LGBTQ/LGBTQIA/transgender

When your violin is supposed to be a cello.

64 Comments

When I was small and new to this world, my parents placed a radio beside my crib.

“We used to play classical music for you,” they told me. “You loved Bach.” For years, I fell asleep to the sounds of 12 different violin concertos, the music bouncing off the walls and into my tiny ears.

My mother swears that this is why I took up violin.

My parents eagerly exposed me to any and every song with a violin solo. I went from Bach to Riverdance to Dixie Chicks, the music captivating me. By the time I was 12, I told my parents that I wanted to make beautiful music like the people on the CDs.

They made me promise that I wouldn’t quit after just a few weeks. I would’ve promised them the moon in the sky or my allowance for every week of my life to have a violin of my own.

They conceded. We went to a store filled with violins from countries all over the world. I had my eye on one that came from Germany. I remember holding it, expecting to make a triumphant sound like all the musicians I’d listened to since infancy, and was shocked that I could hardly make it croak.

“You’ll get better after some lessons,” they told me.

“And after you get some rosin on the bow, of course,” the salesman added with a wink.

It was a little too big for me, but the music teacher at school promised that I would “grow into it.”

I’m not sure I ever did.

* * *

I believed that Lily Peters was the prettiest girl at Rhode Middle School.

And I was the luckiest kid at Rhode Middle School, I reasoned, because I was one of her closest friends. We were cast in the school play together and for those three months, we were inseparable.

I remember looking at Lily with so much envy.

Lily was idyllic in my mind. I grew out my hair and wore it just likes hers, with the messy bun perched right on top of my head. I got contact lenses and I carefully applied the same powdery shade of blue around my eyes. I begged my mother to let me wear high heels for the school dances, the slip-on sort that Lily would wear.

I dragged my mother to the store to buy pleated skirts, but they could only be pink — Lily only wore the pink ones. And they could only be from Limited Too, the only acceptable store for Lily’s taste.

I tried doing all the same things — like it was an equation, and if I did the math just right the product would be the same — but was left with the lingering sense that it was some sort of farce.

When Lily became friends with Cameron from Speech class a month after the play was over, I could feel myself being pushed to the sidelines. I started to feel less and less important. Not even my pool party at the local recreation center — the one with the amazing water slide and the lazy river — was enough to regain her favor.

It all came crashing down one day in English class, when a giggling and mischievous Lily passed a note to Cameron. Cameron, delighted by what she saw, started to giggle uncontrollably behind me.

“Can I see?” I asked, feeling left out.

“I don’t think you want to,” Cameron said, smirking and shooting Lily a look.

Grabbing the note from Cameron’s desk, I opened it up expecting to laugh along with them. Instead, I saw the words, “Don’t you think Sam is really weird?” scribbled in Lily’s flawless cursive writing, a heart dotting each “i.”

My face began to burn, tears blurring my vision. Lily’s assessment was not unfamiliar. It was one that I’d pondered many times — why, no matter the equation or the formula or the number of pleated skirts I squeezed my body into, was girlhood so evasive?

Why didn’t I belong?

Lily never said. But the farce was confirmed, on perfect pink floral stationery, no less.

* * *

The teacher said that I was a gifted musician.

I was first chair in the Rhode Middle School Honors Orchestra, the best of the best. I was ecstatic to be the best at something. I was on my way to making beautiful music, like the violinists I now listened to on my CD player on the bus every morning.

I tried to move my wrists like they did, to make the vibrations hum and tremble, to make my violin weep the ways that theirs did.

We didn’t have anything but violinists in my old orchestra, but it was at Rhode that I heard a cello for the first time. While the violin made me excited, the cello had a stranger effect on me. The cello was deeper, more emotive, and twisted my heart until I thought it might burst.

Every day in orchestra practice I would stare at the cello players in awe. Their music made my high-pitched violin — something I once felt so accomplished in — seem so inadequate, so empty.

But it was too late, I reasoned. My parents had bought the violin and they would never stand to invest in another more expensive instrument, to pay for more lessons, to start over.

Besides, this is what I was destined to do. From the crib, remember? I recalled the stories my mother told me, when the Bach violin concertos lulled me to sleep. I remembered the Dixie Chicks concert when it was broadcast on the television, when they pointed at the violinist under the spotlight and said, “That’ll be you someday.”

I practiced diligently every day after school. Remembering, as I went over my scales repeatedly, the way my mother would squeeze my hand when the violinist at Riverdance played faster, and faster, and faster.

