How is it possible we’ve arrived here again? I must be a failed musician. Or a musician who never even tried. I actually believe both of those things are true.
I was sitting across from my addictions counsellor talking about music. He wore striking white-framed glasses, and he was taller than me. He had that soft look like an angel or a Buddha.
I talked in an earlier piece about how I went to an in-patient treatment centre in late 2018 (just after Christmas, the season of good cheer, and into the season of death, all naked trees and such). I had lost the battle. Or something.
I felt so lucky to get a real one, a live one (at least in the ways I needed him to be). This was my first treatment, but not my first addictions counsellor. I liked that his expression never really changed. Like I couldn’t shock him. And he was well-educated. Willing to indulge me in abstract ideas when others wouldn’t. (Don’t think so much, they say. Don’t trust your brain. It’s trying to kill you.)
I don’t know if you know, but when you go to treatment (at least, the place I went), you get what they give you. In the beginning, I imagined that he had chosen me. I learned later that it is pure lottery.
I told him about how I had reframed all the love songs to represent my addiction to hard drugs. And he didn’t protest. He didn’t try to redirect me, as I’d experienced so many times before. Well-meaning (but insecure?) wellness guides and 12-Step enthusiasts who acted as if to indulge a thought was to actualize it. Raise it from the dead (or the garbage, where it belonged).
This counsellor was the first one to reframe my “addiction” as a relationship.
Notice the distinction there? He moved me away from the idea that addiction is something that happens to me (as if I am not an active participant in a mutual exchange). And just like any relationship, there are lows (LOW lows) and, yes, highs. Pros and cons. Bright colours, and even neutrals (like when we are simply maintaining, or at work, or waking up on a ho-hum Sunday morning and not much is happening).
If you are familiar with addiction recovery program tenets (and there are many groups and theories), you might have heard the phrase: play the tape. This is a strategy we can use when we are tempted to use (alcohol or drugs).
Playing the tape is a soundtrack of all the negative consequences of using. For example: losing the job, losing the kids, losing the support people (like parents and family), losing the methadone “carries” (which is when they trust us to pick our meds up weekly instead of every damn dog day), or incurring a substance-related negative mood spiral or spike in uncomfortable brain activity.
How about sweats? Aches? How about that chasm which, the more you use (and stop, and use again) swallows all the colour in the world, leaving only an austere wasteland drained of water or foliage but soaked in gauze. The chasm that spreads hot and fast like a virus.
Playing that tape was just never enough for me. Maybe I didn’t like that tape. Or maybe it didn’t ring completely true. Maybe I always knew that, like a relationship, reaching for the substance was an attempt to change how I felt. And I would not have fallen in love with it had it been all bad.
Maybe I didn’t think I had much to lose. Except, of course, my physical/earthly being. (What, this old thing?)
I will spare you (and ME) the “like a warm bath,” or “like getting a hug,” or “feeling for the first time like everything is alright” descriptions. I think you get it.
Love songs are also, often, breakup songs. And, if you’ve got even half an imagination, it’s not a stretch to imagine the object of that song as a thing or a substance. In fact, doing that gave me quite a thrill. For example:
“It’s been seven hours and fifteen days
Since u took your love away…
Since you’ve been gone, I can do whatever I wannnnnnnnnt
I can see whoever I choose…”
Can you feel me? Can you feel THAT?
Or:
“It’s okay, in the day
I’m staying busy
Tied up enough so I don’t have to wonder where is he
Got sooooo sick of crying
Sooo just lately
When I catch myself, I dooo a one-eighty…”
Recall The Art of Restraint? Like that, all day. Of course, in treatment there were many distractions. Like process groups and afternoon cake.
But then, when it got quiet:
“He’s fierce in my dreams, seizing my guts
He floooooats me with dread
Soaked in soul, he swims in my eyesssss by the bed…”
And I wake up alone. To do it all over again. Thinking: Surely I’m climbing a staircase to somewhere. Right? (But what if it’s a treadmill.)
