(Un)happiness

I have been desperately unhappy for the past few months and I'm still not entirely sure what brought that about. Even my boss at work has set me the task to "find happiness". I think I do know why I'm unhappy, beyond the "perfect storm" of stress I've been going through lately.

As trivial as it seems, I think I'm unhappy because I can no longer sing, or at least sing publicly in a choir. All throughout my life, music has been an integral part of living. Whole sections of my life are catalogued by a specific "theme" song for that time period. Until it all went silent about half a year back. I'm not sure what happened but right now, there is silence in my history and it's very unnerving. My sis suggested that I may not need it anymore but I don't think that's true. I have experienced moments like this in the past when I am under intense stress but never for quite this long.

Those of you who know me well also know that I'm pretty paranoid about the possibility of losing my eyesight. Well, that silence in my history is akin to losing that visual sense, only in an aural manner. I need music. These days, I'm happiest when I'm bleating on my practice chanter.

Remember when you were a child and you got asked what you wanted to be when you grew up? Mine has always been "soprano" which changed slightly to "successful soprano" as I grew older. Obviously, this can never come true for me, not in this lifetime anyway. It does show, however, just how vital music, and in particular singing is to me.

I can't sing well anymore, at least not in a choir. I can learn to play instruments well but it's not the same. To me, singing is one of the most vibrant forms of expressing one's soul. I can't do that anymore and I think part of me is dying because of that. I'm not entirely sure what to do. I need a voice teacher - that's a no-brainer but it'll take years for me to get back to a level where I can sing contralto. I think it's time and effort well spent except that I can't do that right now.

All I have left is but the dream of that which never was. A bitter feeling, that truly is. :(

Connectedness

I've been feeling as if I didn't really fit into this world for some time now. I used to feel like that all the time before I underwent treatment for the Condition so it was with quite some surprise that I found myself that depressed again. After such a radical life-shift, it's not surprising that I would feel some disorientation but it's been 2 years now. Having said that, it's been a very dark couple of years on the family front and while we're still getting things sorted out, I think we're heading in the right direction.

Meanwhile, I didn't know what to do with myself. Stuff I used to be interested in became dull and boring. This wasn't my doing - when neural remapping occurs at the scale that it did for me, things just shift in unexpected directions. Trust me, it's been a very weird couple of years in several areas.

To put things succinctly, I was bored out of my skull. Ballet helped and is something I intend to keep going. What I really wanted to do was sing and I can't do that anymore, not without extensive retraining.

Then came the opportunity to learn the bagpipes. On the advice of the gentleman who's tutoring me, I got myself a practice chanter and an instruction book used by generations of pipers. The first nights were awkward and then I relaxed...and things just snapped into place.

As I'm typing this, my chanter's by my side. He's a beautiful instrument to me, a joy to hold and a wonder to play. I've taken to practicing inside my car over the lunch hour and my tutor's taught me a trick to muffle the sound. I feel alive when I am practicing on the chanter, similar to but not quite the same flavour as when I'm dancing ballet.

I'm still shaking my head that after all these years, I'm taking on the arts with a vengeance fueled by years of suppressed creativity. I dance, I play and I am trying to retrain my voice as a contralto. My house is a very noisy place these days but I feel joy once more.

Art. Who would have thought that it would hold joy for me?

Creativity

It's been a very rough time lately as can be seen from my last few posts. I'm realizing just how fragile my life is and how little it takes to overwhelm it. Actually, that's not entirely true. I'm easily overwhelmed not because I'm fragile but because I've simply been hit - repeatedly and without pause - with one high-stress crisis after the other. There's always something coming up that I have to deal with. We're not talking about run-of-the-mill stressors here, which I can typically handle. Not anymore though.

It's been a particularly bad week in that I've never reached this level of stress in my life before, which for me is saying something. I'm not eating all that well nor getting enough sleep nor getting any time in for ballet. There is one small spark in my life though. I found out the other day that there's a bagpiper at work who's moving into the building next to mine. We'd talked once before and he agreed to give me some pointers on how to learn to play the bagpipes. So, on his suggestion, I headed off to the local Scottish store and got myself a practice chanter and the Green Book.

When I got home, I tried the chanter out but all I could do was a decent imitation of a duck being strangled. It's a pretty big chanter and I'm having difficulty as my fingers are short and small. Still, I persisted and now I'm able to play the scales. The next day, I went to work and got hit with several stressful situations. When it finally came time for lunch, I got into my car and very odd thought popped into my head: wouldn't it be great if I could practice the chanter right now?

You have to understand, this isn't the same kind of short-term obsession I get from say, playing a computer game and wanting to get back to it. No, this is far deeper than that and it confused the heck out of me. The feeling passed rather quickly and the rest of my day was depressingly normal with a series of meetings that went nowhere. As I got into my car to drive home, that urge came back: wouldn't it be great if I could practice the chanter right now?

Now I'm getting worried. I knew this wasn't a short-term fixation so what on earth was it? I really dislike cases where my thoughts go somewhere unexpected; it's bad enough that the chaos inherent with the mere act of living can't be constrained into something tidier but I'll be darned if I couldn't control my thoughts. Later that night, I mentioned it to my dear sister who nodded sagely and remarked that that's common for creative people, where thoughts like that aren't really thoughts at all but an imperative to be creative.

