Late at Night

Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.

I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.

I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.

And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?

I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.

Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.

And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.

Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.

Sound Reflection

All the music I have ever played sounded like rock bottom. The hollow reverberations against windowless walls. There was no spread; the sound didn’t scatter into a million decibels. Just lifeless, not even squirming.

This is what it felt like to lock myself away in a practice room in the basement at Emory University–the rock bottom of the building. Emory had the instruments I couldn’t afford so that’s where I practiced. And at the time, it was fine. Because I didn’t know that sunlight mattered. No one told me about Vitamin D. I didn’t know that being down there, seeing no one for 4-5 hours every day would be a defining definition of myself.

But it didn’t matter. My goal was to relate to my instruments, my practicing, not people. And to be (too) honest, it still is. I still process time with people as a waste of time not spent with my instruments. And I was sorrowful about this for quite a while. I’m not anymore. It molded my brain. It was what my psyche and emotions developed throughout childhood.

Like social media. Just like social media.

Growing up with the anticipation of getting home from school to chat with friends on AOL instant messenger. Then facebook getting blocked by administrators in high school because we were all logging on during school to stare at non-engaging pages. It’s when there was no timeline. No chat features. All we could do was stare at our profiles, then at others, and mull over the mystery of a relationship status classified as “It’s complicated.”

I’ve watched the movie telling the story of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. Then a dropout of Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. And at the end of that day, it wasn’t much different than what I was doing in the practice room: disengaging myself from people to bond myself with myself. Instead of angling to be around and have fluffy interactions with our objects of affection, we simply lurked online instead, gazing into their photos and creating love affairs in our minds.

I had a love affair with my instruments. I didn’t just gaze at them online. Everyday I attuned myself to making flirtatious advances towards them, incrementally bringing myself closer to their inner parts. Studying the sound when I played them. Studying the physics of their rebound–the relationship of a stick or mallet to a plane that I had to manipulate my body to get a return on the gravity I’d use to strike them.

And always–always–I practiced in front of a mirror. There were things about my body that I’d have to observe, things that I wouldn’t be able to see myself just looking down. But not my head. Not my face. Not my eyes. Because I didn’t play an instrument using my mouth. I always had a disembodied relationship to what I had to look at in the mirror. Even if my face was visible, I never looked at it. It was my back, my hands, my arms, my fingers that needed attention. Still so. When I practice today, I see the body I’m using, not the face that it sits on.

In the mirror I search for the reflection of my sound. Not myself.

Figurative Warmth

Being warm and dry is such a blessing. Literally and mentally. All those times caught in the rain on public transportation. Like clockwork, rain would pour down on the way to or on the way from a Monday morning therapy appointment, sometimes both. I started to believe the rain was just for me, just for my therapy appointments so I could be degraded in the process of finding out why my life had become so empty and static.

Once my therapist offered to drop me at the train station after an appointment when the rain was so heavy that only a nanosecond under it soaked me to the bone. I thanked her, but refused, knowing I didn’t want to travel with the one person who knew my insides. When she immediately said okay without a moment of hesitation, I was glad I didn’t say yes and take her up on an offer that seemed, when she quickly responded, more an act of courtesy rather than an intentional act of providing solace. And she was already doing enough. I was paying her, yes, but she and any therapist should be allowed to walk out the door unencumbered after sifting through a mess that probably projects more of their own lives than they’d be willing to admit.

It’s like my quest to leave the practice room in the practice room–her ability to leave garbage in the trash can. Not my garbage, not me as garbage, but the muck and mud of life itself.

When I step voluntarily in the rain now to smoke a cigarette, the few and far between moments of coping, I also sense my voluntary exposure to what broke me in the process of trying to put my shards back together. Those moments remind me of how I can self-sabotage, erecting a memory that in actuality is a normal part of existence–being caught in the rain–but reeks of a time so low for me. It’s the feeling of being discarded and left not for dead, but for a life of deadness encompassing a breath of fresh pollution rather than air.

And the mental warmth, the mental dryness of being alive nurtured by the rainwater of a shower rather than a flooding of rainwater that drowns me: it isn’t so figurative after all. Being warm and dry in my physical body mirrors, recently unbeknownst to me, a dry warmth in my mind.