But sometimes, when I was all alone, I’d stand the violin up on my lap and pretend, just for a moment, that it was a cello. I would close my eyes and imagine the deep bellowing of Bach’s Suite No. 1 rattling in my chest, the most dizzying and captivating melody I’d ever heard.

But the vibrations of my violin against my chest, too high a pitch, were a tragic reminder of what I lacked.

I grieved — and the grief, at the time, was so unexplainable to me — contemplating the mistake I could not utter aloud. The mistake, the very undeniable fact that my violin could never produce such rich and deep and lovely sounds.

My violin would never be a cello.

* * *

I wanted to be good at femininity, the kind of femininity that girls like Lily and Jessica and Courtney could wear so effortlessly but I never could.

I wore the homecoming dress with the high heels, my feet aching, my stubbornness forcing me to wear them until everyone, especially the boy I liked, had seen me.

It was a performance, I knew it, but I gave it my best — lusting after the affirmations, the encore, someone or anyone to tell me that I had done good.

I didn’t want to be myself, but that was OK. I just wanted to be beautiful, to be worthy.

So I practiced applying mascara the way I practiced my scales: repeatedly, persistently, and with great attention to every lash and every note.

* * *

My best friend in high school, Lucas, was a cellist. At our director’s urging, Lucas decided that we should enter the state competition as a duet. He chose a concerto by Mozart and invited me over to his house after school one day to give it a whirl.

He brought me down to his basement and into a makeshift practice room, with sheet music strewn about and his cello leaned precariously on its side. He carefully tipped it upright again and, sitting down, drew it close to him.

As I removed my violin from its case, he began to warm up with a G major scale. I paused, letting the notes wrap around me and echo in my ears.

I wondered what it must feel like, to keep your instrument so close to your heart.

He looked up at me and smiled, setting down his bow.

“Hey,” he said with a laugh. “Do you want to switch instruments? For fun?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, with a little too much excitement in my voice.

Handing over the violin to Lucas, I made my way to the cello, hands trembling.

What if I was terrible at it and all my dreams dissolved in a single moment? Or what if, miraculously, I was so proficient that I could convince my parents to let me switch instruments? The moment was ripe with possibility and heavy all at once.

Bringing the cello near — tilting my head and bringing my ear as close to the strings as I could — I took a deep breath. I pulled the bow across the strings in a hesitant, slow glide, and felt the weight of each note in my chest.

Something about the richness and depth of the sound, reverberating in every bone in my body, felt so tremendously right.

Playing each note so carefully, I looked at Lucas and confessed, “I should’ve played the cello.” The confession was drowned beneath the vibrations that filled the room.

In a single scale, I broke my own heart.

* * *

I can tell you the exact moment I realized, without a doubt, that I was not a woman.

It was when I put a chest binder on for the first time, during a freezing Michigan winter, late at night. It was when I recognized my own queerness for the first time.

Shocked by my own silhouette, I could feel everything shifting. I ran my fingers across my chest, studying myself intensely in the mirror, trying to resist the joy that was coming over me. I did not want to love what I saw, but I could not take it back.

“What do you think?” my partner asked me from the other side of the room.

What would the future be now? Now that I knew the truth?

“I think it’s…” I was holding back tears. “I’m trans. I really am transgender.”

“Yes, I know. Why are you sad?” they replied.

I recalled the moment that I held Lucas’ cello near me, and all the years after, when, no matter how beautifully I played my violin, I never felt whole or satisfied. The way my scales withered on the vine, how every pass across the strings was empty, and how the notes were always too shrill.

And the regret that washed over me — intense, relentless — when I watched Lucas every afternoon, swaying side to side as his cello beckoned so sweetly from across the room.

“Because nothing will ever be the same,” I whispered.

A thousand Bach violin concertos swirling around my crib, imprinting those melodies on my brain, had not changed the fact that I was meant to be a cellist. And a thousand “she”s, beginning from the moment that I was born, had not changed the fact that I had grown up to be a “he.”

It was in that moment — imagining who I might be, and the terrifying and glorious possibilities that it held — that I realized that the instrument we’re given is not always the one we’re meant to play.

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Written by

Sam Dylan Finch is a writer and daydreamer leveraging the power of digital media to inspire hope and challenge stigma. He is a recognized and trusted voice within mental health and queer media, having reached millions of readers worldwide after his first of many viral articles back in 2014. Sam's career has spanned many roles, including work as a writer, editor, social media strategist, and content marketer for platforms like Alma, Healthline, Psych Central, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, Oar Health, and countless others. You can learn more about him at his website, SamDylanFinch.com.

