Value

Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

"The Princess Bride" (1973 novel, 1987 film)

In the last five minutes of 2018, I learned that I respect myself. Afterward I realized that I define my value in relation to how others value me -- that is, I don't consider myself to be intrinsically valuable.

While I have regard for my own feelings and needs, and I admire several of my abilities and qualities, I consider those abilities and qualities to be separate from the core of what I am as a person. Essentially, everything I do is a costume, a la Shakespeare, and my actual self has very little substance. Perhaps I meant that I admire my costume, or that I admire my ability to make this costume look so real.

I think my musicianship is valuable if and when others do; I think my other traits are valuable if and when I see them have positive impacts on others. My efforts to improve my relationship with myself are a mask for my irrational but still very real fear that I, as a cohesive concept, don't exist.

If it's a costume, and I'm acting, then what is me? I mirror behavior and traits that I see others exhibiting, slowly adding to the costume over time, piecing together what's considered socially acceptable, what's considered okay within the boundaries of a particular friendship, what behaviors will make it more likely for me to find work as a musician, what behaviors will make me a better person and more worthy of love. I believe in the costume's ability to convince people that I am valuable and worthy of respect. I use clothes and lipstick and an army of bad puns and loud laughs to disguise the emptiness underneath, and it works. Most of the time.

My gender is a performance, too. Every day I choose how I want to look when I'm misgendered. I can do femme very well, but only if no one else is doing it better; I can look as masc as anyone with a set of DDDs can, but only if there isn't someone else with a flatter chest and a better-fitting suit. In that I experience gender euphoria, it happens in the fleeting moments when the costume aligns with whatever my gender is doing that day. It's never something I plan, only something I experience, and I feel as though the rest of my existence is similar.

The first rehearsal for opera was last Monday. Last year, the night of the first performance, they left me. I'm in second chair again, and I'll be in that same pit a month from now, fighting panic attacks and missing notes because we all know I won't practice the music as much as I need to. And it matters less when I'm one of a section, but it matters more now because I'm one of four, but in the end it doesn't matter because no one will see me, and if I'm not seen I don't exist.

My New Year's resolutions boiled down to "be kinder to yourself." I don't know how to do that, because I don't know what myself is.