Being warm and dry is such a blessing.

Shelter

The birds were confused and so was I. I had watched them just one day before, perched in branches, singing extravagant operas, digging for worms, switching places as though playing musical chairs—living. Now they move back and forth across an empty yard, not sure where their nests and young have gone, buffa operas now turned into negro spirituals. They had homes, they had conference centers, maybe churches, restaurants and recreational facilities all wiped away in less than a day.

I watched as they cut the trees down, not envisioning how open the space would be afterwards. I was shocked when I finally realized that cutting down the trees would mean there would be no trees. Yet the process was exhilarating watching huge branches fall to the ground and, of course, tree trunks—one even being forced with three men pulling a cable attached to the top half of a tree while another man who had climbed the tree to cut off smaller branches remained attached to its lower half seemingly undaunted by the prospect of going down with it.

The three trees that stood tall, wild, and overgrown—indigenous and free—were a forest of their own making. They didn’t fit in an urban city, despite their size and maturity hinting that they might have been here first and that the city might be what doesn’t fit. But as I stood in the back of the house, this historical, Philadelphia house that is said to have once been the slave quarters for the enormous next-door plantation home no longer with any trees in its backyard, it was easy to forget the main road only two blocks over with cars and buses and fumes and people.

The shelter the trees provided, I thought, were for the birds. I had watched them every day from morning until they all seemingly evaporated in the early evening before materializing again for the next and new morning. But now, I watched them walk on ground where trunks had been. I watched them flying through air where they once landed on branches. As I stood there smoking a cigarette in view of my next door neighbors and strangers passing alongside the street on the other side of their house, I understood. I lamented my own shelter—not theirs.

My smoking provided isolated moments, strung together to convince me that I was present for them. It’s when and sometimes why I’m not seen, and how I can step outside of myself without ever really leaving myself in some sort of abusive way. Being in public view leaves me in the strange and nonsensical reality that all I’m really doing is smoking a cigarette. Without shelter, I’m merely exposed, a vulnerability of weakness and addiction, and maybe everything that goes beyond that—all of it on display because the trees were cut down.

I didn’t need them for oxygen. I didn’t need them to watch the birds. I just needed me, all of me, to myself. I needed to not be seen and the trees were giving that without me knowing to ask for it.

Just last night the shelter that I thought I had while on zoom with my video turned off was challenged when I asked a question of the panel Columbia University chose for the evening. I sat and twisted my hair, my natural hair which, beautiful to me, only looks wild and untamed to others. In asking the question, I was exposing myself mentally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually because of the nature of my question: “What would you write about if this pandemic turned into the end of the world—if it just decided one day that it was going to end everything. What would you write about? What topics would you feel we need as the last way to see ourselves?”

I was glad to participate, glad that I wasn’t consumed by the fear of speaking, of saying something when everyone else remained quiet, as smart people, unlike me, do. The moderator asked me to show myself, saying it was much more valuable an exchange for those who I addressed to see my face, to look at me as if meeting physically in a room and present with one another.

She was right. In the moment, I didn’t consider the shelter I had to give up, what I had to reveal—the vulnerability of any black woman being seen with her natural hair untamed, hardly meeting a standard of beauty for public exposure. I started my video after quickly wiping my face with a paper towel to remove splotches of oil on my face that might give me an unnatural shine reflecting the dim light in awkward places on my face. But I didn’t cover my hair (I didn’t have time) and I didn’t speak up to say I’m not in a state of showing myself. I simply turned on my video and said with my hair unruly, “I’m in the middle of twisting my hair which is why I don’t have my video on.”

And so I revealed myself to the authors, the moderator, all the students that I have not yet met in person, all the students that I have not yet had the opportunity to dazzle with my beauty, my face manipulated, make-up in its rightful place, my hair done in a way so it doesn’t reveal what it really looks like. Just enough to keep hidden what so many black women try their best to do, technology taking the place of what the trees had been providing for me.

