Music + Depression

I’m lying in bed trying to gauge whether or not I’m ready to fall asleep or if I need to watch another episode of 'The 100.'

Bingeing was a good distraction for a while but the scars of the day are still fresh in my mind. The argument I had. The self-doubt that came after. The issues I didn’t find solutions to. Everything is weighing on me, even as today turns into yesterday and the problems of tomorrow prepare to wake me up from the sleep I’m not even getting. I rustle around a bit and finally turn over and stare straight at the ceiling. I can barely make it out in the dark. The fan on my nightstand is whirling. The light and noises of whatever is going on in the kitchen and living room are peeking through the spaces between the door and its frame and despite the black computer screen, bright images from a few moments ago are still flickering in my mind’s eye. With a sigh, I feel around for my phone, unlock it, and, with blind muscle memory, find the music. I press play without looking to see what’s on deck, but immediately recognize the song. “Summer” by The Carters. The intro hasn’t even segued into the first chorus yet when a familiar feeling hits me. There’s this tension a few inches above my stomach, almost as a reminder that I have a heart. The rest of the muscles in my body relax and my breathing slows. Peace. The kind I only ever know when I’m listening to a good song. I consider adding it to 17.

17 is a playlist I’ve been curating since the sixth grade.

It started as a short list of about five songs that I considered my favorite of all time. Thirteen years and very careful consideration later, it's grown to 17 songs, hence the name. I hold 17 in very high regard. The same playlist is on every device I own and whenever I have to update a device or get a new one, this group of songs is the first thing I add, even before phone numbers. If emotional support dogs were playlists, this would be mine. I’ve never shared it with anyone in its entirety and I’ve never explained, truthfully, how all of the songs came to be on the playlist, probably because I was always afraid to. For a long time, I told people, and I guess myself, that it was nothing more than songs that got stuck in my head; songs that I just really, really liked. Some of these songs bring up painful memories for me. Some remind me of the people I miss. They’re stories about people I’ve loved and lost. Its a photo album of times in my life when I thought the world was coming down on me. Its quite literally a record of me trying to find self-acceptance, emotional stability, and new reasons to live. But, if anything, 17 is a map of who I am and what I’ve been through. Each song is a message reminding me of something I survived. At one point, each one of these songs saved my life by redefining it for me in some way. Most of them are love songs so I’m sure that says something about the Pisces in me, but sappy love songs or not, they made me who I am.

That’s because the most consistent thing in my life is music.

It’s a part of my soul. It’s the answer to everything for me. Even with the isolation I’ve created for myself I can celebrate the highs, nurse myself through the lows, and narrate everything else in between with music. The way certain smells or sounds can trigger memories in people’s minds, I hear a particular song and remember what I was doing and how I was feeling when I first heard it. “Paper Planes” takes me back to middle school summers playing foosball on a hot ass patio with my brother and cousins. I remember “Disturbia” coming on at middle school formals and trying not to dance too close to the boy I liked. “Bills, Bills, Bills” reminds me of the shy boy I used to be hiding behind my mother’s legs when we met new people, only coming out to join society when Destiny’s Child came on. This should have been a CLEAR indication that I was gay.

There’s music that reminds me of times when I didn’t have a care in the world and when I could breathe.

Though the memories are distant, the feeling is a welcome reminder that happiness is indeed something I’ve experienced in my life. It reminds me that being content with my life is possible because I’ve done it before. Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel takes me back to a three bedroom house. It's just my mom, my brother and I. Every Wednesday night is movie night where we order pizza and bundle ourselves up on the couch. We probably watch a Marvel movie. My mom is recovering from a divorce but it's just the three of us for the first time in years so despite what she’s going through, we’re happy. It's my sophomore year in high school so there are posters all over my walls and I rearrange what little furniture I have in my room every few months. I have one foot out of the closet and I’m considering, very nervously, coming out publicly, especially now that I’ve decided to quit football and pursue duel-credit classes. I do classmates’ math homework for money and when I study I listen to this album my best friend just burned for me. Even then I did the whole, lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, and listen to music thing. I loved that house.

But then there’s the music that breaks my heart.

Some, in a glorious, “At least I got to experience love” type of way. Others in a “You almost didn’t make it through that” type of way. Music that makes me think of all the things I would have missed out on had that moment in time been my last. Nothing breaks my heart like “I Was Here”. Honestly I never thought a Beyoncé song would do that but anything is possible when you go through tough shit, I guess. The song wasn’t always a punch in the gut, though. I was a junior in high school when it came out and everything I that had made me happy just a year earlier, I’d lost. By this time the world was a dark place that led to fighting this battle between thinking practically and making last-minute decisions that made me happy (and/or pissed off my parents). It was too late to invest in a future that revolved around the things I really loved so I found myself grasping at straws when it came to making choices about college. I was always really good at math so I thought I’d be an accountant. The second semester of my junior year, however, for the first time ever I did not understand what was going on in my math class. It's like, as if by divine intervention, I suddenly lost all the mind that I had for numbers and problem solving so I scrambled to find something else that defined me. I needed to apply for college, pick a major, and know exactly what I wanted to do with my life so, instead of making a last ditch effort to explore my interests, I decided to pursue psychology, which I won’t lie, I do love but was pretty much picked out of a hat. I guess because of my need to be needed and the fact that I was always the mom of the group, solving my friends’ problems for them, mending their relationships, helping them plan their own futures despite not having my own shit together, I decided I’d become a therapist. I figured I might as well get paid to do something I already do well and naturally. But, of course, I didn’t take into account the fact that have a tendency to get way too invested in other people’s problems and get incredibly offended when people don’t take my advice (because why would you come to me in the first place if you weren’t going to take my advice? That’s why your dumb ass is in the situation you’re in, because you didn’t listen), a conclusion I didn’t even come to until AFTER I switched majors recently. My family wasn’t very convinced, but this is the same group of people whose various life plans for me included the military, playing football at a school I hadn’t even bothered to apply to, and becoming an engineer: a trifecta of things I never had interests in, so I wasn’t too keen on picking anything out of that peanut gallery. To convince myself I was making the right decision, I would listen to Beyoncé and convince myself that this is where my experiences had been leading me all along. I knew that I wanted to make meaningful differences in people’s lives and this, to me at the time, was the only realistic way to do that. It was a positive reminder to follow my heart.