You know, she's right. Looking back, there's only been three others cases where it's happened: when I'm a part of a choir, when I'm keeping a regular journal and when I'm dancing ballet. In all these cases, the need to practice singing or to make a journal entry or to practice ballet is unbelievably strong.

Wow, I'm apparently creative now. A few years back, I'd have seen it as an insult. These days...I don't know. Singing makes me sad because I don't fit in a choir anymore. I still journal every now and then but my priorities are different. Ballet is my touchstone. The world seems a little more bearable when I can dance. Now, I've got something else to enrich my life.

All isn't bad, I guess. It's a very dark time but I'm also growing. Time will tell, I guess.

Innocence Gone

*** WARNING: irrational emotional ramblings ahead, please turn OFF your logic circuits before proceeding. ***

Lately, I have been playing this online game that I bought into several years ago. The account is still active as they never shut it off. It serves as a decent distraction from the depressing nights.

There's a part of the game where you earn in-game points for watching ads. That's not a half bad way of generating a revenue stream for the makers of the game - it's a pretty smart idea, really. Unfortunately, some of those ads make me sad.

As ads will do, they try to persuade you to buy things. There's a few that's presented with such innocence so you get the feeling that everything will be all right if you just bought this and that for in-game use. I can see that if you're really into that online game, that might actually be true but it would also mean you don't really have a real-life type life if you spent that much time on the game.

No, what makes me sad is that I haven't felt as if anything was going to be all right for a long time now. I miss that innocence, that feeling that if I worked hard enough, or if I did things right that everything will be fine in the end. Sometime in the last two years, something has changed inside of me where I have realized that no matter what I do, life can intervene and radically shift things from good to bad in a heartbeat. It doesn't matter if I've tried to do things as right as I can with the best of intentions - it all goes pear-shaped in the end.

When I was a child, I was beaten everyday for years and years. These days, they call it child abuse. Back when I was growing up, it was par for the course. When I say beaten, I don't mean "beaten with cause" - I mean "beaten because someone had a bad day". I believe the term used for that is "anger transference". When I say everyday, I meant every single day. For years. I used to run and hide from my family, crying soundlessly lest they hear me and drag me out for more beatings. I had a comfort object that was all mine which I still have and hold dear to this day. You know what the irony is? I felt more safe then, hiding behind the shelves or under the table clutching my comfort object than today, lying in my bed in my own home blogging.

You see, back then my world was a lot smaller. No matter what happened to me, I knew that at mealtime, there would be food on the table, that there would be cartoons to watch (quietly!) on the TV and my imaginary friends (as kids normally would have) would be there to play with me and tell me that everything was all right even as I nursed my bruises. I now know as an adult just how close we came to running out of money back then and just how much my Dad finagled to keep food on the table and our house in our possession.

These days, the kids depend on me to put food on the table. I'm the adult who has to keep them safe which I will gladly do. Heck, I would gladly lay down my life for the kids if needed. No, what scares me is the fact that regardless of what I do, something can happen that will royally screw not just me over but also my family too. On a smaller scale, I'm always fully aware that no matter how nicely I treat people, some of them will turn around and take full advantage of me to my detriment if it suited their needs.

There was a time when I could lie to myself that what I did mattered. You know what? What I do really doesn't matter. I could take care of my family but still have a family member go deathly ill on me. Or some urgent house repair would happen that will require a massive amount of money that I simply cannot cover regardless of me being employed and have savings.

It doesn't matter in the end. It really doesn't. I will continue to go to work and care for my family as always. But I really don't believe that life is really worth much anymore because nothing I do will matter in the end. I can do the best job I can for my team at work and still get stabbed in the back. I can care for my family members and bring joy to them as best I can but still have them run away when I needed them the most.

I miss the days when I believed in what I do. When, like in those in-game ads, I still believed that if I did this and this and that, that good things will happen. I know it doesn't anymore. Oh, I've always known that this chain of causality was merely an illusion, a lie that lets me sleep at night. However, life has hit me so hard, so fast and so often lately that it's shredded this comfortable little lie that lets me keep going. As with all illusions, once it's gone, it's *gone*.

I had to take my nephews over to the local toy megamart during a weekend recently to do a recce on potential birthday presents. We had to walk through the plush toys to enter the store proper and as we did, I felt a strong wave of sadness palpably hit me in the gut. For most kids, a plush toy is their comfort object. It's what they hold at night when they go to bed. It's their friend, albeit an imaginary one. What I saw were plush toys all over the floor, where they had been knocked off their shelves. Some were damaged and will probably be binned when the staff came around to tidy up. This really upset me. As irrationally as it may sound, a plush toys' ultimate calling is to be a companion to a child, to bring joy to that child. The damaged ones that will be binned will never be able to do that. Even the ones that do end up with a child will eventually land in a garbage dump somewhere when the children are done with them. Yes, I know that they're not alive, that there's no "calling" or "reward" for them. Yes, I'm being irrational, probably because of my abusive childhood when all I had was my stuffed companion comfort object to hold as I cried. It just kicks me hard in my sense of what is "fair". Again, I used to believe that if one does one's best, that everything will be all right, that there is a fair and just ending to those who work at it.

There isn't one. There never will be. There are no guarantees in life. Whether you are good or bad, the rain still falls on you when you least expect it. What has been core to my identity and remained unchanged since childhood has been the idea of fairness. However, the world simply isn't fair.

I'm not sure anymore if I have a place in this world or what the value of remaining in it is. The simple act of just living hurts so much these days.