If you’ve interacted with me over the past several years, I have probably done (or not done) something to an extent that you may have wondered if I was unwell. You would have been correct. (And I’m so sorry for the ways my symptoms have impacted those around me.)
While in retrospect, I’ve had depressive tendencies going back to elementary school, it wasn’t until my undergraduate studies that I began to unravel, and it wasn’t until my graduate studies that I became undone by my illness. The pressures of turning my love of music into a quantifiable commodity, the competition, my determination to be “great”, became too much for me, and while I was steadily declining all through my first year of my masters degree, it was in summer of 2020 that I snapped.
It wasn’t a dramatic snap, I didn’t require hospitalization. But I had given up. I considered dropping out of my program. I found it a struggle just to move my limbs, as if my bones had turned to lead in my sleep. One day I spent hours laying on my fire escape, staring at the clouds for hours as tears fell silently down my face. I couldn’t move. I hadn’t written music in months, and the music I did compose in the past 2 years was so arduous, so excruciatingly difficult to create that I questioned whether I was a composer anymore. Pleasure, joy, and curiosity was taken from me, and the zeal I had for music was replaced with desperation. By summer 2020, I had given up. I renounced music from my life, thinking that if I disowned it, perhaps its absence wouldn’t hurt so deeply.
When I started my autumn quarter at the end of 2020, I wasn’t sure if I’d make it to the end. I was constantly riddled with panic and paranoia in between fits emptiness and desolation. Composing felt impossible. I did, and they condemn what they do not understand was the result. But I didn’t feel proud, I felt ashamed. By that point, my illness had made music become a shameful experience.
Why is this so hard to talk about? I’ve heard plenty of stories of musicians who found respite from their illness in music, but not so many about those who felt music had abandoned them in their illness. I began to wonder if I was ever a real musician if music could leave me so readily. Notions of toxic productivity—images of composers diving into their work to escape their illness, losing sleep, losing relationships over their commitment to their work—filled my mind, and I felt horribly inadequate for not living up to them. I felt that I was a fraud any way I tried to look at myself.
It’s now January of 2021, and after months of medication and therapy, I can say I’m doing much better. I still have a lot to process, but I no longer feel paranoid, afraid to leave the house, afraid to speak, unable to accomplish basic tasks. I’m still struggling to commit to my own work, but I’m listening to music more than ever—truly listening, for enjoyment, for pleasure, and finding so much richness in it that was once lost. I’m regaining confidence in myself and my ideas. Most importantly, despite my struggles to compose, I’m beginning to feel inspired again, which is the real motivation behind this post.
I’m coming out of my haze, and I’m falling in love with sound all over again. And god, I’m so deeply in love with it. The gravity of that is so significant to me that I want to shout it from the rooftops, but this feels like the next closest thing. I feel like music has embraced me once again.
It feels like a long awaited reunion.
It feels like coming home.