Three weekends ago, I sang in my choir’s last concert of the season. The theme for this concert was Echoes Across Time, presenting pieces which interacted, in some way, with the voices of past work. To give you a sense of things, we sang Barber’s Reincarnations, a setting of 19th-century Irish poetry by a 20th-century American composer, and a pairing of Duruflé and Jiello’s settings of the Latin chant, “Ubi Caritas.”1
Part of this concert included a collaboration with a local high school choir. This was a fairly standard two-choir program: they sang a set, then we sang our set, interspersed with a few songs we sang together. We hadn’t seen any of their set before the concert, and so, when the concert started, we sat down at the front and became part of the audience, experiencing this performance for the first time.
And it was, frankly, incredible. It’s not just that they were good singers, but that they were fully committed to it, to the act of performing and making music together. It felt so utterly vulnerable, singing in an unfamiliar space, in front of an unfamiliar audience, and yet still giving it one’s all, all of one’s voice. I wanted to go up to each of them and tell them this is special, to tell them to keep using your voice, because we hear it, and it does matter.
I can’t imagine that I would’ve been able to do something like that at their age. It has always been cooler to be ironic, to not suggest to people what you actually feel or believe. I can’t count the number of times I’ve played games with what I’m saying, even with some of my closest friends, trying not to give away what I actually mean while desperately hoping that they recognize it; even as I speak, I can’t count how many times I’ve stayed silent. To just be raw and vulnerable, that is a bravery we don’t talk about quite enough.
The theme for our season overall was Vox, or voice. How and when do we use our voice? And what keeps us from using it, what keeps us from saying what we actually believe?
Three summers ago, I said the sentence “I use they/them pronouns” for the first time.
The summer of 2022 was a really hard time for me. I’d cut contact with my parents in January of that year, and I was still trying to navigate the aftermath. Although I had been hoping to spend my summer in Boston doing research, I had realized that I needed to get a tad bit more financial stability under my belt if I was going to stay the course. When the Microsoft internship offer came through, I took it. It was not exactly where I wanted to be, but that was a cost I was more than willing to pay.
At the same time, that summer was one of the most freeing experiences I’ve ever had. Armed with my newfound freedom, a three-month rental car contract, and a confidence that I would not be returning to Microsoft,2 I spent the summer just trying on new versions of myself. I started growing out my hair,3 I went on a trip to Vancouver with six people I only kind of knew, and, of course, I started considering what it meant to be non-binary. I got to try on so many different and new versions of myself, taking on new interests and personality traits, and discarding some old ones.
I wrote my first real blog post about my queerness that summer.
It has been fascinating to discover who I can be in the absence of obligation. That summer, I remember standing in the Atlantic Ocean with a friend, out in Rockport, Massachusetts, considering that I might be an artist there some day, or just something different from who I was then. Over the past three years, I’ve spent so much time trying new things and imagining new futures, in a way that I don’t know I could’ve done without the freedom that I have now. And it’s hard, sometimes, to leave one’s old self behind—to slowly slough off old obligations and connections and identities is, fundamentally, to lose something—but I am happier now, with who I am, and who I hope to become one day.
I am by nature an overthinker, but as time has gone by, my sense of being non-binary has gotten less and less complicated. I’ve never really had a relation with gender where it has ever been particularly useful to me; it has always felt more like an obligation than an identity. And so it has been so easy to just lose that obligation, the same way one might feel relief after canceling a stressful meeting or a date with someone you don’t particularly like. It has been so easy to let it settle down, away from what I consider myself to be. I don’t have to be anything; I just am.
As the Whitman from the previous choir concert went:
From this hour, I ordain myself loos'd of imaginary lines.
Often, the freedom to cross or discard imaginary lines is something we don’t get from society. Societal constraints—the constraints of the people and situations around us—are real; they matter in the most important sense, in that they dictate how we relate to the people around us, something at the core of our humanity.
At the same time, I think it is a freedom we don’t exercise enough as individuals, and it is very easy to perceive more constraints than there actually are. How afraid are you of trying something new, of becoming someone different? And who would you be, in the absence of obligation?
