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The Great Escape

The passion and the pain will keep us alive some day - how music brings hope.

By Stephanie McDonaldPublished 4 years ago 10 min read
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I lay on my back on the grass, hugging my soccer ball to my stomach as if it were alive and could provide me the comfort I so desperately wanted. It had been a sunny day, with clear blue skies hosting the occasional fluffy cloud. Now late afternoon, the sun was beginning to lower, casting that brilliant golden glow over the day while the sky blazed bright blue above me. Laying there in that field, I should have been peacefully contented with the picturesque scene around me. But I was lonely and hurting; full of tumultuous emotions that wanted to burst from me, tearing me at my seams. Indeed, it felt like I was breaking, and that the world around me looked so at peace only served to deepen my pain.

I had had to grow up too quickly. That’s what one of my teachers told me one day when they were trying to help me understand why I was different from the kids my age. I had seen too many things that young eyes shouldn’t see, and because of it I was forced to live years beyond my years. It’s hard for people who have lived more than their age should allow, she said, to find a place among those who have not.

So I learned to pretend; to act young and immature, without a care in the world, while the cares of the world secretly burdened me to points of breaking, over and over again, without anywhere safe to let them go.

As an adult, I’ve found peace with my difference. Well, peace enough. I’ve learned how to live with it and still find joy and purpose in life. It’s sometimes easy to forget how painful it was to be different, to not belong, when I was younger. It’s easy to forget the hurt of never understanding just why I just couldn’t fit in like the other kids could. Chaos brewed inside me from never really feeling like I had a place to call home, where I could be safe and known and accepted as I was.

Eventually I found a safe place – the soccer field. When the game started I was part of the team, and until that final whistle blew, I was the same as my teammates. We were one unit: athletes, comrades, friends. I didn’t have to worry about who I was, how I should speak, or what I looked like. All I had to worry about was playing my position well and helping the team towards victory. Perhaps that’s why I put so much of myself into the sport, and why it meant so much to me. The soccer field was my home, and the people I shared it with became my family.

That’s where I lay that day, under the afternoon sun. It was a soccer field close to home. Not my soccer field; that was too far away for me to get to on my own without a license. But feeling so overwhelmed with my secret burdens, I had to go somewhere familiar; somewhere safe. And, really, the soccer field was the only place I could bear to be.

Less than a week earlier I had arrived home from our national soccer tournament in Brisbane, where I had captained our U18 Girls team. The actual tournament had been a disaster. In the only game that mattered, we played awfully, and for the first time in years, missed out on a spot in the final. To repair the last of a dignity, we managed to come in 3rd place overall, but everyone was disappointed. We knew we should have done better.

That’s not why I was upset, though. I was upset because the tournament had ended, and the team that I had spent months training and playing with, where I had formed friendships on and off the field, had disbanded upon our return. I was upset because I knew that no one else on the team really cared as much as I had about our friendship and teamwork, and the relationships we had formed. To them it was just another part of the year. They had friends, much closer friends, and family and boyfriends all waiting for them back in their own towns. They had things and people to return to. I, on the other hand, felt like I had nothing.

To add insult to injury, most of the team lived relatively close to each other. A few of the girls and boys, from the three boys teams that had attended the tournament with us, even went to the same school. They played together in their local teams and clubs and hung out on weekends, while I lived far across the other side of the city from all of them. The thought pierced me— I’m alone, again.

It’s not that I didn’t have friends at school. I did, but they didn’t understand me. They barely knew the real me, because I was always so careful around them. I was careful to smile and laugh along with them, pretending that I cared about things I didn’t care about, just so that we could have something to bond over. But the guys and girls I spent the last week playing soccer with? Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I felt like they got me. At the very least, we had one thing in common: our love for the game.

For that one week I had finally felt like I belonged. Like I had people who accepted me and wanted me, who really saw me. I felt like I had come to know and love them as my teammates and friends. Even knowing that my mind had exaggeration how much we had actually bonded, I felt like coming home left me empty and alone once more. I could barely take it. For the sixteen years of my life, I had never felt like I fit anywhere. Then when I finally got a taste of what it was like, it was over so soon. I couldn’t keep living this life! The loneliness, the pain—it was too much to face over and over again every day. Never had I thought of ending it, but I desperately wanted to escape. I wanted to escape some way, any way.

