Month: April 2017

I am not done yet

I might pick up music again. I never really considered doing that, when I wrote my last blog post I was certain it was done. I always believed I wasn’t really capable of doing something that required so much passion while being depressed.
Maybe I am wrong. I never thought I could write a blog. I always thought I would not be able to find the right words to describe what I feel and if I did I would hate and pick apart everything. While I still feel this way about almost all my articles I am nevertheless very grateful I wrote them. It feels good to articulate my thoughts and share them with others.

Maybe I could do the same with music. Many people faced their inner demons by channelling them into beautiful art. Listening to music is often therapeutic for me, who says that writing it could not do so much more for me?
Since I played an instrument once I would not have to start from nothing. In fact, if my (so far very shaky) career plans go ahead as planned I will have to learn to play the guitar anyway. I considered that to be a duty exercise, learn some basic chords, done. But perhaps this is the perfect opportunity.

Maybe this is just a crazy late night idea that I will drop immediately. But I am not afraid to try and for me, that is something very special.

Blogger Parade: Music

Blogger Village 2

Today I am taking part in a project with the network Blogger Village which is called Blogger Parade, where each member of the network writes a post about a topic drawn from a tea pot. This time the topic is music and I chose to write about my time as a musician. I hope you like it.

When I was eight I watched a concert of the local school of music’s teachers. Afterwards I told my father I wanted to learn how to play an instrument. He was very supportive, bought me an electric piano, paid for lessons, the whole deal. Even though I enjoyed playing, I enjoyed practicing a lot less but I always managed to learn my material in time. I also sang in the school choir.

When I was twelve I was approached by an old friend of my family. He was a musician that had started a band for his son and his two cousins of the same age and he wanted to recruit me. Later he gave up his spot for someone as old as us and we moved from covers to writing our own songs. We even recorded an EP – properly, not in our run-down practice room.

But then in secondary school, there was no choir and it was a wretched place in general. Most of the groundwork of my depression was laid there but I was still a happy kid outside of school. When I entered High School (or rather my country’s equivalent), I chose one with a choir and band. I was so hopeful that this was the place where everything would turn around.

But it didn’t live up to my enormous hopes, how could it? By the end of the first year, I was in my first major depressive phase and that was the end of my days as a musician. I kept playing for some time, but my passion was gone. For a long time, I considered it yet another thing I never followed through with, a failure in a long list of failures.

But now I consider it yet another thing my depression took from me. It wasn’t my fault. I could try to start again but I know I don’t have the energy, discipline or passion to do it. Will that ever change? I really don’t know.

Beyond that, I also realised that it wasn’t a failure at all. Even though I no longer play, I still achieved something. Not just the recording, I also made treasured memories and formed deep friendships. I also had an impact on the people around me. Maybe someone out there had their first kiss during one of our songs, or their first break-up.

Also, I still experience music in a special way. Did you know musicians are one of the few people whose profession can be guessed from brain scans? Sometimes, when my illness takes over and quenches my emotions, music is nothing but noise to me. But often it is one few things that that can snap me out of a phase or make a terrible time just slightly less terrible. I wonder if that were the case had I never picked up an instrument.

If any of you ever dropped something you put a lot of time and energy into and feel like you failed, consider how your life might look like without it. The things you experienced, the lessons learned, the joy and pain and everything else it brought you. As long as you took something away from it, you did not fail.

Interesting Tidbits

I am having a bit of a writer’s block right now, so instead of a full article here is a new segment called “Interesting Tidbits”, where I share small random pieces of information I picked up somewhere. I hope you like it.

One aspect of humanity that keeps fascinating me is how despite the enormous variety of human cultures and civilizations and the often insuperable differences that come with it, sometimes the simplest aspects of humanity are shared by everyone across the ages.

Did you know that the ancient romans had graffiti? More than 2000 years ago, they scribbled phrases on walls that might as well come from modern toilet stalls, such as boasting about sexual exploits, insulting superiors or simply signing their names.
But you can go further back than that. On stone age cave paintings, archaeologists have found drawings that are sloppy, with hunting scenes more brutal than usual and figures with exaggerated genitals – most likely drawn by adolescents. Somehow immaturity has not changed in 30.000 years.

Conversely, sometimes experiences we all share are being interpreted entirely different.
In an isolated tribe – I forgot where and unfortunately I could not find the original article – the symptoms experienced by heavy infatuation such as the warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach are seen as signs that the person is possessed by an evil spirit that must be cleansed.

The Clockwork of Misery

One of the things depression has up its sleeves to get you down is a constant feeling of inadequacy. Take my last post for example, The -lessness. It was supposed to be about all the things that depression takes away but in the end, it focuses mostly on emotion and motivation. I should have written about so much more, like sleeplessness, lack of confidence and so on. I also don’t think I fully captured what I wanted to say. If you already know what I mean you might understand but if you don’t then I am not sure I made it clear. And the different sections don’t flow into each other naturally and some wordings just sound weird. Every time I read it I could kick myself. I understand that mostly it’s the old “Depression lies” but understanding it and feeling it are two different things.

And if it wasn’t enough, this is where my anxiety kicks in. What if it is the first post someone reads on this blog and decides to move on because of it? It is yet another entry about mental health. What about readers that are interested in my other topics? What if the readers I already have decide that this blog isn’t worth it after all?
For someone else this might be a reason to do better next time, but my lack of energy makes it hard for me to imagine a next time. And my pessimism tells me I won’t do better. And my guilt tells me how horrible it would be to leave yet another project unfinished.

And so, all the different aspects of my depression work together like a clockwork of misery.

But it is possible to disrupt it. Right now, I am trying to make amends by writing this post, and maybe it will make me feel better. And if not, at least I tried. Sometimes trying and failing makes me feel even worse than not trying, but in the end, I don’t see what else I could do. Often I don’t have the strength to try, but I have learned it is important to forgive myself for that.