“Catherine? Catherine Zhu?”

Yep, that’s me.

I wave my hand to let the adjudicator know I’m here. They smile at me, not very reassuringly, and motion for me to stand up and approach the piano.

I stand up, the goosebumps on my arms making me shiver despite the August heat. I hand the adjudicator my sheet music, take a bow, and sit down at the piano.

The seat is too high, but the pressure of so many eyes on me makes it too embarrassing to reach down and awkwardly adjust the seat. It’s fine, I tell myself. Just get it over with.

I know by the first note that this is not going to go well.

The seat is making it hard to reach the pedals, and I’m missing cues. The piano is difficult to play, hard to press, very different from the piano at home. My hands are sweaty, and I’m missing notes, messing up the trills.

I can tell by the empathetic but amused look of the audience that my performance did not go well.

Later, when the results come out, it’s no surprise that I didn’t place. Still, it hurts. I’d played that piece for more than a year, and I’d completely failed the competition because I was too scared to adjust the seat.

Of course, people whisper nice things: “You played beautifully.” “The piano was bad.” “The judges were unfair.” I nodded and smiled like I believed them.

But, I didn’t. I know where it went wrong. It wasn’t the trills, or the missed notes, or even the unfamiliar piano. It was when I sat down and decided it would be worse to be seen adjusting the chair than to play badly for everyone to hear.

So no, it wasn’t bad luck. It wasn’t the piano. It wasn’t the judges.

It was my fault, and I shouldn’t have been scared.