Maya Shankar
speaker
1,518 appearances
8 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 5 Jul
Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And I had really big dreams of one day becoming a professional.
And then my slight change of plans was that I had a career-ending injury.
And I remember that there was something so curious about my grief when it came to the loss of the violin, which is that I found myself grieving not just the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself in this much deeper way.
I think many of us don't realize sometimes how much
something has come to define us until we lose that very thing.
And I realized that so much of who I was had become entangled with this identity of violinist.
My sense of belonging, you know, I was bullied a lot in my school.
I was one of a few brown kids in a predominantly Caucasian school.
So
I found refuge in the more international community of my music school.
A lot of my self-confidence was tied up in it.
And so when I lost the violin, all of that kind of went away.
And I felt myself feeling really untethered from anything meaningful.
And it's taken me decades to learn music.
a valuable lesson from that that I'm so excited to share with all of you today because had I known it at the time, I think I would have had an easier transition point for myself.
And that is it can be quite precarious for us to anchor our self-identity too tightly to what we do.
Instead, we can learn to anchor our identities to why we do the things we do.
So when I asked myself this question when it came to the violin, I realized, oh, human connection was at the core of my love for music.
I love connecting with my peers.
I love connecting with the audience.
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