64 comments

  2. Oh my GOD this was so beautiful I am in tears. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I am so glad you are finding yourself. I myself play the violin but have always had a special heart string tugged when I hear a cello. You sound like a beautiful person no matter what instrument you are ❤

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  3. Pingback: When Your Violin is Supposed to Be a Cello (Repost) | A Modern Ukrainian

  4. Reblogged this on Loony's Biz and commented:
    This is so beautiful, and embodies everything I believe about transgender people and the experience. As an outsider looking into the whole thing, this makes me sure that I’m on the right track to understanding. Please read and share this incredible piece.

    Liked by 4 people

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  8. I know the analogy with gender was the main point of your essay, but I too grew up playing the violin and wishing that I had learned the cello! (My parents are both classical musicians and there were some complicated family dynamics at play…)

    I have always been drawn to the lower, darker tones, both instrumental and vocal, so I suppose it’s only fitting that testosterone has lowered my alto voice to the baritone register. And when my voice squawks, I can always fall back to piano or my electric bass 🙂

    Liked by 4 people

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    1. I figured the analogy would be something anyone could relate to, which is why I structured the essay in this way. 🙂 I think trans and cis folks alike can understand how gender would be akin to music. And I can’t wait for my voice to drop, too – it does seem so fitting!

      Liked by 3 people

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  12. Sam, I’ve never met you, but my heart always bursts for you. I think anything I would say about my own journey this past year giving up my professional career as an oboist here in LA to learn and perform on the cello would seem trite. But, you could not have picked a better analogy for your journey. You spoke to me directly, your story resonating like my new cello which is resting against my chest as I read this and type to you. You astound me with every essay and I’m glad to “know” you.

    Liked by 4 people

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  16. I learnt to play the flute when I was a little boy and everyone thought that it was weird because there was (still is, actually) this prejudice that it was not a “masculine” instrument to play. But you know what, my passion for the flute still remains intact while other people’s judgement stopped. Now that I identify as a gay cisgender person, I know it was an important lesson to learn: no matter what instrument you play the important thing is to let the music speak. Thank you for this post.

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  18. Pingback: When Your Violin is Supposed to Be a Cello | shedylov
  19. Pingback: When Your Violin is Supposed to Be a Cello | electronic existentialist

  22. My son plays cello and I have serious cello-envy! I play his from time to time. Did you ever take lessons to start playing? I am an electric bass player and I want a stand up bass so badly! The rresonance is heaven! Did you follow your cello dream?

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  24. First off, what an amazing memoir. I appreciate your willingness to open up about your own personal experience.
    Second, What is the significance to the cello suite that you added at the end of the memoir? Does it hold some special memory for you?

    Liked by 1 person

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  25. Very nice article. Thanks for sharing. I bought a full scale drum kit and a professional keyboard before realizing that our kids were interested in smartphones!

    Liked by 1 person

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  27. So beautiful and moving. It takes a lot of courage to break away from what the world sees you as, to show who you really feel yourself to be. Thank you for sharing your story.

    Liked by 1 person

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  28. Yup, Sam. You got me right in the gut with this one. I’m midway through an internship, where I’ve decided to be ‘myself’ . Your words make me long for the day I can redefine my self more publicly. As always, thanks for sharing! 🙂

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  32. You deserve a round of applause! This was…I’m at a lost for words! I played cello for a bit a couple of years ago. Reading this I wonder why I even stopped.
    Beautiful story! ❤ ❤

    Liked by 1 person

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  37. Wow! Really, really wow! This is amazing, so wonderfully written. I'[m definitely following. I love the comparison with the instruments. I’m trans and a musician myself. Have a beautiful day sunshine ^.^

    Liked by 1 person

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  38. My friend linked me to this. I am working every day to understand better to be a better ally. Thank you for being one of the voices. This was amazing and added just a little more perspective outside my own experiences.

    Liked by 1 person

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  42. Pingback: The (Second) Elephant in the Room: Another Gender Q&A | Let's Queer Things Up!

  44. Beautifully written but I must say that it bothers me that girlhood is equated with traditional ideas of femininity, as if that were the only version of girlhood there is.

    Girlhood doesn’t have to be long hair, high heels, pink skirts and make-up. That can be one version of girlhood but girlhood can also be t-shirts and shorts, short hair, scraped knees and dirty fingers from running around in the garden and climbing trees all day. That was what girlhood was like for me.

