Content Warning: Suicide / Domestic Violence
I want to give you something triumphant. Something that will make you punch the air with satisfaction. Something that will imbue purpose to the hours spent waiting for gigs to start or all the money spent on all those albums and something that will reaffirm the sacred place that music has in your heart, and in mine - but I can’t.
I was in college. I was 19. I was struggling financially and emotionally. I had been impaired by a low and ever deteriorating sense of self worth and berated by a pathological internalised anger over my teenage years. It had not abated, as I hoped it would, with a change of venue. The fear and anxiety I often needlessly felt suddenly found good grounding in the real dangers of poverty and failure I faced in my first forray into an independent adult life.
Then one night, of no particular significance - other than I had just finished reading Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ for class - the rabid self hatred that had coursed through me with every single pulse of my life overruled reality and I plunged broken glass through the tendons and arteries in my wrists.
I spent a week in hospital. No one came to visit.
This is where my relationship with music begins. Before now, to me, music was just what was on the radio; a melodic static that I tuned in and out of as it took my fancy. I shunned medical help and bluffed my way out of hospital feigning long abandoned interests and painting a future for myself “five years from now” I couldn’t see.
So I was set adrift with nothing but the prevailing winds of sleep and study to move me. No destination, no purpose, no constellations to guide me. On some midnight bus, shuttling me between study and sleep, I heard something on the radio. The radio whose sole purpose was to keep the driver awake. I sat up and the blend of sounds dragged my attention out from under its burial mound. That something furled around my heart and gripped it. That night I had a new album, a gig ticket and a smile on my face.
The academic community continuously strains itself trying to reduce to a formula the overwhelming anecdotal evidence of the comfort found in music but of all the papers I have unearthed none have mentioned ‘recovery’ and one paper even correlates teenagers who invest heavily in music with a higher risk of depression. I still struggle through most days scattering apologies in my wake hoping to scour the world of my tracks. I go to work feeling wholly inadequate for the task. Mostly, I do not speak unless spoken to. I wish people would not look at me. I am terrified that people can smell me. Understandably, I am not in a relationship and I maintain very few friendships - except those I have fostered through music.
In 1977 the Voyager 1 and 2 were launched into space with a ‘Golden Record’ on each. While accompanied by diagrams and recordings of nature the bulk of the content was a choice selection of humankind’s music to date. It’s a romantic notion for music lovers that in trying to reach out to unknown life forms, that could be hostile or prefer to remain anonymous to us, we sent a music collection. Why was it presumed an extraterrestrial could comprehend music and why did we feel that in the vast incomprehensible expanse of our universe music would be the thing that would bind us together?
Music has given me an opportunity to relate to people. The confidence I have in the worth of the music I enjoy lends courage to my words. I feel worthy of attention and I have begun to believe that people are willing to hear me speak. That some people, who have become my friends, even enjoy hearing me speak. I have seen people smile when they recognise me in the crowd. It is the only place I have ever felt wanted, even if it just because the band are happy to have someone, who cares about what they have created, to play to. I have felt wanted.
It has also opened the door for me to reach out to the wrong people, to overestimate my right to intrude on someone’s good will. I have read that when managing anger, listening to calm or soothing music doesn’t help, you should listen to fierce music instead. It becomes an outlet for your emotion. It was the first thing I thought of when my mom asked me: “Why didn’t you do anything?”
The night before I witnessed an incident of domestic violence in my home. It was a brutal retaliation to months of emotional abuse. Ever since I have tried to select the song I would have played to stop it, had I thought to do anything at all. It’s difficult when you realise that your parents can’t protect you. It’s a realisation I’ve had to come to again but this time with music.
It couldn’t protect me from the self destructive whim to edge up to the lethal dose of codeine and mix it through with alcohol. It didn’t stop me as my eyes became agitated and my insides began to grow barbed wire. I crawled over to the glow of my computer screen and watched my music player’s timer drag from left to right. I couldn’t hear any of it and I began to scream at myself and at it that ‘this wasn’t supposed to happen anymore’. I tricked myself with false hope that someone could help fix this disconnect. One of the people who made the music I was trying to hear in the first place. Someone I vaguely knew. He gently and correctly pointed out that I should not be reaching out to him. I needed real help.
I awoke the next day not remembering, having to discover, what I had done. Having to discover that I couldn’t trust myself to be better nor could I trust music to keep me from committing dangerous blunders, as I had hoped it would. However, it hasn’t failed me. Music has led me to a community that has welcomed me and given the best version of myself a perfect microcosm of adult life in which she can be coaxed out.
I haven’t recovered, but I have found my best self. She is adventurous and quirky, generous of spirit, possessions, time, love and is sometimes wise. She marvels at the world and the people in it. Her eyes are enrapturing. She has her flaws too but they can be endearing in the right company. She possesses and feels all the love in the world without ever having stepped into the world. I don’t know if she can or ever will but now I know that she is there. I can write about her as if she exists.
It’s January 2014, a decade and a week since this whole wretched business began in earnest. I am standing at the front of the crowd unapologetic and unashamed to be there. Shoulder to shoulder with strangers; I am brave and I don’t feel alone. I do not cower away. There will be people here whose words I have read or photographs I have enjoyed, even EPs I have listened to. I regard them all as friends. I dance and I am carefree. I can conduct joy, wonderment and awe all at once. I can scarcely breathe for they won’t give way to the air. I can feel the sounds course through me, note by note. I feel gratified and here is where music prevails; I recognise the potential for the rest of my life to be just like this.
