This Year I Learned...

I’m not sure that I intended these year-end posts to be highly personal and confessional, but here we are.

My entries only date back to the end of January, but when I first started doing this I wasn’t writing anything down. I’m actually coming up on a year of doing this with very little interruption. It’s been an interesting experiment and it’s kind of formed a habit, so I don’t suppose I’ll stop. There’s a long testimony here, but the TL;DR version is that my poor mental health had been robbing me of everything I used to enjoy, including music. And when I started to get help, it quieted my inner narrator enough that I could start enjoying things again.

Dealing with the Narrator

I have dealt my whole life with an inner narrator who hates me. Maybe you don’t have an inner voice, a narrator who lets you know what is going on and why things are happening and what you should do next. Or, if you do, maybe that narrator is encouraging and forgiving. Mine has never been. For as long as I can remember, my inner narrator has pointed out how much I don’t fit in, how much I’m screwing up, how stupid, fat, lazy, ugly, incompetent, and unlovable I am.

This is what anxiety is like (and neurodivergence, and anxiety about neurodivergence, probably), but I hadn’t always had the vocabulary to talk about it. Several things came into focus in 2020 and 2021 and made me realize it was time for a change.

First, I witnessed my daughter make great strides in dealing with her own anxiety issues. It’s been amazing to see how well she’s overcome it, and how vigilant she stays to deal with it going forward. I suspect both of my other kids deal with these things as well, but talk about it less. So my youngest was the one that helped me with my own realization.

Second, it might sound silly, but there is an episode of Bojack Horseman that gives you a glimpse of Bojack’s narrator. The point of the scene is to show how outlandishly dark his inner voice is, constantly abusing him and basically pushing him to make progressively worse choices. I realized that we as an audience were supposed to be shocked and appalled, but for me the reaction was just, “you mean this isn’t normal?” It made me realize that what I had dealt with my whole life was not something normal or healthy.

I began to notice how much of my time was consumed by counterproductive things: obsessively planning, then being angry when the slightest thing wouldn’t go down accordingly; losing sleep by worrying about bills or work or kids. Stressing about things that happened months or years ago that I just couldn’t let go of.

As I looked around at life in my late 40s, I realized it had been years since I’d really just experienced joy. My listening habits, like my relationships and my inner mental life, were just going through motions I thought I was supposed to. I wasn’t getting much out of it.

Taking it seriously

At the end of 2021 I talked to my doctor and I started taking anti-anxiety meds. I also started taking my own mental health more seriously, dealing actively with that awful voice in my head when it became too loud. It took a while to start feeling any different, but it wasn’t long before I started having a very different experience.

The narrator wasn’t gone, but he was quieter. I could tune him out more often and recognize that it was just a cranky guy yelling at me and not the truth of my life.

Accordingly, I started to be able to find real moments of joy in that new quiet space that I’d almost forgotten how to experience. Now just hearing my wife make a joke, or hearing a song in the grocery store that I hadn’t heard in a long time can just suddenly make me joyful. And I’m even more joyful when that happens because I’m cognizant of what a new experience it is.

right, but the music?

I realized I needed to take more time to be present and to intentionally listen to music if I wanted more out of it. My habit of stacking new releases into a set of “inboxes” and then rushing through them every week wouldn’t do. So I started making myself listen to whole albums, not skipping around. I put fewer things into the inbox, and actually spent time with them. After a while I started writing to express some thoughts about what I listened to each day. Then I started doing more planning to get myself a wider variety of music to sample.

That’s the birth of this blog. It’s not a testament to my vast knowledge of music or my impeccable taste or anything. It’s just me taking note of what I encounter, trying to find new things to put in my head, and leaving space to be surprised and delighted every once in a while.

So… um… happy holidays. If you’re starting to think you need help, you probably do. I encourage you to look around and ask for it. Here’s some music. I’ll do some more explicity “best of 2022” playlists in the next few days, but this one is full of older things that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t started my little album-a-day experiment.