A plane flew overhead, and with everything in me I wished to be on it. Going somewhere, anywhere away from here. I wanted to travel, to leave this country and never look back. To find somewhere where I could be myself and be happy; to leave everything and everyone behind and give up the nothing that I had at home.

While I had been kicking the ball around, trying to run out my frustration, I had had my earphones in and playing music. Just before the soccer trip I had bought P!NK’s latest album, The Truth About Love, and had listened to it on our bus rides from the airport to our accommodation, and from our accommodation to the soccer field early in the morning, when everyone was still too tired to talk. It became my soundtrack for the tournament, and that was what I was listening to as I took shot after shot on the empty goal that day, tiring myself out but failing to ease the pain inside me. The earphones had stayed in as I had collapsed on the ground in frustrated hopelessness and hugged my ball tightly. After the plane had flown through the sky and out of my view, the next song in the album started to play -- The Great Escape. It was slow, and therefore I hadn't really paid it much attention on the trip. Now, however, the piano began to play, its notes sounding concerned to have me listen to their song.

“I can understand how when the edges are rough,

And they cut you like the tiniest slivers of glass—”

I closed my eyes, listening intently as the smell of grass and the material of my soccer ball took me back briefly to the fields where we warmed up in Brisbane, reveling in the gaze of the boys as they watched us prepare for our game. It was both sweet to remember, and so bitterly disappointing to know that it was just a memory. Yet as the song played, I knew that what I was feeling upon my return home was more than just nostalgia over a sports trip. It was a bubbling over of all the times I had ever felt lonely, abandoned, and hopeless. My whole life was filled with rough edges, assaulting me with tiny cuts that had never really healed.

“And you feel too much,

And you don’t know how long you’re gonna last.”

It’s very rare to come across a song that seems to know you inside out. Yet here I was, laying and sweating on that grassy field, as the lyrics sung of exactly what I was feeling, and seemed to know just how deeply I was hurting. I did feel too much. I always felt too much. Teachers and family tried to tell me it was a blessing; they called it “passion”. But how could a blessing only ever hurt?

“But everyone you know, is tryna smooth it over—find a way to make the hurt go away.

But everyone you know, is tryna smooth it over,

Like you’re trying to scream under water.”

That’s exactly what it felt like. Trying to scream under water. How did she know? I opened my eyes and watched a small cloud fly by above me.

“But I, won’t let you make the great escape.

I’m never gonna watch you checkin’ out of this place.

I’m not gonna lose you,

‘Cause the passion and the pain, are gonna keep you alive, someday…”

Tears rolled silently down my face as I listened to this song telling me, urging me, not to give up. Not to try to escape, because there was a purpose to this pain. She seemed to get it. I was breaking, and I was so sick of hurting, and feeling, and never belonging. I desperately wanted to make that escape, but I listened to the song as though P!NK was sitting right in front of me, pleading with me to hear her out.

I listened as she sung about how she had been where I was; how she had felt the pain, and this damn thing that others call passion—a fire that only burns the one from whom it springs forth. And I listened as she promised me that it would be worth it one day.

Only someone who had suffered the cuts from those tiny shards of glass herself could sing so passionately and plead so desperately for another to endure it. Lying on the grass of an empty soccer field under that afternoon sun, with the pain of loneliness threatening to tear me apart, a trust was formed between two broken hearts. One of those hearts had been repaired, and was promising the other that, one day, it would be too; and in that day, the passion and the pain will have been worth it.

That night I learned the words to the song, The Great Escape. I sung it often, and learned how to play it on guitar, and even now when things get tough and I feel like everything is too much and my heart is too burdened to go on, I sing it to myself. And every time I sing it, I remember that sixteen-year-old girl laying, broken, on the soccer field; the only place in the world that she had ever felt she belonged. I remember the golden sunlight and bright blue sky, the smell of grass and of my soccer ball clutched in my arms, and the moment the plane flew by overhead, sparking the desire for an escape. I remember the crushing weight; the pain that I carried for so much of my life, and the tears that I cried so many nights.

Every time I sing that song, my heart is a little more whole, and I am a little more thankful for the passion and the pain I endured, and how it has shaped me. And every time I hear it, in my own voice or another’s, I swear to myself that I will be the one to promise another young, broken heart that one day they will make it through too. I will be the one to show that I know what it’s like to be cut and broken, to feel too much, and still I will plead with them to hold on. Because one day the passion and the pain they feel will be worth it.

humanity
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