Happy birthday

Birthdays are semi-arbitrary markers of the passage of time.

I turned 23 yesterday, on Remembrance Sunday. I spent the day doing chores and on the phone with my family. Some of my gifts hadn’t arrived yet; such is the nature of cross-continental shipping. I tried not to think about everyone who has died in war, soldiers and civilians, patriots and dissidents, those who orchestrated the deaths of others and those who were comparatively innocent.

Birth and death exist in harmony. Perhaps it is fitting that today I realised that Pablo Casals died 23 years before I was born. We treat the six Bach suites for solo cello as the centre of the cello repertoire despite them having been in the public consciousness for barely a century. Canon is a semi-arbitrary representation of everything that humans have done (but only the “right” humans, the privileged ones, the ones who had time to create and learn and either force others to do menial work or neglect to do anything to combat structural, systemic inequality). Sometimes I honestly think we need to throw out everything we think of as Western classical music and start again.

I am asked what I want to do with my career. I am told I need to have a plan for what I will do after I graduate. I am torn. I have grand visions, ideals for what I want to change in the classical music world, and I am beginning to work toward those; but I am painfully aware that money is a requirement for survival and I have neither the connections nor some intangible element of musicianship (which in others’ cases has jump-started careers) to do anything besides freelancing in the years immediately following my master’s degree. I am 23. I am no longer a child. I am expected to make a life for myself using the tools I have been given by my parents, my educators, and society in general.

I don’t fear mediocrity, because I can find a learning opportunity for myself in any situation. I fear that my work will be meaningless. I want to be visible as a nonbinary mentally ill cellist, because representation is important; I want to use my privilege as a white person to break down structural inequalities in Western classical music. I have no desire to be a name in a book of influential cellists, because nothing is being done about climate change and nothing else will matter if we continue as we have.

When I was asked this year what I want for my birthday or for Christmas (which falls six and a half weeks after my birthday), I found it difficult to think of anything. I don’t want more stuff that I have to store somewhere, I feel horrible asking for money when the people who have money to give me are already paying for my grad school, and I don’t have anywhere for my parents to stay if they were to visit me (they visited me for my last two birthdays in Chicago and stayed at my apartment both times). As for celebrations, I drink twice a month at most, I don’t have much room to host a gathering of any kind, and I’ve only just moved here so I’m still making friends. I had people over on Saturday night and had a great time and felt empty and dissociative when they’d left. This birthday has been the strangest and the loneliest in a long time, and maybe this is what adulthood is, and I feel so like a child.