How to Disappear Completely

I'm standing in the shadow of the most staggeringly imposing building I've ever seen. I have to crane my neck painfully to see the grotesque, stone-carved gargoyle faces adorning the walls, the tops of the imposing gothic spires stretching skywards above me. The castle is an awe-inspiring, commanding presence - and I live a stone's throw away! I'm in a new city, on the cusp of a new life, alight with possibility. Tomorrow is my first day of school. The weight of expectation on my shoulders feels heavy, but I can bear it - I can bear anything. I'm a Bright Young Thing, ready to take on the world and win.

Changes - David Bowie

I was in my early teens when my family moved halfway across the globe to the Czech Republic, settling in Prague. I met the transition head-on, keen for a new phase and, more importantly, an entire reinvention of character. I'd hit a point of adolescence where home and all it had been wasn't quite enough anymore. I wanted everything that was new, to see more of the world, meet more people, do more, and excitement at the prospect of creating a new version of myself to meet it was enough to override any apprehension over the upheaval of my life.

And who could be a better expression of the transformative and chameleonic than David Bowie? Changes is too personal and ambiguous to be a true, cut and dried teenage anthem, but the flashes of defiance and reinvention struck a chord with my younger self. It wanted evolution, and so did I. Bowie would provide the soundtrack to many more of life's seminal moments for me, but Changes was the first to resonate.

I watch the ripples change their size

But never leave the stream

Of warm impermanence

And so the days float through my eyes

But still the days seem the same

And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

______

I'm on a tram crammed too tight with people when it happens. I have a heart attack - or what feels like one. Completely blindsided, I cling to a pole as my heart pounds wildly in my chest. I can't breathe. I’m spoken to in brusque Czech, but even if I could understand the words, I can barely hear them properly over the ringing in my ears. Shaking and clawing for breath, I manage to stumble off at the next stop in time to retch violently onto the pavement. A stranger walking by eyes me dubiously and quickens her pace. She probably thinks I'm hungover. I only learn later what a panic attack is.

Wake up - Arcade Fire

Mental illness is rife in teenagers. As if navigating the world of adolescence - of puberty, raging hormones, newfound sexuality, and self-discovery aren't overwhelming enough. In my case, mental illness and my teenaged years are wrapped up tight in each other, I can't separate the two. Not long after starting school, something changed in my brain. My grand plans of becoming an awesome new version of myself went directly down the toilet, and my mental health started to follow.

Arcade Fire changed indie rock - for better or worse was up to perspective at the time, but the release of Funeral provided a sound worth cleaving to for a generation stumbling to feel. The lyrics of Wake Up explore becoming an adult and a philosophy of acceptance, but the roaring of ripe, pent-up emotion in the hands-in-the-air, shout-out chorus is the linchpin of the whole affair. When my mental state began to spiral, the concept of catharsis through music all at once became relevant to me as it hadn't quite before, and joining in with the emotional rallying cry in Wake Up was a perfect way to self soothe.

Somethin' filled up

My heart with nothin'

Someone told me not to cry

But now that I'm older

My heart's colder

And I can see that it's a lie

If the children don't grow up

Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up

We're just a million little gods causin' rain storms, turnin' every good thing to rust

I guess we'll just have to adjust

______

I'm awake. Still awake. It's three in the morning and I haven't slept for days. The sky is yellow with light pollution even in the small hours - there are no stars to keep company with. I lie on my back and stare at the white walls, eyes twitching, body on fire with the need to sleep. It's getting light now, and I'll have to get ready for school soon. I keep staring at the ceiling until my bedroom starts to feel like an insane asylum. When I finally have to get out of bed, I wonder if I belong in a real one.

What's Up - 4 Non Blondes

Knock knock! Who's there? It's depression! And she brings her charming friends, anxiety, and insomnia. In a span of months I'd shifted from a pretty standard kid with reasonable lust for life, into an actual fully-fledged, diagnosed Disaster. I was quickly medicated, which made things better and made things worse. Unfortunately for my ability to cope with day-to-day life, my dosages were changed so regularly I was fairly often stuck in the adjustment period, enjoying an array of side effects. Insomnia was the kicker. Endless nights just exacerbated everything else to the nth degree. But the most confusing, infuriating part was how unnatural and at odds with my personality it felt. I had never been an anxious person before, so being plagued with bone-deep anxiety and regular fight-or-flight episodes was the worst kind of emotional whiplash.

