It’s Spring 2003. My solo set has gone fabulously. An assortment of De Visee met with an unexpected standing ovation.

I am preparing to take my advanced standing – which is insider lingo for “play music in front of professors to determine if I am good enough.” It seems to me that if someone who does not play a single instrument can learn a single song that I, player of many instruments, should be able to fix all that is wrong with my playing in the weeks between now and my advanced standing.

I play in a duo with a young woman I adore. A violinist. She is beautiful in that she is striking and angular and unpredictable. She is sweet and funny.

Our composition professor wrote a piece for the two of us – violin and guitar. It’s title translates simply to, “Three Parts.” I am in love with the idea that no one has ever played this piece before. I assign more value than perhaps I should. I want so very much to master this piece.

A particularly complex passage – slightly too far spaced for my hands – we joke this is the stuff tendinitis is made of. It’s Sunday. I play for 12 hours, forgetting to eat.

Monday morning comes too soon. I wake and cannot quite feel my hands. I can see them and when I look at them they move as expected but they feel so odd. I get in my car to drive to campus but I cannot start the car. Not due to a mechanical issue with the car but, I cannot grip the key hard enough to turn it. I put the bow of the key between my hands and contort my body just enough to turn the engine over.

On my way to school I call a friend of mine – she’s a PA. I explain the very odd morning I am having and she, without hesitation, says a word that has ended many music careers, “tendinitis.” I explain that that cannot be the case because I have plans. She placates me, “ok, you have inflammation of the tendon.” “Well, that sounds treatable.”

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I don’t have an array of hobbies or interests. I have only music. I live alone in a 4 bedroom house that my parents bought for me. It’s kind of a long story but the idea had been that I would live there with roommates but…I didn’t have many friends. None who wanted to commute 15 miles to campus.

My days were filled with playing and writing music until this pesky inflammation began. I can’t play. I sit down on the couch and use two tingling hands to turn on the TV. It’s Oprah but I can’t seem to care enough to change it.

The episode features Jennifer Finney Boylan, a woman who is an esteemed professor and author and has various accomplishments under her belt. She seems so sure of herself and at peace. Which is curious to me because she lived the first 40 years of her life as a man. How could anyone survive that kind of change?

I am astounded at her courage. I think, “Wow if someone can go through something so fundamentally …” I don’t quite have the words but suddenly things that seemed impossible felt… I sleep on it.

When I tell people I woke up gay, I find it important to clarify that I was alone when I woke up. This is not that kind of story.

The morning light is unusually bright and distinctly golden. It occurs to me that I know what has always been wrong with me. Why I didn’t fit in. Why I couldn’t…so many things.

I am a lesbian. Hmm. Yes. But just in case, I head upstairs and to the bathroom mirror I say it aloud. Hmm. To be absolutely sure, I will head to campus and walk down the hallway as if I were gay and just…see how that goes.

I only make it halfway down the hallway because a young woman smiles at me and I am suddenly certain. I hit the elevator down arrow to head to the practice rooms. A friend of mine is in one of the first rooms I go to. “Can I talk to you?” He is encouraging and fabulous and unfazed by my grand revelation.

I call another friend – we arrange to meet at Perkins. Its not our first choice of restaurant but it will have to do. More love and acceptance. Life seems so exciting.

Some amount of time passes, the details of which I cannot recall. We are in the violinist’s car, she’s driving. I tell her. She takes a detour – the long way. There is talk of God which seems so very odd given the sins she committed just last week plus the ones on her to-do list – all of which include my friend from the practice room. “Well, I’m not going to kiss you.” I’m not sure what to say – I may not respond at all. I wasn’t looking for a kiss…

A friendship that I treasured dissolved almost instantly though I won’t realize that for sometime. It will not be until years later that I realize how many friendships dissolved in the next few months. There was almost no one who rejected me – but there were a lot who were suddenly not around anymore. Perkins and I are friends to this day though separated for quite sometime by 1,700 miles if you can bare the drive through North Dakota. I have always preferred South.

I never did sit for my advanced standing and the acclaim following my solo performance would be the high point of a career that never really started. The following fall my physical therapist would tell me to find a new career path – that my forearms would never recover completely enough to play professionally.