With the trees gone, I could now be seen by strangers walking by, cars, and now maybe even family who are turning the corner to pull into the driveway. My in-laws, the people who although they are my family, I still don’t want to see me as I really am.

At the time I felt confident. At the time I even felt excited that I had the confidence, the strength to show my face, my hair half-twisted, half out, the kinks sticking straight out after a day of humidity that shrank my hair from passing my shoulders to only inches from my scalp. It was after spending a day confronting nature, the natural state of the condensation colliding with the natural hair on my head, that I took this experience, this collaboration between my body and the earth, that I felt empowered, my vanity stripped away, no longer captive to altering what is natural within me and outside of me to fit an unnatural and altered reality of what beauty is—and what black is.

The next day I woke up horrified, recoiling at how bold I felt revealing my face and my hair, splotches of oil on my forehead. What was natural yesterday felt unnatural today.

“Why would I do that?” I asked myself. “I’ll have to make sure that I look extraordinary every time I log on so that people think I’m beautiful, so that people know I’m beautiful.”

Now that I see the birds circling around where those trees once were, I understand the natural exposure, the taking away of their shelter and my (un)natural exposure with the click of a button.

The open backyard of my neighbor’s house piles up with cinder blocks and bricks. Surely something is to be constructed in the place of those trees, something, hopefully, that will shelter me once again from the public. Something, I hope, I can hide behind as I smoke a cigarette.

Scene: Take 1

Sometimes it is tempting. To give into strength. Strength of mind–or lack thereof. To break away, a necessity of non-existence, of what in your own hands, is only physically possible. In His hands? Mental non-existence is necessary for spiritual presence. But even now, I want not to type His name. Because what can be chilling is remaking through. Or breaking out.

I’m caught in a scene. A beautiful one. But caught, nonetheless. The knowledge of what beauty does with me (or what I do with it) demands freedom. When there was possibility of movement, I feigned healing. Just having the options makes me smile. Not actually utilizing either of them.

Maybe I  haven’t been caught in the scene. Maybe I’m just stuck in it.

What’s Real?

Hi ma,

I wanted to let you know that I’ve been gaining some perspective tonight. Just reading a lot about what has been going on in the world (I’ve been up all night doing what I can to take my mind off of everything because those destructive thoughts start to take a life of their own) by perusing news sites, blogs, etc. and I’ve applied some logic to my uncontrollable emotions. The truth is that I DO have a good life. And no matter how bad I feel internally because of these thoughts or any external thing that may trigger them, my life will never be something to complain about. I’ve been reading very sad stories about the injustices that occur around the world everyday (a big part of the reason why I became interested in practicing law) and my disease does not even begin to describe pain, despair, loneliness or hopelessness. I’m not downplaying it because pretending that I don’t have those feelings won’t help me learn how to cope with them and learn how to live my life without wanting to end it, but reading about what people endure empowers me. Thinking about what you have endured in your life, daddy, and especially Faye as she has made great strides against all odds and people I don’t even know who are younger than me or more vulnerable than me or victimized their entire lives–people who know nothing but how to survive in the worst of conditions–fill me with hope.

There are still a lot of things that I have not confronted that I am dealing with in pieces as I gain the strength to do so–things that Jim has advised me to let out and if possible, share with someone I can trust. He says, “no one can help you if they don’t know what is happening or happened to you.” I asked him, “why can’t I just start being happy? why do I have to re-live the pain?” And he told me that because it took years for my psychological disease to break me down, I won’t actually be healing if I don’t undo the damage by slowly building myself back up. Ever since you held my hand at the hospital when you took me in after leaving Savannah to come help me, I stopped thinking that I can’t trust you no matter how my thoughts may try to distort your support.