    Being deeply unhappy with being forced into a traditional version of femininity does not make a person trans. Cis and trans people alike can be unhappy with the gender norms forced upon them and it has nothing to do with whether or not someone is cis or trans. It only means that those gender rules are rubbish and that kids should dress and behave however they want.

    This is also why I don’t really get “gender” identities (as opposed to perhaps calling them “sex” identities or something else) because if gender is the sum of all the social rules and expectations that are cast on people depending on their bodies, then why not abandon gender instead of using it as a source for labels?

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    1. It’s really hard for me to engage with this comment because what I’m hearing is that you believe that trans people, instead of transitioning, should abandon gender roles and embrace their assigned genders? Am I misunderstanding you?

      And I’m also hearing that you are telling a transgender person what makes a person trans, as if they can’t figure that out for themselves. Is that also what you are doing? Because it’s really affecting me emotionally to read this kind of invalidation from you.

      Liked by 1 person

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      1. What I’m saying is that society as a whole would do well to abandon gender, it’s not aimed at trans people. And I don’t think anyone should embrace anything that society forces upon them if it makes them unhappy. I just know that plenty of cis women are also extremely uncomfortable with their gender and I think it’s important to clarify that one’s level of happiness with one’s assigned gender roles doesn’t say anything about whether or not that person is trans. Otherwise I would be trans as well.

        As a matter of fact, I did think I might be trans for some time. As a kid I was such a tomboy, hated most “girl things” and loved most “boy things”, dressed “like a boy” and wanted to be one. I was ecstatic every time someone addressed me as a a boy. I think a lot of people would consider my younger self a trans kid. I struggled with the label “girl/woman” for a long time until I realised that it wasn’t boyhood that I craved, it was to have my behaviour and presentation validated by society as just as natural and normal as it’s considered in boys. I’m happy with my body and feel okay with the label “woman” to describe it. I don’t “feel” like a woman, though. My body doesn’t make me feel anything special identity-wise, just like the color of my eyes or hair doesn’t make me feel anything in particular.

        I’m not saying that trans people should embrace their assigned genders. I’m saying that we should look beyond gender and break it up into bits and pieces and see that it’s really just made up of many different flavours of people’s personalities.

        Reading your text I did get the impression that you considered your unhappiness with things that seemed to be expected from you (wearing skirts, make-up, high heels etc.) as “failing at girlhood” and I just don’t think that these two things have anything to do with each other. I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of trans girls that absolutely hate skirts and plenty of trans boys that love them? But if that wasn’t your intention then I read your text wrong.

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    2. I want to add that this is not an attempt to equate femininity and girlhood. This is an essay about the crushing weight of imposed gender, especially when it’s being imposed based on an untrue assumption about your identity.

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      1. Lastly, “sex” is as much a construction as “gender.” What you’re hitting on here is that it’s all socially constructed. But telling people how they should and should not identify is not helpful in liberating trans people.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. 100% with you on the crushing weight of imposed gender. I would just argue that a lot of people feel this crushing weight to some extent, regardless of whether they are cis or trans. When I think of gender I think of two differently shaped cookie cutters that are used to cut away people’s individual “dough” of personalities that comes in a million different shapes.

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      3. I don’t think as a cis person you should be telling a trans person how they should and should not arrive at the conclusion they are trans, or critiquing their narrative as if their personal experiences of gender are invalid. This is not a story about the weight that other people feel. This is not a story about other people’s genders or lack thereof. It’s my story. My journey. And it’s transphobic to tell me how I should and should not interpret, engage with, or manifest my gender.

        Liked by 1 person

  45. This was beautiful. I mean just stunning beautiful. Each story weaving into each other. Thank you for sharing this. I felt like i was there. Discovering who you really are is a powerful and freeing experience. I have no words, only a sense of recognition of a similar experience.

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  46. Pingback: When Your Violin is Supposed to Be a Cello | 30daysto30
  47. Pingback: My parents and I survived my ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.’ This is our story. – Let's Queer Things Up!
  49. Pingback: I’m queer and I have mental illness – Growing Into Myself

  50. I am sorry I am a little over 4 years too late to this post, but this is beautifully written. As someone who has struggled with my own sexuality since I was a kid, I can definitely relate though I am of a different shade, I would say. 🙂 Thus, the rainbow is indeed very fitting as a symbol.

    Anyway, if it helps convince you to heed the call of that cello, I am not at all musically trained but I started learning the cello at the tender young age of 40. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made. My instrument may not be singing yet about a year on, but when that thrum hits my chest my heart definitely sings. And the soul soars.

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