--- date: 2019-08-30 weight: 4 --- I tried to let go of choir when I went to university. I was all set to begin anew. I was going to live up to my parents' dreams of becoming an engineer. That, and I heard the choir perform during All-State my senior year of high school, and they weren't that good. the All-State choirs were better. My school's choirs were better. I didn't want to tarnish my feelings on choir by having my last few years in it be less than what I was used to. > Yeah. How'd that work out? I lasted a semester. Part of it was, of course, that I started the same year they hired Dr. Kim, who turned the choral department around. Suddenly I had something I wanted to reach for. Part of it was that, on graduating, one of my chosen families disappeared. I still had furry, of course, and I still had Ash and Shannon, but I was missing a core part of myself, and I wasn't strong enough to not have that in my life. > You weren't strong enough to do a lot of things, then. No, I wasn't. I wasn't strong enough to tamp down my mania or pull myself up by my bootstraps through depression. I wasn't strong enough to buckle down on my math and chemistry studies. I wasn't strong enough to treat my friends and lovers as well as they deserved. Not on my own, at least. So I joined choir. > You did more than that. You took ownership of your life. I changed my major to music. I started taking singing lessons. I gained strength from my community, and I got better. I got strong enough to at least learn, bit by bit, how to deal with each of those things. I'm still working on some of them, but that's where I started learning. I got strong enough to make it into voice lessons with Dr. Morrow-King. I got strong enough to get into Chamber Choir. I got strong enough to go on two choir tours in South Korea. I got strong enough to leave the music education program and move to music composition. I got strong enough to talk to the department chair about why I wasn't getting lessons through the school. I got strong enough to stand up to Dr. Wohl when he was called on it and not selected to be the new professor. > Not strong enough to suffer defeat. No. Not the one I experienced.