I feel scared about letting people in because I have held on to so much contempt and rage about people who I felt abandoned me when I left NY. I felt like I had an entire network of support that fell away, from people who I could care less about to people like Tom who I cared everything about. When I was in NY and asked for help with what was going on in my ward and the problems I had with my spirituality as a result (which I now understand to have been within the context of this disease), I felt upset and hurt and lost when he never called me back. He said, “do visiting teaching” in the one conversation we had. Before I left for NY, daddy would call me a “star,” dubbing that as my nickname before I let him down when I came home. Stanford, who I was particularly close with before he moved, expressed his disappointment with a disdain that I still think about all the time. Dawn, who wanted to help and support me the best way she knew how and was my closest sibling out of everyone often scolded me about what I would do turn myself around when I didn’t even have the clarity to understand what was happening. And despite the many loving gestures she made, I could only interpret constructive criticism an an attack. My teachers in NY stopped responding to me, Don at Curtis didn’t get recommendations from Chris or Duncan, and my teacher who was a supporter, nurturer, mentor and guidance counselor for me as well as a close friend refused to even talk to me about what happened and completely ignored me altogether–something that I hope to soon confront and find forgiveness and strength in my heart to move past.

But more important than the people in my life I felt as though Heavenly Father abandoned me. When I got up to NY with the gospel burning bright inside of me, I thought that nothing I had done to build my spirituality and trust in Him was helping me persevere. Everyone at school knew who I was, what I stood for, and got to the point where they completely stopped trying to test my standards because they knew I stood firm. Boys learned that I would not compromise my standards for their pleasure and they all almost stopped trying to get to know me or date me altogether. I had very few friends who stood by me and for me when I chose to uphold my standards, and even fewer who could spend time with me knowing that I wouldn’t smoke, drink, go to an inappropriate venue, hang out with or around negative influences, or compromise my spirituality and the Spirit inside of me in any way. I became alone and isolated because I had a difficult time adjusting to the Manhattan 9th ward. I felt disconnected as a black woman, unattractive to white mormon men and unable to relate to white mormon women and dissatisfied with settling for whatever else would accept me. So I felt isolated spending most of my time in the practice rooms alone, something that worked for me in high school, but haunted me in NY, left to these symptoms that began to poison my mind and body. One Friday night–the weekends were particularly lonely because everyone liked to go out and do all those things I wouldn’t partake in–I’m in a practice room with my Book of Mormon because I desperately wanted to feel fulfilled and loved by my Savior. With the ardent faith that He was all I needed to achieve joy, I knelt down and prayed with Moroni 10 in mind, finally asking for the first time in my life if everything that I had been taught was true. And I was answered. My tongue felt bound and my body felt stiff. I could not move or speak and I didn’t want to, knowing that being still would allow me to feel or hear the answer. All I could do was cry uncontrollably. By that time, I was use to crying alone in the practice room, but I knew this wasn’t one of those nights. I knew that what I was feeling was not the hopelessness and despair that had caused streams of tears to drip down my heart. It was the Spirit that I had grown to know over years and years of attending church and being surrounded by spiritual beauty. I knew in that moment that there is a God who loves me and who would comfort my conflicted soul. Mommy, I went the next three days without eating or drinking a single thing and at no point did I hunger and at no point did I thirst. I never even felt an inkling of needing food or water. I understood what it meant to never hunger or thirst after drinking from the everlasting life of the Savior. For those three days, I kept the Book of Mormon with me because I wanted to read it and have its presence and power in my life. I wanted the Spirit to be with me at all times. My prayer brought to me so much joy that I couldn’t contain it and I wanted to escape the misery that started to take over me. That Sunday after church, I sat down and wrote a letter to all of my siblings testifying of my belief in Heavenly Father and the unparalleled joy that it impressed upon my tortured soul. I never sent that letter although I still have it. Because that day after church, I took a bite out of a chocolate chip cookie that did not immediately diminish my joy, but seemed to somehow slowly fade it away as I began to hunger and thirst once again. For those three days, this Spirit, this knowledge, this joy interrupted and eliminated my pain. So not knowing what was happening to me, I grew angry; angry that I had lived my life to reach those fleeting moments of truth, angry that I had devoted my life to my Heavenly Father with complete faith and trust in Him, with a desire to serve Him, be a representation of Him, to keep His commandments, and live with Him once again only to be miserable while everyone else looked happy. I didn’t understand why I got to the point where I could not live my life and do what I thought I was meant to do, developing the talents that He had given me in His name with every intention to use it as a tool of His great and marvelous plan.

