The Power of Music (Part 1)

It got to a point where every single day I hated everything, and I wished I weren’t alive which is an intense emotion for a 9-year-old I suppose. I remember very early on in my life understanding the concept of suicide and empathizing with it heavily, especially because it felt like it would’ve been a better alternative to the bullying. From middle school to the first half of high school I felt really shy and awkward. I became very emotionally and socially isolated, always feeling weird and super neurotic. I didn’t tell anyone, and I don’t think anyone really thought about me either, and I was so emotionally anxious and awkward from all the isolation and bullying that I was in this place where I felt trapped within myself.

But… then I found music.

I remember I saw this performance at the school talent show with some older kids in a band performing the song Little Black Submarines, and I remember thinking “what the hell did I just watch, this is some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in my entire life”. I had never seen music performed like that or thought about music like that before. I don’t know how that happens in therapy, but I had this feeling like “this is it”, and in that one moment my whole life flipped upside down. Every day after that I started taking music seriously…because all I could think was how could anything like that have ever existed and I just thought about it all the time. When I started singing, all those feelings that were constantly growing in me worked their way into the music…. but the depression eventually took hold of the music entirely. I thought my life wouldn’t make sense without the sadness and I would’ve felt defenseless, I was convinced that the anger that fueled me was a necessity, and I felt this way for a very long time which informed my music making it really bad at first. But as I became a better writer, I realized I needed to value myself to grow and to become better at the whole endeavor because nothing works until you feel happy, good, satisfied, and fulfilled in your own process... that you’re never going to become a good artist unless you’re fully independent from the control, the anger, and pain it has over you.