Singing the Pain Away

Although I only started learning how to play an instrument less than a year ago, I’ve been trying to write songs for years. It was something that I aspired to. Musicians don’t make much, lonely musicians make even less. But poetry and tune came naturally even when I didn’t know how to make them sound quite good. I still struggle with this, but I’m improving slowly.

My lyrics were always off though. With depression and anxiety leaving me hollow, I never knew how to work them into something that people could enjoy. They never had any sense of emotion or what they were meant to be. There was nothing in them that felt right. Reading them was like reading monotony and singing them left me empty. As pages piled up in the trash can, I gave up. I’d never been in love, so love songs couldn’t be written, and I’m asexual, so I couldn’t draw inspiration from sexual songs.

My mental illnesses were a struggle to put into words. I couldn’t find the poetry in anxiety or the beauty in depression because there was none. In other words, I was thinking too much about my work rather than simply putting it on the page.

Then my brain stopped. Everything stopped and I felt a pain that I didn’t think existed. You think you can imagine what loss feels like. You read about it and you see it in movies. You hear people discuss it and you have friends who experience it. But you can never imagine it. I didn’t know how to process it. As someone who already struggled emotionally, I couldn’t process it.

So I wrote my thoughts. All of them were so disorganized and jumbled that they weren’t even poetry. They were just bits and pieces and they didn’t want to connect. It took me weeks before I could read over them. It took weeks to even think about them. But some of them connected.

It was difficult. I wrote and rewrote. I recorded and rerecorded. I turned my thoughts upside down and inside out. And then I thought about them. I added a beat, and from a beat a tune developed. Next thing I knew it was recorded. Not professionally, just on a cell phone camera. It was shaky and the quality left something to be desired, but it was real.

Writing my feelings into lyrics helped. It helped me realize my emotional state so that I could start working through it. Even if I was the only one who had heard it. It was still there. It was just processing. Next thing I knew I had a second one. This one came easier, as though it had been pre-written for me and set into my lap. The lyrics were easy and the tune was light. I could hum it under my breath and sing it out loud within a few days. I even heard a few customers humming it to themselves after hearing me singing it.

It was then that I realized something. Nobody could experience my sister, but I could still let them experience her. The third song began to form. Just poetry that I never got to say, all the things I wanted to tell her. Slowly, I’m finding ways to hold on, and someday I might even be able to say that I’m coping. Until then, I’ll keep on writing.

Maybe I’ll write an album. I’ll contact a friend and see if he’ll help me. There was a sentiment we shared. Ad Astra Per Aspera, it means Through Hardship to the Stars. This is my hardship, may she take me to the stars, and may we share them with each other.