While going to the YSA Ward after breaking up with BP, I met repeatedly with the Bishop, telling him that I had not kept the Word of Wisdom, the Law of Chastity, that I had not taken the Sacrament in almost fours years ever since I smoked marijuana for the first time during my last semester in NY, that I wanted to repent, but I didn’t know how, and that I needed help because I feared that if the Lord could not save me, I could never be saved; that I had started contemplating suicide almost four years prior and while before it was one of many depressing thoughts, I was finally starting to devise a specific and hopefully effective plan. And mommy, when the Bishop talked at me (not to me) and said that I was unhappy because of the commandments and promises that I had broken, because of the decisions that I had been making, and that I was inflicting my own pain upon me by the way I was living, I wanted to walk away from church and never go back. When I tried to explain that I felt happy, spiritual, ecstatic, connected, overjoyed, devout, determined, inspired, supported, loved, and motivated when I first arrived in NY and that I grew miserable years before I blatantly committed a treacherous sin that would change my life and how I was living it for years, I felt even more confused than before I met with the Bishop. So upon beginning the process of repentance, my emotions discovered the ultimate way to control my body. With the guilt that wracked my soul for committing what I felt were among the most horrific sins against God, I could no longer come up for air. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t understand, I couldn’t believe, I couldn’t love, I couldn’t be. It felt as though everything that had amounted to that period in time, the years of suppressed guilt and rage and contempt and misery and loneliness and surrender took over me and would not let me go. I didn’t feel like Donna and I hadn’t in four years, but at this point, I didn’t even feel human. There was a demon inside of me, that had become me, that spent years struggling to take over my body and finally won.

So when I broke up with BP and lost my only coping mechanism, I fell apart. So much of what I have learned about Bipolar II Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder and Dependent Personality Disorder has released my body from captivity and taken power away from my demons. My mental awareness provided me with a platform to begin understanding that I am not what those demons tell me that I am, that I don’t have to forever feel the pain that they inflict, that my dreams, my soul, my emotions, my spirit, my body, my virtue, and my worth can be mine again, that I am not this distorted enemy to myself, but that I am myself: Donna Lee. I can love myself, I can feel myself, I can enjoy myself, I can be proud of myself, I can TRUST myself, I can believe in myself, and I can BE myself.

Repentance is not something I take lightly, nor for granted. When I went to the Bishop to beg for mercy, I wanted it with every fiber in my being–but that fiber wasn’t what you and daddy nurtured and cultivated within me, and my ravaged being wanted to use it to destroy me, not save me. I will one day be able to face the sin I have committed, kneel before God and beg for mercy with Godly sorrow and pure intent. One day, that process will cleanse and refresh my soul, leaving me as spotless as I was the day I was baptized, but mommy, I know that sorrow will only take over my mind and thoughts and emotions if I’m not strong enough.

God blessed me with this body, and this soul. I’m releasing the anger and resentment that has filled my heart with contempt for a God that would create me this way. I am embracing the shades of beauty that it has created within me to conquer the evil and use it for good. But I just beg you, mommy, please, please, please know that I can be better than what I have become, that I will make you proud once again and that I cannot fight this battle without you. I can’t disappoint again because I don’t know if I can handle the backlash, I don’t know if I can handle another night that has turned into morning like this one and continue to grow strong and make progress if someone else walks away from me.

