to be blunt, I’ve just always struggled with worth. my family, like a lot of folks’, was damaging (/ damaged) and pretty toxic – it was hard to explore self while having to protect it from them. I found theatre + improv comedy to be a really good outlet, but there was a lot of stuff I was making up for as I pursued it. there’s a validation component early on, for sure, but as I continued I started struggling against being ____ enough. my energy during performances would ramp to keep poking at this thing that defined my sense of self, to ask more of it because I wasn’t putting in the work in other ways to discover it more healthily. through college and for a bit after, those moments outweighed the cost (not really my debt alone, but also what it asked of those around me) until it didn’t.
discovering lines and everyone who is a part of it was part of a turning toward myself again. toward being with my inner kiddo more and making a safe environment for him.
music is the only place where I’ve been able to best exercise balance. “giv[ing] up ‘note-making’” was necessary, because of how willingly I tried to fill notes with self-meaning.
the Georg Kühlewind quote in the GitHub notes pretty much sums it up:
Because man does not experience the Seeker, the Thinker, the Experiencer in his presentness, he needs property, success, self-assertion -- confirmation that he is. Instead of experiencing himself as a thinker, which is certainly possible, he seeks to convince himself of his existence from the outside, and that brings him to the habit of self-feeling. But man can only feel himself because of something -- everything that serves him in this way, everything important and 'necessary,' everything he clings to. Finally other men begin to serve the same purpose for him, and this determines his relationship to them. Position, power, money, and recognition form his world, on which he is dependent, and in which he has continually to make an effort to prove himself, to be certain of his own existence.
anyway, hope that gives insight without too much weight. 
