Dear Reader,
How’s it going? I’ve been thinking about how life is a summation of changes, but there seem to be a lot of those these days. You know what I mean? Or maybe it’s just me. Let me know!
Before then, I’ll catch you up. On a Friday night in April, my blank stare took me out of my body and into the marshy waters. Golden yellow reeds lit by the 6pm sun. Green algae blossom-coated water underneath the train tracks, rippling as the minnows gulp food on their swim downstream. In short: Everything is teeming with life. I see that evidence everywhere around me. But feeling it is a bit more elusive.
I had never planned for the last year to become a “healing journey,” let alone did I much believe in the possibility of healing. At least not in a way that could last. You try enough that you start to give up, or think maybe it’s just the way it is. When I was five, I would look in the mirror and wonder if my body was really my body. Was I some space intruder sent to Earth to do some digging? At 16, I lay on the floor in my room and looked at the ceiling; I listened to Justin Vernon’s Self Record and wondered what it might be like to feel at home somewhere inside myself. At 21, I collapsed in the hall to the bathroom too many times to count but got up and went to rehearsal instead of looking at the stars.
And then, at 28, I peered into the swamp and forgot who I was for a while. What is healing when all you’ve known is escape? At least Cindy Lee made Diamond Jubilee for me, specifically.
There are terms and phrases and treatments for all the things I have experienced, and diagnoses I won’t divulge. But let’s just say this: Last year I made what is likely to be the most important realization of my life. Which is that I can choose to heal. Sure, feeling like shit might be easier — thinking about how much of a bad person I must be is like eating chocolate cake — but the thornier path is sometimes the one you have to choose.
In my 28th year, I hurt someone, actually a couple of people, which, to me, confirmed my biggest fear: that I am capable of evil so dark it should banish me from the planet. You may think, how is hurting someone evil when we all do it? The difference is in how much you trust yourself to fix the wounds when they inevitably come to pass.
~~~
Is music just a form of dissociation, I ask myself, as I head out to my third show of the week on an unusually warm March day. Let me just feel something, anything to get me back into my body, anything to get me back into my soul. Maybe for a moment on the beer stained Market Hotel floor I’ll feel that Lust For Life that makes the mundane worthwhile.
I let myself feel it, and then I forgot how once the moment passed. I held myself back, certain if I leaned in a little further I would commit the biggest crime — causing another pain — again. It isn’t easy to overcome guilt. It’s harder to rebuild when it’s yourself you don’t believe in.
Yet in the mine or at the 24 hour drone or on the train or in the car or on the dance floor or on the street in the middle of the night, music is there, saving me from the worst of it all. Perhaps catharsis is fleeting, sure. It might be just another form of escapism, I know you’ve told me, and it’s time to stop coping. And I respond: Whatever it is, I am there in it, lost and found and, for once, whole.
And so, after all that, here I am now in the field of trees turning yellow in the 60-degree autumn cool, six months after my life turned upside down, a few weeks after turning 29. I don’t quite know if I’ll ever be “healed,” and I still find the idea of healing to be a dream, but I am returned to my body, spirit intertwined with form.
If there’s anything I have learned, it’s that I’ve been through it and I’ll go through it again. There’s not really a silver lining. Just a resolution to try, and the knowledge that the unpredictable is not a curse.
Anyway, I heard there’s a show tonight and I think this one’s going to last. Wanna come with?
Love, V
Sure!