I am holding on for you

Here, Let Me Explain…

I’ve been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. So this explained so much. It explains why I could not for the life of me pick out one positive aspect about myself. It explains why I was so emotionally dependent on my boyfriend. It explains why I always had a death wish, why I would literally pray to God and ask Him to take my life. It explains why I was constantly afraid—afraid of myself, of my family, of my friends, of my boyfriend—just fear in all corners of my existence. It explains why being and feeling happy was impossible for me. It explains why I stopped having any desire to practice, do my schoolwork and all those things that are good for me. It explains why I chose to hurt myself with destructive habits and drugs. When I checked into the mental institution, I felt overwhelmed with negative emotion. I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t stop imagining how I would commit suicide, I couldn’t see, think, or feel. I was numb and overcome with pain all at the same time. Yet the last thing I wanted to do was reach out to someone for help. I didn’t want anyone knowing how weak I felt. I didn’t want anyone to know how alone and lonely I felt. And that’s because there was no real reason for me feeling that way. I lived at home with my parents, attended Spelman College, was, for a while, very involved with organizations at school, and had a long list of accomplishments that cause people to look at me in awe. What reason did I have to feel the way that I did? I assumed that I would come across as being spoiled or high maintenance. Whatever it was, I felt ashamed and embarrassed for feeling the way that I did. It was when I could not keep myself from breaking down in public that I began to believe that I might need help. I got to the point where I would start crying at school in front of everyone. And that’s simply because I could not hold back the tears. But at the time, I had recently broken up with my boyfriend. So it merely looked and felt as though I were heart broken. To some degree, I’m not sure if that wasn’t true, but it was obvious to me that I could not go on with the way that I felt. So I was forced to check into the hospital. And while I thought that I would be resistant to being there, I felt a peace that I had not encountered for years. It instilled in me a glimmer of hope. And I had not felt something that was even as remotely as positive as hope in years. It was at the mental institution that I felt most understood as I began to discover what I was suffering from. I was finally in a place where I didn’t have to fake a smile or a laugh. I could finally just be me. It was the first time I realized how much faking it was such a burden, and how much it made my depression worse. My stay at the hospital gave my mind a break. I could rest. I could refresh. My negative thoughts would dissipate and I could breathe more deeply. I just needed to be. In all my misery, youth, confusion, delusion, I needed to be and feel all those things that had amounted to that time in space in a mental institution. So what led to that stay in the hospital? Why, when I was in New York, crying myself to sleep, addicted to drugs, and contemplating suicide did I not seek help? I guess I just sort of thought that life was as bad as it was for me–and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t realize that I was stuck in an alternate universe that was different from those around me. But mostly, I attributed those feelings to being alone and feeling lonely. “Maybe if I have a boyfriend,” I would think to myself, “then I will be happy.” So upon leaving the Manhattan School of Music and coming back to Atlanta, and falling into a relationship, I thought I had solved all my problems. But as everyone knows, if a medical ailment is left untreated, it only gets worse. I didn’t know at the time what I was dealing with, but I know now that getting into a relationship, especially my first one, while (unknowingly) battling depression was the worst thing that I could have done because it swung me into the worst years of my life thus far. My emotions were too fragile to deal with my first relationship and losing my virginity. But more than anything, I was too fragile to deal with someone like my ex-boyfriend—someone so focused on himself, someone so stubborn and immature, but also someone so loving and caring. He had the perfect concoction of ingredients to make our combination so deadly. I placed so much emotional dependence on him loving me, but suffered from extremely low self-esteem as a result of letting myself be treated so poorly. It’s almost as if he had some strange, mystical power in which he could treat me just well enough in order to get away with treating me like crap. But I know now that my emotions were merely unreliable when it came to discerning why I was with him and why I put up with so much in order to stay with him. I was emotionally weak. At the time that I moved home from MSM, more than anything, I needed love and support. But nobody, myself included, understood why I lost my scholarship. So I didn’t have that love and support that I had hoped for. Instead, I had people angry and disappointed in me, people who wanted nothing to do with me both in my family and not. So what could have been more fitting than to have a boyfriend? Someone who is on my side and by my side, holding my hand and telling me that everything is going to be okay, reassuring