31:56 Speaker 04 The cello was in its case for almost three months. This was early April 2021, and I didn't touch it again until right before summer solstice in June. And I remember that because the reason I did was that someone had asked me to play for their summer solstice party. And I said, yes, kind of like, sure, I'll probably cancel later, but I'll say yes because I feel guilty. And then I just forgot to cancel. And a couple of days before the party, there I was like, oh, this is happening, so I should probably get the cello out and let's figure out if I still know how to do this. And, you know, this is probably something I should work with my therapist about not
32:41 Speaker 04 holding on to, but this image that sticks with me of wiping the dust off the cello case is just wild to me, that it sat, I didn't even move it. It just collected dust for almost three months. And then I started to play and I started with the famous prelude by Bach.
33:08 Speaker 04 You know, the one from the car commercials, but it's the best. It's really the best. And, you know, of course, I was feeling for my fingers, like this kind of rusted over feel that you get when they're used to doing something and then they don't for a long time. But what immediately took over was the vibrations against my chest, moving through my body. And it was the most moving moment that I'd had with the cello in so long. This rush of emotions and realizations and energy.
33:48 Speaker 04 I was overwhelmed, but also so suddenly motivated, inspired, and like, things just clicked into place.
33:57 Speaker 00 And kind of getting back to music has allowed you to do lots of things that we talk about on this podcast. It seems to have involved a lot of self compassion and a lot of what we call radical acceptance. What does that radical acceptance meant to you?
34:09 Speaker 04 Oof. So I think one of the biggest things is that I don't play the cello unless I want to. So there are days when I don't practice. And the me of six years ago is like, what the heck are you doing? I don't know if I can swear, so I'm not going to.
34:27 Speaker 00 You can swear, it's fine.
34:28 Speaker 04 What the hell are you doing, Joshua? You're supposed to practice every day. Like, but more than anything, now I treasure the trust in the relationship. You know, the cello is a proxy for a part of myself. I know it's just an inanimate object, but there's something about, am I practicing because I feel like I'm supposed to? Or do I actually feel an internal impetus and desire to make music? And sometimes that is a little bit, okay, well, I do have a concert tomorrow and I really want to sound good, but it's not, I'm supposed to get better because that's how people prove something.
35:09 Speaker 04 No, I'm going to play because I want to play and because I love exploring it. And when I pick up the cello, I'm in a different state of mind. I'm ready, I'm approaching it a different way. I'm never sitting at the cello thinking, oh, I have to do this. Even though I loved it before, a lot of times I'll admit now it was guilt or it was some other thing. And what I was training myself to do was to ignore that part of myself and try to force the cello to be a tool. And again, that's a proxy for a part of myself. Force myself to be a tool in service of something else to deny my state of being would have any effect on it.
35:50 Speaker 04 Sure, in a moment of crisis, maybe you need to push past, but especially when we're talking about scratching a wooden box to bring people joy, like, what the hell? No, you kind of like pay attention to how you feel.
36:03 Speaker 00 I love this example so much because this whole season is about coping strategies, which when used in the way you're talking about them, where it's compassionate and patient, these things are great. But any good coping strategy, whether it's meditation or kind of taking time to exercise or something, if you're doing it in this forced way, in the like have to, I should way, it winds up not having the benefits that you might think. And it seems like even with music, you're able to find this, like you have to have a kind of compassionate relationship with this coping strategy, or it's like not going to work in the way you think.
36:32 Speaker 04 It's so fascinating, right? What you're saying is, to me, it's reinforcing that idea that it's all about opening up the lines of communication in a way, whether it's between parts of yourself or other people, the understanding, first of all, there's a relationship and every relationship needs a certain amount of trust and that you just don't actually build the trust that you need to feel good if it's all about checkboxes and improvement. Those things, yes, they're useful, they're important tools, but if they're the basis of a relationship, the relationship is not going to grow in actual trust, it's just going to have a very fancy system of verification.
37:15 Speaker 00 Another way that you've been able to grow your trust through this kind of awful long COVID incident is to really trust the importance of rest.
37:22 Speaker 04 Yes.
37:22 Speaker 00 And it seems like you've also had a lot of acceptance for what your body can really do. I know you even carry something with you to remind yourself and other people about this, right?
37:30 Speaker 04 Yes, I have a card, I have many of them printed up, and it's something that people can look at if I have what I call a crash, which incapacitates me to various degrees.
37:44 Speaker 00 And just so we understand, what does that, what would that look like in public if you had one?
37:48 Speaker 04 I really try not to have them in public, but sometimes even walking home, I will have a crash and I will suddenly look like someone who's just stumbling, like barely able to shuffle forward, my eyes will be closing, and that's a minor crash if I can still keep walking. And I will push myself to get home. A full crash is not being able to set up, not being able to open my eyes, not being able to speak, often not even being able to think. It's uncomfortable because it's incapacitating, but it's not physically painful. I kind of stop being there. It's kind of crazy. And it's for someone who used
38:31 Speaker 04 to fix everything by running faster, it's pretty crazy to be faced with this phenomenon that I still deal with pretty often.
