It’s 3:52 p.m. and Park University student and classical violin major Laurel Gagnon throws her head back in laughter as she tries to teach how hands need to move to play the violin.

“Other side, nope, that hand’s wrong,” she says to her pupil. After an impossible power struggle of the left and right hands, she shakes her head. “No, no,” she laughs. “Just write.”

Gagnon’s eyes light up behind her rimmed glasses as she speaks of her violin. The fingers on her left hand twitch slightly in anticipation as she speaks.

“I want to practice all the time,” she says. “Some days you can’t even do it even though you have to, other days I can sit down and do it for two to three hours.”

And practice she does. When Erin Esry, her roommate and friend, hears her leave her dorm room to practice, she knows not to expect her back for a while.

“Sometimes she won’t be back until four in the morning,” she says. “She’ll be gone that long.”

Gagnon’s authentic intensity is motived by her music.

“There’s a certain beauty that I have in my mind of how it should be played and I’m not there yet,” she says. “Through practice you’re explaining the music at deeper and deeper levels. Each piece is different and it all depends on how you interpret it. Everyone can play the same piece differently.”

Gagnon shifts in her tan seat and crosses one leg over the other, tugging on the sleeve of her pullover and smiling slightly at the navy blue Sperry’s on her feet. She goes on explaining the world through the eyes of a musician.

“We’re all very strange people,” she says. “(We are) very odd. That’s pretty much all you need to know. When (musicians) watch movies, we laugh, but not at the joke, but because of how the music cuts in, going to a movie full of musicians is a whole new experience. We find humor in noises, or sound effects, or how people talk.”

Though music is the undeniable sparkle in her eyes as she speaks, the question mankind thirsts for is the genesis of what first put the flame there. Without hesitation or even a deep thought, her response is simple: difficulties motivate music.

“Oh yes, people say you can’t perform a piece to the fullest until you’ve experienced heartbreak,” she says. “Because music is so emotionally driven and if you can’t experience it firsthand, how can you experience it to other people?”

She leans forward, as if communicating her feelings through words isn’t enough.

“Beethoven, when he went deaf, his music changed and you could hear his psychological struggle,” she says.

Gagnon slides her empty ‘to go’ coffee cup across the table between the safety of her two hands, contemplating her own personal heartbreak.

“I don’t want to seem dramatic. I mean everyone has the heartbreak of guys and things like that,” she says. “But running was my life. I struggled mentally with running; it would underlie my entire identity. I would cry for days, running could break my heart.”

As a former cross country and track athlete at Park University, she’s recently made a large shift away from athletics toward sole dedication to her love of music.

“To be a great runner it has to take over my life,” she explains. “To be a great musician it has to take over my life. There’s only so much self-discipline and taking it out of running and fully into music was the best decision of my life actually. When I was running I felt guilty for running. When I was playing I felt guilty for playing. “

Gagnon goes on about the battle of attempting two high intensity interests and she opens up more about her identity shift and how it affected her. Mourning a part of her life was a long term decision and she wanted to make sure it was the right one.

“Eventually I was over it but I was still holding on, I didn’t tell anyone,” she says. “How others viewed me…I care way too much about what others think of me. I was afraid the team would be mad.”

She explains the reality of the struggle of burying her secretive and rising passion for music, as well as the burdens of carrying around her love of competitive running that had long since died.

“It felt like betrayal, pretending to be invested and loving it when you just can’t,” she says. “The thing I noticed is that I forgot to encourage others. I quit and I’m learning how to do it again. I was spending more time trying to encourage myself. I started to lose parts of myself that I actually liked.”

Now, as a non-collegiate athlete, her approach to running is a healthier, de-stressing method. She says she enjoys not having to invest too much energy if she doesn’t want to.

As the story of her evolution comes to a close, it reverts one last time to her fire for music.

“Oh gosh,” she laughs. “It’s like, my life. There’s always a piece of music in my head playing itself. It’s constant. I dream about music.”