me that I am a wonderful person when everyone else is looking down at me. My ex-boyfriend saved me. And somehow, I equated that as love. Because he became the savior of my emotions, I allowed him to get away with everything. Even if it ate away at my confidence, my family relationships, my spirituality, my schoolwork, my music—I allowed him to be the end all, be all of my existence because I could not, no matter how hard I tried, exist and live for myself. Even now, I struggle to let go of this dreadful relationship. The fear of being alone haunts me and forces me to face my solitude and all the negative thoughts that accompany my isolation. I am worse when I am alone. My mind creates the worst string of thoughts it can possibly muster, than it builds an entirely new set of thoughts to top the last ones. Over and over, this vicious cycle repeats itself. And the only way that I can think to appease it, or better yet, shut it off entirely, is to kill myself. And the worst part? I have absolutely no control over it. I don’t sit down and strategically or carefully conjure these thoughts. Sporadically, they flash across my mind’s eye in gory detail. Without consciously making a decision to do so, I find myself looking up, “How To Slit Your Wrists,” or “How Many Grams Of Serequel Will Kill Me”” on google. Then I’m thinking to myself, “I need to call my psychologist,” but I never actually do it. Hours of this will go on before I find a way to distract myself.  I may be able to practice for a little while without my thoughts interrupting me. If I try to watch TV, it won’t be long before I start thinking about how I am a failure for barely being a college graduate, with no job, no money, a busted and nasty relationship, and a lack of motivation to practice. But, the reality is that so many young adults are in the same predicament as I—and  perhaps even worse off—but  I do not and cannot accept that as being the realization of how life, not just mine, is in general. For me, these are real emotions—as real to me as my mother and father, brothers and sisters. Although mental illnesses such as schizophrenia are known as ones in which one experiences a break with reality while depression is not, I feel as though I am stuck in an alternate universe: one in which killing myself is a sound way to deal with my issues. But I don’t show that alternate universe to anyone, unlike people who suffer from schizophrenia who reveal the dimensions of what their mind has created. And as a result, it is ten times harder for people to understand what depression is and that it is a very real and very serious mental disease. But sometimes it feels good to be alive, like when I’m under the influence or my medicine is chemically reacting the right way. But those times are rare and fleeting, and becoming more so as time passes. When I do feel hopeful and positive, however, I cherish those moments as if they are my last—because they might be, or at least in mind. I try to accomplish as much as I can with the focus that comes from feeling better with the ability to control my mind. These are all real feelings for me. And they are incessant. They corrupt my mind like a poison. Before these symptoms began to creep into my body four years ago, I was zealously religious and deeply devoted to God. My standards were high and strong. I had integrity. People knew me because I knew myself. People depended on me because I was steady. But today, I can hardly remember who that young woman was. And now I’m losing myself and struggling to create myself all at the same time. After making progress and moving forward, I often get myself stuck along the way. Nowadays, people can’t trust me. They can’t believe what I say, understand what I do, or relate to who I am—and for good reason. I don’t trust myself. So how could anybody else trust me? I’m putting on a front for everyone around me. And it weakens me everyday. So my mother steps up in those areas. She reminds me of who I am, who I was before this dreadful disease took hold of me. She holds on to who she knows I can be. All this time, I assumed that the days in which I was honorable and respectable are long forgotten, but my mother—the one person who I thought had forgotten me—remembers. Powerful is the memory. To remember is to cherish. Many things drop from our memories in an instant, but what is valuable, necessary and deeply and internally planted remains. My mother remembers who I am. She reminds me that I can still have a remarkable journey. And it comes in the best way that she is capable. She reminds me of my deeply devout devotion to my God and Savior. It penetrates my spirituality as I remember. “I can’t allow you to suffer. I have to do what I can to make you better. Because I don’t want anything to happen to you. Okay Donna? I’ve already lost one child. I can’t lose another one.” This my mother said to me as her eyes filled with tears, tears that I never knew she had for me. My mother is so guarded, so un-emotional that I believe she allotted a percentage of tears with the birth of each child. It had been years since I last felt my mother’s embrace, since she so openly expressed a kind of love that only a mother possesses for her child. And it came at the most crucial point in time: as I sat in the hospital with uncontrollable tears streaming down my face. Yes, I needed medicine, psychotherapy, a diagnosis—but in that moment, there was nothing that could have calmed my troubled mind more than the love of my mother.

