(((O))) : Musical Therapy: Music Presses All the Right Buttons; Not Necessarily in the Right Order

If you stop and think about it for a minute, music is a curious thing.  Sure, it’s fun, exciting and vibrant and can trigger the most beautiful and important youthful memories, but the way that we’ve been consuming it since the birth of the Walkman has moved it from a pastime that involves many, to something altogether more insular.  And I suppose this is why it still figures so importantly in my life.

Having lived with Depression for many more years than I care to recollect, music has been both a cure and – if I’ve been feeling particularly self-vindictive – a cause of the darker moments.  This seems to be all straightforward enough, given our desire to find understanding and a sense of belonging from wherever I need to, but sometimes it can be hard to explain to others that I turn to what would outwardly be seen as depressive sources of entertainment in order to trigger feelings of sadness or to find somewhere to safely and willingly withdraw.  These places created by various artists, whether they mean to or not, can be (and no doubt have been) absolute lifesavers for many people who don’t wish to be a burden to those close to them.

Like most people, I have certain musical destinations I head to whenever I feel at the top of my game, or when things are at their bleakest – or, worse still, when I’m emotionally numb.  Listening to Nick Drake’s “At the Chime of a City Clock” or “Northern Sky” puts me up among the stars; hearing him perform the self-loathing “Parasite” cuts me to the bone, and both of these extremes don’t strike me as being anything out of the ordinary, as these swings affect us all throughout the day.  But it’s when I hear “Know” that I feel the most resonance.  To hear someone so normally musically eloquent reduced to four notes clumsily yet accurately hit over and over again may seem merely odd to most people, but it terrifies me because it seems to come from a place where the protagonist simply doesn’t care anymore.  And if I can relate to something like that, then there’s something very wrong indeed going on.

But this is the thing – if I can hear something very obviously going wrong in the voice, music and performance of someone I have no tangible connection with, then recognising those same things in my own feelings or behaviour means that I can also realise that I need to do something to prevent that behaviour from escalating.  And for me, that’s the difference between falling into old habits of self-destruction (for which I carry scars both psychological and physical) or asking for help; and there’s no contest about which is the most beneficial course of action, even if it sometimes feels like the hardest thing to do.

I guess what I’m trying to justify here is that we all set our own markers that we use to act as a warning to ourselves that things are going wrong, and the hope then is that we catch it early enough so that we can at least prepare a softer landing.  This is why I listen to certain music that has cropped up during my life, it is why I continue to listen to it, it is why I share it with my friends in the hope of understanding, and it’s also why I write about it in the hope that somehow this will help to dissipate the awful Depression I feel sometimes.  Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t.  But it’s worth it for the sometimes.