4 Non Blondes only big hit What's Up was and still is divisive (aside the truly stellar He-man version, I think we can all agree on its unequivocal brilliance), but nowadays it's become something of an LGBTQ anthem, and it's not hard to see why. It calls out for change, resisting the system, and generally puts a voice to feelings of overwhelming frustration and hopelessness. At that stage, the latter more than the former was why screaming along to Linda Perry's howling "whats going on?" felt so liberating. I hadn't really accepted my new reality, and protesting (loudly) was like an exorcism of built up anguish.

And so I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed

Just to get it all out what's in my head

And I, I am feeling a little peculiar

And so I wake in the morning and I step outside

And I take a deep breath and I get real high

And I scream from the top of my lungs

"What's going on?"

______

I'm walking to my tram stop when a brightly coloured mural on the side of a building catches my eye - an alternate, stylised interpretation of The Creation of Adam. “Choose to be happy,” it says. As if choice has anything to do with it. If happiness were a choice, I'd be shooting rainbows from my fingertips and drowning my loved ones in Good Vibes, not wishing I could cross "Go to sleep and never wake up" off my to-do list. If I were more dramatic, maybe I would spit at it, or stick a finger up. But I’m exhausted, and so restricted to a less theatrical gesture, I give it a feeble kick before moving on.

Another Brick In The Wall - Pink Floyd

Ah, the ultimate expression of teenaged angst: scorning positivity! But I was too bone tired to really act out, so the list of casualties of my discontent started and ended with ill-fated art instalments. So there I was, the kicker-of-uplifting-murals. I felt like I'd become a caricature of teenaged angst. You could find me skating along in a leather jacket with Pink Floyd blaring in my ears in a bid to just feel something, anything. It felt like an unoriginal cliche - the depressed kid who refused to be understood. After all, I lived a pretty privileged life. I didn't deserve to feel the way I did.

Comfortably Numb and Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2 are two of the most quintessential and well-loved Pink floyd songs, both on The Wall. For me, the third instalment of Another Brick In The Wall encapsulated the fury and loneliness I wanted to express. The whole album is full to the gills of youthful trauma, misery, self hatred, and in Part 2's case, protesting the education system. Small wonder it continues to resonate with malcontent teenagers facing the world with middle fingers raised. I was one of them - though the irony of a teen on an impressive cocktail of meds belting out "I don't need no drugs to calm me," is hilarious and not lost on me.

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teacher, leave them kids alone

I don't need no arms around me

And I don't need no drugs to calm me

I have seen the writing on the wall

Don't think I need anything at all

No, don't think I'll need anything at all

All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall

All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall

______

I'm in a club, uncomfortably humid and choked with smoke, bumping drunkenly against walls as I make my way to the bathroom. There's an older girl snorting a line of coke on the counter. I bypass her and lock myself in a cubicle to catch my breath.

"God, I want to die," she says suddenly.

"Same," I reply.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Oh."

A beat of silence, and then I start laughing until I can't stop. She gives me a bewildered look when I emerge, like I'm some kind of insane person, but I can't shake the whisky-induced hilarity and I'm still cackling maniacally even as I leave, heading out onto the streets. Strangers' sweat still clinging to my skin, my eyes rake the skyline until they catch on the familiar gothic spires of the castle, and I follow them over wet cobbled streets towards home.

Between The Bars - Elliott Smith

The truly lowest lows aside, I barely remember being in the pitch-dark doldrums of depression. Going cold, numb, cutting off from reality seemed the best defence against it - being present was unbearable. I wasn't interested in anything anymore. Everything I used to love was kicked to the curb, none of it held any value. My grades took an impressive nosedive. I gained and lost weight intermittently in between real episodes of sickness. I wasn't bright or promising anymore. I was a failure, a waste of potential, and any semblance or vision I'd had for my future was gone. There was only the numbing quality of alcohol.

Elliott Smiths much-covered Between the Bars hovers around love and addiction. He was a masterful songwriter, and a litany of his tracks are all but splitting at the seams with feeling. He was also well-acquainted with depression, drug use and alcoholism, which are tied up amongst other emotionally fraught themes with beautiful poeticism, many of which I wasn't equipped to grasp way back when. "Drink up", however, in debatably his most famous song, was a sentiment I could get behind.

