Well, I guess my hobby is music too at the moment. Honestly, I'm not sure you need to know much theory to learn guitar. I mean, it always helps, but guitar is one of those instruments that you don't even need to read music, just tablature which is more intuitive for the instrument in my opinion. For the finger movements, those can be tricky but with everything, you just start slowly and gradually speed up.

As for how I'd rate myself...when the part is in a role that I specialize in (hopefully you can get what I mean...I don't want to specify my instrument or specialties because of privacy) then I'm the best or one of the best in the area at what I do. Even when I play parts that are out of my comfort zone, I still do better than most. I've been playing a lot out of my comfort zone to become a more well-rounded player and that affected my confidence a lot. But at least I'm able to play well in multiple genres. I play regularly in classical, jazz, and latin context. I've been mostly playing in university ensembles (sometimes subbing in a latin style band in the next state over), but in the summer I'll be playing with the band in the next state again, for an 8-show musical run, and hopefully will be part of the start of a closer latin band.

As for composition, I finished a commission a while back, I wrote a concerto for my boyfriend, I just found out that a piece that I wrote as part of a collaborative song cycle is going to be distributed to Spotify, iTunes, etc. I just finished my first arrangement for big band, but unfortunately it got snubbed from the concert (the jazz bands at my university have a concert exclusively for student/local/alum composers every year). I think it was personal because mine was better than two of them that were on the concert, but most of the band voted on the tunes we played, so I don't know. But that greatly affected my confidence. And remember I'm around jazz musicians the most often, and jazz is still very sexist. There is an underlying feeling like women should not be involved. I hadn't been involved in a while until I met my boyfriend so there may be people who think I'm only involved because of him. I did just revise a piece for a jazz combo and that should be on the next concert. We just played the revised version in rehearsal today and everyone seemed to really like despite it still needing some revisions. As a composer I was trained in the classical idiom, so writing in the jazz idiom is still really new and I don't have a lot of confidence in that earlier.

I guess it just comes down to confidence. I'm usually out of my comfort zone becoming more well-rounded because you have to do everything, especially to become a professor anymore it seems. My professional performance experience is almost exclusively latin, and that's not the case for most other people around here. There's plenty of other things I wanted to do performance wise that I've never been able to do that most people do, especially by my age. I just feel like such a late bloomer.

I just feel really far behind my peers, maybe that's what's affected my confidence the most. That and never getting a teaching assistantship, which most people in the music department get. So unlike my peers, I have little to no teaching experience (especially college teaching experience). I see listings for jobs that my abilities and education fit very well and then I see that 2+ years of college teaching are required or some other requirement that I don't meet and it's very frustrating. If I had a TA, I might have been able to apply.