What lines would you draw for yourself, rather than for others?
Seven summers ago, I attended a summer research program at MIT called RSI.4
Growing up in South Dakota, I was a fairly quiet student. I think there was just not a lot to talk about with many of the people around me; we did not share the same interests, and we came from fundamentally different home worlds. As a perhaps silly example which belies a larger iceberg of unrelatability, I still don’t fully know what my classmates ate at home, because I had Chinese food every day, cooked at home by my mom. In the little groups of people I was familiar with, I talked more—the debate team, the orchestra, etc.—but, in general, I was very quiet.
When I went to RSI, I realized that that quietness was not inherent to me. Stuck in an environment with eighty other ambitious, science-minded kids from all over the world, I found that I was actually quite comfortable with being open and vulnerable to people who were open to receiving my vulnerability. I remember talking to people about what they were working on, being so excited about all the different projects and subjects I was learning about; I remember singing with folks in MacGregor lounges and outside on the Fourth of July. I still think about the rush of emotion that comes first from the anxiety and vulnerability of sharing oneself, and then the relief and satisfaction of the recognition and response one gets back. I think I must’ve felt that emotion more times that summer than I had throughout the rest of my life before then.
At the end of camp, I remember getting notes from my friends, saying that my openness had changed them, had encouraged them to be more open as well; I remember thinking, “In what world? How could I have possibly done such a thing?” But it was true—I had tried to be someone new, to be someone more open, to use my voice, and it had worked. I remembering wanting to do that again, as soon as I could again.
When I came home from RSI, my guidance counselor asked me what the experience was like. I remember when I started talking about it, she told me “that’s the most excited I’ve ever seen you to talk about something.”
And of course, the excitement was real. That camp changed my life, because when I spoke there, they heard me in a way that I had never been heard by before, not by my classmates or by my parents. They listened, and they thought it mattered.
What I am trying to say is that I keep forgetting to use my voice, and then I am reminded, once and again, that I have it. That it exists and has value. That using my voice, in turn, causes other people to use theirs. For me, this has always been most clear in the making of art, in the communities around theatre shows and music ensembles; for you, it may be something else.
This, in turn, is why I think Pride still matters, and matters so much. What I say is intricately tied up with who I am, and what I am comfortable saying about who I am. Pride is a statement to the world that we are comfortable with saying who we are, in the myriad aspects of our queerness, a fractal subset of the myriad aspects of our complexity as individual human beings. It is taking a moment of vulnerability to say “I am here, I am queer, and I am not going away.”
What I am saying is that I think we could all use a little more Pride, in who we are and what we say about who we are. In examining what we genuinely feel, and sharing it with the people around us, however mundane it seems. In letting ourselves be infinitely complex. In letting ourselves care, and be cared for.
I want to be earnest in a world that is constantly turning away from earnestness. I want to say all the things I believe, and have them heard. I want to sit in the shade and listen to friends and strangers alike tell me everything they feel, and I want to them to know I believe them. That it matters to me. I want to take pictures of my friends as they are, smiling or surly, in the candid moments we spend together that make me love them so much. I want to love and be loved in the broadest sense, without hesitation or fear.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Who will you say you are? And who will you listen to?
I love the Duruflé “Ubi Caritas”. That is all.
Oh, how time makes liars of us all. The sentiment of this was true, though—I moved teams the next summer from a newly-acquired startup in Microsoft Advertising to the Windows kernel team I currently work on.
Big shoutout to my sister who called me a “trash baby” upon first seeing a picture of my longer hair, but then proceeded to suggest the middle part I still wear my hair in to this day.
Much can be said about RSI (Research Science Institute). I am mostly eliding the research portion of RSI in this section of the post, because it is not the primary concern here, but I did also learn a lot about technical research during my time there, and I don’t want to obscure that by just talking about the social aspect. This part of the post is my personal experience, and the broader place of RSI (and programs like it) in the academic landscape is something that I am not going to fit into a footnote on a post like this.
tell me about despair
what??!? you're queer?!??