Two years later in my first semester of college, it was harder to keep that same positivity.

I’d play that same song to remind myself of the future I wanted for myself. Only now, it was a lot harder for me to see. I wasn’t making the same grades I did in high school. The material didn’t come as easy to me, and for the first time in my academic career that I didn’t have a creative outlet to keep me motivated or to channel my frustrations. My issue was a lot bigger than not choosing the right school or major and I thought if I told my parents what I was feeling that that was the conclusion they’d jump to and throw it in my face and I couldn’t handle that. So, all I had in my arsenal was this song that didn’t have the same effect on me that it once did. It slowly became a song I would listen to when I was thinking about taking my life, trying to convince myself that life was still worth living because I had goals. But I had a loud voice in my head telling me that those goals weren’t attainable; that I would never amount to anything. A legitimate fear of mine is not being successful. And at night that’s what would keep me up, seeing myself as a failure. Not just someone who didn’t have a good job or didn’t have money but someone who didn’t amount to anything and didn’t mean anything to anyone.

Through my depression, my anthem became this pre-eulogy of sorts.

I would lie in bed and think about how people would remember me and it was so important that they knew how I felt about them. I remember doing things like sending random, “I love you” texts to the most important people in my life and surprising my friends with random acts of kindness just to show them I appreciated them. It took a while but I finally felt like everyone I loved knew that I did. Satisfied, one night in December, a few days before Christmas break, I listened to “I Was Here” for what I thought would be the last time and tried to commit suicide. And now, whenever I hear that song I get stuck in that night. I get stuck in the drinks I drank to build up the courage to do what I set out to. I get stuck in the act of drunkenly trying to call my mother so I could hear her voice one last time. I get stuck in the act of trying to walk into oncoming traffic. But more than anything I get stuck lying on the couch as my friends, having gotten me inside, take care of me, through a drunken haze and embarrassment hearing “I Was Here” still blaring through my headphones as I fall asleep.

Growing up, I used music as a departure from shitty situations.

Music was my first form of therapy. Music gave me my first idols and mentors. Other kids had their fairytales, various space-themed movies, or sports icons but I never got into those things. I saw myself in music. As long as Nina Simone was playing the piano I didn’t have a deadbeat dad. As long as Louis Armstrong was blowing into a trumpet I wasn’t getting bullied. As long as Mariah was hitting those high notes I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t when I came home. That daydream form of self-care translated later in my life into a tv and movie addiction where I could travel through space, time, and comic book pages away from my dark corner of the world. Oh, how easy my life would be if my only problem in the world was a car that turned out to be an alien robot. Music, though, will always be my first love because, despite its ability to take me back to some of the worst times in my life, it somehow still takes me the furthest away from pain. Being the giver that I am, I think that’s why I’m a creative and from an early age had these wild dreams of being famous. Obviously, the idea of being rich and having nice things is alluring but, more importantly to me, whether it meant I was in movies, made music, or whatever, I saw myself as an entertainer, doing for other people what music was able to do for me; creating an escape from all the bad in someone’s life. It was always about creating a platform and doing good with it, being the person the younger version of myself needed. It took me years, depression, and a suicide attempt, but I came back to that. I came back to music.

I was in the church choir, school choir, and band in elementary and middle school. I spent my summers playing around on pieces of my uncle’s old drum set and printing out sheet music to play what little I could on my grandparents’ old, out of tune and beat up piano. I wrote poetry, lyrics, and plays just for own personal amusement and still let the world and all its mess get in the way of my passions. I’m 24 and am just now realizing that I want to produce and work in A&R and am pursuing a degree to do so. Some days I feel like I’ve wasted time, at least 4 years, to come to a conclusion that was always in front of me and some days I feel like I wouldn’t have found my purpose if I hadn’t gone through some of the things I did. Maybe I’d have my degree by now but something would be missing and I wouldn’t know what it was. I go back and forth about how I feel about things but either way I regret not being true to myself when it mattered most. Making music taught me how to do that. In high school, I did all these things to make my parents happy and to be the perfect academic and when I graduated I made quick reactionary decisions from a place of rebellion and despair.

I spent a lot of time using music to drown out the world instead of using it to make the world better.

But I guess that’s the plan now. So please, dear reader, don’t be like me. Trust your mind AND your heart. Think realistically AND with optimism. Most importantly never underestimate yourself or your dreams. Whatever it is that you love, embrace it. Accept it. And don’t let anything get in between you and what matters.

Hopefully, sharing my truth will bring you closer to finding yours. Enjoy the playlist.