Notes On… Sondheim (and the Self)
Before I had a therapist, I had a cast recording.
I know I’m not alone in this, as many queer people find their first form of self-expression not in words but in art. And where else would a closeted kid in Ohio go to find it but the public library? I’d crack open the plastic cases of the Broadway albums, slip the disc into my portable CD player, and enter a world that felt safer than my own. Among those early discoveries was the work of Stephen Sondheim. His words came to me through other people’s voices, but they landed in my bloodstream as if they were my own. I began to learn what I couldn’t yet say and that a single lyric could hold loneliness, ambivalence, and longing, all at once.
Growing up closeted in the 1980s and 1990s, I lived in a constant state of disguise, but Sondheim’s characters were fluent in masks and in the ache beneath them. They understood how rage hides in wit, how desire hides in irony, how terror sits right next to love. To me, these weren’t just songs. They were case studies of a psyche terrified to show itself.
Sondheim gave language to what my community kept silent. Our society fumbled to say the word “gay” out loud at the time, and I found myself reflected in the contradictions of his characters. They wanted connection and sabotaged it, wished for intimacy and feared it. They longed for freedom and clung to safety. That paradox was my adolescence. Long before I had the vocabulary of “closeted,” I already knew the rhythm of double life because his lyrics sang it.
Sondheim became, almost without my noticing, my first interpreter of the unconscious. He wrote about mothers, about ambivalence in love, about the impossibility of being fully alive without also risking despair. His songs were Freud set to melody, Jung set to rhyme. I returned to them compulsively. This was more than entertainment; it was repetition as a cure.
And then, as Sondheim wrote, I started “putting it together, bit by bit.” Back then, I was both the actor asking, What is this character hiding? and the closeted kid asking, Who can ever know me? Years later, I am now a therapist, and I find myself still circling the same question: What are you not saying? In Sondheim, the roles I’ve lived, actor, patient, therapist, fold into one.
Those library sessions felt private, almost confessional. No one saw me mouthing the words under my breath, or the way I shook when a lyric landed too close. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was already practicing regulation. Each line became something to hold on to, a kind of grounding object, steadying me, the way a therapist might gently guide someone back to their breath.
I would later learn that therapy is the slow uncovering of one’s true story. And so, Sondheim was my prologue. He taught me to listen for what hides between the lines and to trust that subtext, too, is a kind of truth. In the silence of that small Ohio public library, his songs taught me what the world around me couldn’t: that even the unsayable has a voice.