Drink up, baby, stay up all night

With the things you could do, you won't but you might

The potential you'll be that you'll never see

The promises you'll only make

Drink up with me now and forget all about

The pressure of days, do what I say

And I'll make you okay and drive them away

The images stuck in your head

______

I'm lying in an MRI machine as my brain is scanned, ears full of whirring buzz. I imagine it can see more than just the physical makeup of it, but the thoughts inside. What would they look like? What am I feeling? I can't come up with an answer. I can't find meaning in any of this. My Mum is in a waiting room outside. I wonder what she thinks of it all.

The Dead Flag Blues - Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Here comes existential dread!

You can't really avoid discussion about the world at large in an international community. If battling with my own self-sabotaging brain wasn't challenging enough, external factors were always there as a reminder of how hopeless everything was. The political landscape, corrupt governments, climate change, the general morality and meaning of humanity, all ever impending. Nothing like a healthy dose of nihilism to serve as the tasteless icing on the ash-for-flour cake of an emotionally void teens mental state! I say nihilism, but not in a well-adjusted philosophical sense. Healthy existentialism was entirely beyond my grasp.

The Dead Flag Blues drove me into the ground. Utterly desolate and starkly beautiful in equal parts, it immerses the listener in a near-apocalyptic atmosphere, the soul-piercing monologue over a droning bass eventually giving way to a truly haunting soundscape, a world in itself. A keystone of post-rock, Godspeeds F♯ A♯ ∞ would be a fitting soundtrack to the end of the world - and nothing nailed that sense of numb despair more than The Dead Flag Blues.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel

And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides

And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt

And we're on so many drugs

With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine

And the machine is bleeding to death

______

I'm sitting on my windowsill three stories up, gazing out at the castle as it looms in the distance, lit up like a beacon against the night. I don't want to be here, stuck in this body, this brain. It occurs to me how easy it would be now to take the other escape. Let myself fall, let my body break, let my mind quiet at last. Let my parents discover me. Let my brother cry for me. Let them deal with it. Let them carry on… but I can't. I back away and shut the window.

How to Disappear Completely - Radiohead

I didn't want to be alive. But I didn't want to face suicide either, or the overpowering guilt that presented. I just wanted to vanish, to have never been at all. How to Disappear Completely is my favourite Radiohead song, and one of the most beautiful I know, period. It opens in an atmosphere of melancholy, one high, unsettling string line at odds with the key signature. Thom Yorke's vocal and acoustic guitar grounds it, but more lilting strings join and begin to build in intensity. Eventually, it swells and swells until it's drowned in a cacophony of dissonance. Everything clashes in a disorienting tidal wave of sound. The orchestra wars with itself and Yorke's keening voice as it rises and falls in haunting, wavering notes, replete with emotion.

And then it stops.

The instruments fall back into order, and the grating inharmony is over. To me, that sudden cessation sounded like death, a solution to the incessant, inescapable noise of living. I wanted nothing more than to curl up inside those last seconds and vanish.

In a little while

I'll be gone

The moment's already passed

Yeah it's gone

And I'm not here

This isn't happening

I'm not here

I'm not here

______

I'm (thankfully, blessedly) past that time of life now, and haven't taken an antidepressant in years. These days when I listen to How to Disappear Completely, still easily one of my favourite songs of all time (and still capable of evoking an almost unnervingly visceral reaction), the sudden calm in the final stretch of the song doesn't sound like death, but the other side of a storm. It's not happy, by any stretch. On the contrary - there's absolutely nothing optimistic about it. The lingering malaise hangs on until the very end. But it's not the oppressive, discordant, overwhelming clamour of before either. It suddenly gives back breathing room, leaves a sense of space. In my eyes, nothing could be a better metaphor for the process of mental recovery. It's not immediate - there's no walking through a miraculous door out of a black box and all at once into the sunlight. It's a gruelling process cut with setbacks, and happiness usually isn't the immediate reward for trying. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's worth fighting tooth and nail for.

I still listen to every one of these songs, some more often than others, but all with a sense of gratitude. They bring to my mind that classic cliché, of the wilfully misunderstood teen whose only escape is music - and I can't help but see the reason and truth in it. In what can be such a mentally and emotionally traumatic time, when relating to the world is such a struggle and expressing inner thoughts seems impossible, it's no surprise we found (and still find) solace in music. If you did, flaunt your favourite tracks loud and proud - even the embarrassing ones. Love them, appreciate them, reflect on them. The refuge they gave is worth it.