I’m sure my face contorted (or maybe I put my head in my hands) when I told my counsellor I would never listen to music again. I’ve ruined all those damn songs. Just like Jane. Just like my lover, the Punk Singer, who I actually made music with. Just trap those finished/unfinished songs beneath the lacing in my chest, and put them to bed.
Music has been my constant companion. Ever since I saw my mom’s Kate Bush record as a child. And likely before that. Since the womb. And long before alcohol or relationships or drugs.
But that Kate Bush record, man. Hounds of Love? Talk about candy for a child’s eyes. All that purple chiffon. Violet satin bed sheets. That fan of red hair, spread out around her like a crown of fire. Eyes half-open. And those silky, downy dogs just doped up in her arms.
Then you flip the record over, and Kate is Ophelia drowning. Reaching, like the dead waking, from the weeds.
And I sat there, listening to that record, flipping the cover over and over, reading the lyrics. Day after day. Steeped in visions of witches and clouds, murder and space travel. Roses with thorns. Ghost trails, grassy hills, shattered glass. Sleepwalking in red high heels, and kicking them off.
In pre-school, I’ve been told, I couldn’t bear playing with the other children. But I sure could spend every available moment with Kate and her hounds (in my head, at home). Or Queen Latifah. Her too. With her gold crown, eyes skyward, promoting a distinctly feminist brand of positive hip-hop.
The danger comes when you start mixing the music that nurtured you (shaped you) with relationships or drugs (or both). I’ve been guilty of this, certainly. Albums as currency. Like, I’ve probably listened to Nirvana’s In Utero with every single partner. Or forced them to scream the lyrics to Violet with me.
Come onnnnnnnnn. Join me under my bunk bed with my walkman, staring into the face of God. Except she’s not a white bearded patriarch. NO. She’s got a tangle of bleached hair and a big red mouth. Those seafoam eyes. That crooked crown on her head. Those shredded nylon legs.
Those songs, those archetypes (many of them druggy) saved my damn life.
There’s no lack of music in the world. And this is a very good thing. New songs are born every day. And old songs introduce (or reintroduce) themselves thanks to TV soundtracks and classic rock stations.
But you notice how, the older you get, you never really get the same intensity/chemistry that bonded you (really fixed you) to the music you enjoyed during your developmental years? Childhood. Adolescence. Kinda like chasing a high. Never ever the same again. Not really.
I notice. And I noticed.
The hard truth, my counsellor said, was that my brain needed (and still needs) time to heal. And that felt like the bitterest pill when I’d just crucified myself (offered myself up, arms outstretched…kinda). Trying so hard (with tears and nicotine and conversation and carbs) to pack some sustenance back onto my bones. And everything was pitch black in front of me. A set of stairs, or a stairmaster? Who knows? I don’t know. FAITH, I’m learning now, is really the only thing.
During a subsequent session, my counsellor presented me with a possible solution. Once I was stronger, he said (and only I would know), I could maybe experiment with the lost and dead songs. The trick was to plug them in at a time of heightened brain stimulation. Like during a (sober) runner’s high. Or on the starlit walk home after a kundalini class.
Sounds good in theory, right? Inspired and temporarily satisfied, I bought a book called This is Your Brain on Music on Amazon. When it arrived, I showed it (proudly) to my counsellor, whose eyes sparkled. And I got a little charge. Then I went up to my room and put the book on my nightstand, and never read it.
Still. A runner’s high is obvious. But how else could I generate a dopamine hit, perfectly timed?
Well, the other day I broke my quarantine to go to the bank machine. I walked four whole blocks, there and back, in my white mask and blue denim vest. I was already feeling a buzz from writing something. (Yeah, I wrote something. I let myself be seen. And I even had fun doing it. What. A. Feeling.)
Outside, the air was warm and cool at the same time. Minty fresh, alive. There was a moment I recall distinctly when that old song came on my Spotify playlist.
“Ooh child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh child
Things’ll get briiiiighter…”
And as I rounded the bend, my home in sight, walking (or floating) and secure in the knowing (even if only in that moment) that I am loved and seen and cared for, that sweet chorus was swelling, and building to higher heights this time.
