Music is the Weapon for my Self-Destruction

I’m 33 years old. You would think that would be plenty of time on the planet to learn the difference between certain things. While I am certainly incredibly good at differentiating some things like, coffee from tea for example, when it comes to human behavior and separating the genuine from the tantamountly false, I am notoriously miserable at it. I think some of that has to do with my neurodivergence, but I think a lot of it relates to a thing that I hadn’t really examined until I spoke to a friend about it a few nights ago.

I don’t trust my own thoughts because I have a list of diagnosed disorders longer than I am tall. I write myself off as mentally ill, so I don’t trust my own intuition about people and situations. As a result, I have ended up in bad relationships, bad friendships, and bad situations. Bad, bad, bad. I go to therapy, I put the work in hourly. This thing though, I didn’t really have the words to articulate until fairly recently, so it was impossible for me to ask for help. I think of it in the same way as my ASD and ADHD need a schedule and a routine, but I struggle to impose one on myself because I know for a fact that I am full of shit.

What the hell does this have to do with music? Funny story that. I ignore my feelings so often that most of the time I don’t know what is going on inside myself until it all comes flooding out. I have worked really hard to be emotionally aware and emotionally mature about things. I have put the work in to ensure to the best of my ability that the collateral damage to others when an emotional outburst occurs is minimal. I have been largely successful, but at the expense of myself. I have internalized so much of how I feel that I now view it as irrational mental illness instead of legitimate emotional responses to stimuli. Most of the time I can only really access that well of feelings through music.

I have been terribly upset about something that is relatively minimal in the grand scheme of my life. But because it involves people that I care about making self-destructive choices without consideration for the damage it does to the people that are adjacent to them, I can’t just let it go. I have a really hard time processing people who are not aware of the damage they do to others, because I have spent so much of my life being told that is the only thing I should ever worry about. I wouldn’t trade the deep well of empathy I have for the universe, but I also understand that it is at least in part a trauma response, and that disregarding myself for the sake of others is not healthy either. I, like everything else, require balance. But I, like everything else, sorely lack it.

Today I got in the car to go to work, coffee in the cup holder, comfy t-shirt with a beloved local band on it. (Kids on Fire are wonderful and you should definitely check them out immediately if not sooner) I got out of my neighborhood switched my stereo on, and Mike Doughty’s voice filled my ears, sank into my skin, wormed its way into my heart and before I could process what was said, I was crying so hard I had to pull over.

“You were the only answer. My plans spun all around you. Five years in the wrong. I am assured my name to you us just another word.”

The album that song is on came out in 2000. I’ve been listening to that song for 21 years, and how it hits me is entirely dependent on the feelings I am refusing to acknowledge. Bursting into tears on the side of the highway was not in my plans for the day. And since then, I have been a breath away from crying.

I get to work and I start plugging away at all my responsibilities, and I turn on Spotify because I know the only thing that is going to get me out of this is what threw me into it. I need words that will destroy me until I am nothing but a scrap floating in the void. And then I need to fill that void with the swells and sweeps of music. I need to make the only sound the passion of people who can build me up again.

I need to hear Jerry Garcia say, “I will get by, I will survive.”

I need to feel it in my bones when Mike Doughty says, “Oh yes, I’m free to face all the darkness on my own.”

I need to be moved by Geddy Lee as he proclaims, "I can learn to close my eyes to anything but injustice.”

I need rolling bass lines, and melodic guitars. I need double bass pedals and crashing symbols.

I need La Dispute to drown out all of my tumbling thoughts screaming, “Can I still get into heaven if I kill myself” until it’s all I can hear.

It is only in this way that I know how to come back to myself. To acknowledge that I am feeling and begin to piece together the why and how of it. But I can’t be built back into myself if I am not first destroyed so completely that no one would know I ever existed in the first place.