About Me

Hello! My name is Catherine Sabrina Velazquez, but you can call me Vibrato Queen. I am a slightly erratic 18-year-old who is obsessed with classical music.

I started this blog when I was a naive 17-year-old who thought that I had to become a professional musician to be a "real" music lover. I also thought that my inability to practice my violin consistently was the greatest peril of my life. How I was wrong! Friends, I suffer from a terrifying subset of OCD known as Pure-O. I would explain it as a mental illness where your mind spends every waking minute trying to convince you that you are among the worst individuals to walk the Earth: the type of people only seen on crime shows. Horrifying thoughts, images, and sensations plague your mind and body, and your mind does its best to convince you that those intrusions mean something. You spend hours compulsively scraping the inner corners of your mind, trying to fabricate any possible evidence that you are what your mind says you are. The anxiety in itself is debilitating, but the worst part of Pure-O is that it dismantles any sense-of-self you previously had. A sinister identity crisis, if you will. If you truly do fit the accusations made against you, then you are truly inhuman by society's standards. You truly don't deserve to exist.

The ironic part - as explained in the linked video - of all this is that most sufferers of Pure-O felt inhuman long before the intrusive thoughts began. They are perfectly respectable, kindhearted, moral people who were somehow wronged by this world. Even though I am intelligent, beautiful, introspective, thoughtful, and even affectionate, I got the message for years that someone like me didn't deserve to exist. So right as I began to find fulfillment in my life, my brain grasped onto a ridiculous fear to prove that I'm the horrible person I always felt I was inside.

Rather than trying to fight with my mind, I choose to engage in the activities that I remember made me human. That's why I'm devoting special time reconnecting with my love for classical music. It was ultimately my love for classical music which led me to develop as a person, even if my self-esteem is still low enough for me to fall ill with Pure-O.

I find solace in classical music because many of the greatest composers were as tortured as I am. When I delve into composers' life and work, I allow myself not to feel so defective. As I engross myself into their displays of hope, I can more clearly envision my light at the end of the tunnel.