This piece serves as a musical response to “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch by Stephen Trask – a song I initially intended to perform for this project. That song retells a myth from Plato’s Symposium about humans being split in half by angry gods, doomed to forever search for a missing “other half” to feel whole.

While “The Origin of Love” captures the profound pain of feeling cut off, the musical itself is often critiqued by trans and nonbinary communities. In the show, the protagonist’s transition is framed not as self-actualization, but as a botched, traumatic sacrifice made to legally marry a man and escape East Berlin. Further, the myth itself pushes a narrative that we are inherently incomplete without a romantic partner, rather than perhaps understanding ourselves as inherently whole as we are.

Acknowledging this friction, I have chosen to let the original song rest as a period piece. Instead, I recontextualized a few of its fragments to speak to the truth of the myth — the reality of feeling cut off from oneself and from community — while radically shifting the narrative. Instead of a desperate and tragic search for romantic love, these new lyrics invite us to explore a different question: How do we realize our own wholeness, and how do we show up for ourselves and each other?