I'm not going to go into the events (or shall we say process)
that unfolded in my 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st years, events that
forever sealed off the imaginative space from which sprang my
music composition. What happened can be pithily characterized
as a forced coming to gender consciousness of traumatizing proportions.
By the age of 25 I had completely repressed the trauma. Whenever I
chanced to remember (or was reminded) that I had once been a composer
overwhelmed by the constant, rich presence of music sounding always in
my head, I told a lame story that instantly deflected any interest (in
myself or others) in this astonishing break in my life's history.
Only much later, in 1986, when engaged in hours and hours of intense
conversation with a friend aged sixteen, did the story unravel itself
in all its previously-censored, belatedly-acknowledged devastation.
This loss is a pain I have never recovered from, but only, mercifully,
continue to forget. Some memories are simply unbearable.