Could be age related. I could never play a musical instrument until my mid thirties. Nobody in my family could. My wife found a Ukulele which was left on the side of the road and which was in good condition and took it home. I started playing just randomly tugging strings to understand the sounds and I kept doing that maybe 10 to 30 mins a day for about 2 months and the tunes became less and less random and now I can improvise full 1 to 2 minute melodies on the spot with multiple strings.
I don't need to plan the melody ahead of time I just pick a few notes that go well together then I pick some starting notes and I just intuitively know how to join them together into a full piece. It's like when I play some notes, my fingers themselves resist certain bad notes and whatever note I end up choosing (high pitch or low pitch) seems to work out every time.
I had a guitar since I was 16, and never gave up trying to learn. I reached a plateau very quickly (knew some chords, simple songs), and could never go past it. I then spent almost 20 years in that plateau.
Then, suddenly, it all started to click. I was reharmonizing, writing my own lines, improvising, soloing. It was uncanny. I moved to other instruments at similar speed, stuff I never played before. It became so easy.
I heard many times that once you age, you lose some ability to learn music. What made this experience so jarring was that I experienced the exact opposite.
Maybe this thing that you have to start young is all bullshit (probably what's going on here), and before I had some kind of block. I can't explain what that block was though.
Did the diagnosis perhaps relax some defensive structure in your mind which freed up an ability to tolerate the discomfort of actually identifying what you need to improve?
I don't know. It seems too vague of a description.
On the guitar, I did some identifying and learning.
On drums though, I just sat there and in a matter of months I was able to play to a lot of songs. I was doing polyrhythms, for example, before I knew what polyrhythms were.
Possibly, this is nothing extraordinary and fits the overall learning curve for the general population (I'm assuming lots of people do polyrhythms without knowing them). Which means that before the first episode, I was below that general curve of learning music (slower than everyone else would learn), then something changed right after such episode.
Since I'm on HN, let's use a computer analogy: I would describe it as upgrading a PC to new hardware, things felt smoother. The world of music (and arts in general) felt higher resolution, faster, more responsive to my actions.
I don't need to plan the melody ahead of time I just pick a few notes that go well together then I pick some starting notes and I just intuitively know how to join them together into a full piece. It's like when I play some notes, my fingers themselves resist certain bad notes and whatever note I end up choosing (high pitch or low pitch) seems to work out every time.