Hope Just Beyond the Horizon

Some things are beautiful and nothing else. Art is one of those things, that is, purity within art. I’ve gained another dimension of thought over the years and now I’ve come  to find that dimension practically useless. It’s the dimension of plenty, of too many rather, and it’s crowded. It’s where I thought I needed to be in order to think and to understand, but it turns out that there isn’t enough room, enough space to do so. There are no mirrors yet everything seems to represent and embody reflection. So my understanding of myself, of others, of existence, is distorted.

Just the other day I was playing a solo with the jazz ensemble at school. I hated it. But our professor, maybe you know him–Joseph Jennings? Saxophonist?–turned around and praised it. What for? I don’t really know. It was a bunch of jumbled notes that I really didn’t have control of. I couldn’t hear what I was playing. My hands were operating without my permission. But then someone else heard it and told me what it sounded like. For years, I’ve controlled what I played. And apparently the world thought I sounded pretty good. So I did too. And now that I’ve stopped controlling what I produce, now that I couldn’t control it even if I tried, I hate it. But this time, when someone says it sounds good, they’re talking to me. They’re talking about me. Not the music, me. Because the music isn’t separate from me anymore. Now, music doesn’t exist without me. I remember in NY after playing Bach on a recital, one girl, a cellist, came up to me following the concert and praised the correctness of “my” interpretation. I just thought, “this is a conversation you should be having with Johann. Because you’re not really talking to me.” And she wasn’t. Whether I performed that piece on that particular night or not, it would have existed and continued existing with all its accompanying praise without me.

I’m starting to understand the importance of Things. Things are coming alive inside of me. And I gotta tell you, its not that I ever put anything asleep. I just started taking notice of every Thing. I started critiquing and analyzing and adjusting. And doing that thing when you stop trusting yourself because your own mind and heart is playing tricks on you. I didn’t want to disappoint myself so I started with the lying. To everybody. But especially myself. And so Things became disproportionate to what they should have been and what they needed to be for me to survive. But I’m watching myself less and less. Understanding that I’m not meant to see myself the same way that everyone else does is liberating all those Things that I trapped and kept from living.

I still battle my emotions day in and day out. But I’m talking to someone about it now. I’m starting to let some Things out and other Things go that need to be over in my life. The good news is, I have found more and more moments of clarity recently. More than I have had in about four years.

So?

I Want to Be

Shon Thompson to me  12/3/10

Feeling trapped in a fearful world is the magic of life. Everybody feels it. The sense of wonder about how others perceive you is the other side of, how do you see your self. The amazing thing about who you are is that you’ll never know what effect that you have on the universe that you you create. Example, You spend hours writing something that ultimately does not satisfy you, then some one else calls it beautiful. Another, spending too much time in the mirror to put together an image that will be attractive only to be called a whore and admired by degenerates. The truth is, nobody can see themselves, no one has any idea what they look, or sound like. I’ll play something that I hate, just a thing that popped into my head, and then think, well fuck…that was terrible, and then my percussionist will say “wow, what was that, do it again 1,2,3,4…” The way he heard it was from a different world. Everything in life is like that. Your self image does not matter, at all, as long as you continue to grow. The labels that people assign are the only way that they have to try and find out who they (others) really are. They will never know until they give up on labeling. I love Charles Mingus too, Epitaph is my favorite but truly, Charles never even heard it because he wrote it. Miles hated playing with Charles, that knocks me out. If I cook you a plate of food it will taste different to me than for you because I know every ingredient that went into it, and you don’t. Consequently, I don’t enjoy my own food, but everybody else loves it. I cannot surprise myself, only others. Daddy wanted to name Booney, Yusef Lateef, but my mother wouldn’t let him. I leaned how to play Donna Lee years ago, but I can’t play it anymore. I’m not sure about how your renaming yourself has helped you. I don’t think it matters what you do, as long if it helps. I wouldn’t enjoy having a name that made me keep my chops up on a particular piece of work, but I would have to do it, that’s just me. “Oh, Donna Lee…huh?..well Donna Lee, go on ahead and bust it out.” Donna, we are all slaves to our emotions. The reason why a lot of people let it get the best of them is because of the great persona of “cool.” Cool, and style, even flash are important to people who want to be accepted. The bus to work was held up for almost a minute because the guy couldn’t board, his pants were sagging so much that he had complications making the steps. But he was fashionably cool. I was only late to work. About love, your description is the best I’ve heard. It hurts and heals, but it always changes you. When I play my music, nothing else matters for about two days. When I play again, I’m better at it.