38:42 Speaker 00 And so how do you have acceptance for that? It just seems so hard.
38:46 Speaker 04 It's very difficult. And this is where I think the beautiful irony of kind of getting the lessons that you need rather than the lessons that you want from life. I can't push my way through it. Pushing is what causes crashes. So really paying attention to what precipitates a crash and whether there's anything I can do either in the moment to say, oh, this is about to happen. So I have to stop. I have to leave this party. I have to get out of this loud place. I have to grab a cab instead of thinking I can walk all the way to this store today. Or backing up a step, and this is where it's
39:27 Speaker 04 really been life-changing, is planning my day, saying, okay, I know this is going to take a lot of energy and that's going to take a lot of energy. So those two things can't happen on the same day. Our conversation is one of two things that I'm going to do today that require a certain level of engagement and energy over any kind of sustained period of time. The rest of the day is going to be a mix of resting and not taxing my brain too much. I've also learned how to ask for help, how to delegate. I've been building a team. I have a business, all these sorts of things. When you start to prioritize and take care of yourself and think about the people around you, all of a sudden you start
40:11 Speaker 04 building structures that give everyone things to do. And it's just, it's much better.
40:18 Speaker 00 I also understand that you've been able to kind of come to terms with your long COVID through your music, getting back to music as a coping mechanism. And so how have you been able to do that and kind of share your vulnerability with others in the same way you've shared music?
40:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, thank you for asking about that. It's kind of interesting because I get the question a lot, like, how does music help you get better? And for me, it's such a twisted answer because the act of listening to music even is taxing. So if I sit down and listen to a Mahler symphony, that's a big thing for the day. Not going to also do the Saturday crossword puzzle. That kind of decision making, let alone playing the cello. So I have really focused on doing the things that mean the most to me, that allow me to bring as much as possible to the table.
41:13 Speaker 04 And my friend Dasha at Princeton University started a series called Healing with Music. And she was seeing me struggle with long COVID. And at the time, you know, we would tell, my manager would tell people to expect that I was going to need to lay down more, that I was going to have this and that, they should be ready for that. But I wasn't going around making long COVID a part of anything I was doing. I said I had it on social media a couple of times. I wasn't trying to hide it, but it was just kind of a thing in the background. And I was trying to keep it that way, not to have it interfere with my work. And she asked if I would be okay building a program around my experience with long COVID and playing the music that had helped me heal.
41:59 Speaker 04 Her asking that question gave me an opportunity to think about things in a different way. And for the, maybe the very first time, to think about music, not in terms of, one of two ways, this is what people expect to hear on stage from a cello, so I'm going to do that. Or two, this is something I think other people will find interesting, and so I'm going to do that. But what seems really meaningful to me, like, why am I doing this? Let's put that on stage. And it was really successful. I felt really good about it. It fit together in a way that I can stand behind.
42:37 Speaker 04 I didn't feel like I was projecting a false sense of intellectualism or something like, no, this was the music that I loved and that was giving me a reason to play the cello and the story of why that was. And that story was long COVID and is long COVID. And from that experience, built a project that I call Immunity. Where now it's everything from playing for other people with long COVID and long COVID clinics to advocacy on the hill to these residencies. And it's opened so many doors and given me such a sense of purpose to be able to not
43:20 Speaker 04 question whether what I'm doing is using my energy well. The answer is yes, this is what it's for. This is what my energy is for. And how can I build a life and the kinds of relationships and team in life and work and artistry that allow that kind of impact and connection in those relationships to flourish?
43:51 Laurie Santos? I'm so grateful that Joshua Roman was willing to share his journey with us today. His story shows just how amazing music is as a coping strategy. It's such a quick path to joy and togetherness for musicians and listeners alike. But there's a second component of Joshua's story that I really appreciated. Traumatic experiences like getting long COVID do suck, but they can also help us grow, often in unexpected ways. It's really helpful to remember that adversity does have a bright side. It can help us appreciate all the stuff we took for granted. There's one final episode left in this special season on creative coping strategies, and it's devoted to a sport that I have recently become a massive fan of.
44:35 Laurie Santos? It's a game that's skillful, competitive, fast-paced, and fun. It's called Cornhole.
44:41 Speaker 05 We have under 18 players competing in the pro field against adults. I've seen players throw on crutches. I mean, we have players that have no arms that throw with their feet. Literally, anybody can play, so now all of a sudden you get to compete and there's no limitations or boundaries to that.
44:57 Laurie Santos? Oh, yes. We'll be learning how we can cope better with Cornhole next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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