Musical Nostalgia

I often spend my evenings transcribing sheet music into MIDI files.  Sometimes I do this to create backing tracks for later use, but often, I simply enjoy being able to listen to the music.  Be it piano solos beyond my ability to play, a song I’m thinking of covering, or a choral piece I once performed, I thoroughly enjoy this process.  Music has always been a critically important part of my life, and even something as simple as transcribing it warms my soul.

Recently, I spent a couple of weeks working on a song called “The Kid Inside” from the musical “Is There Life After High School?”, and it has brought an interesting feeling of nostalgia.  I’ve not seen the musical, but the synopsis is essentially laid out within this song, which is the first in the show; it is about a group of adult men and women remembering their experiences in high school.  This song has long been a personal favorite of mine because I performed it in one of the last concerts of my high school career.  At the spring concert every year, the graduating Seniors perform a choral piece as a way of saying goodbye, and this was the piece chosen for my class.  Though it has been fifteen years, I can remember performing it as if it were yesterday.

From time to time over the intervening years, I’ve pulled out the recording and listened to it.  I sing along with it because I still remember my part, as well as the two brief solos I had (each of which is only a few words long).  I marvel at how my voice has changed since, and how modest my ability is even now to that of some of my classmates.  It makes me look back on all the times I sang in those halls and puts a smile on my face.  But while transcribing it over the last couple of weeks, I found myself thinking not just of fond memories on the stage, but of the boy I was so long ago.

I was a small boy until my senior year.  I wasn’t athletic, good-looking, or popular in any way.  I was bullied for much of my childhood and adolescence.  Anxiety was my constant companion, but I wouldn’t learn until many years later that this was because I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  In all honestly, I’m fairly sure I’ve blocked a fair bit of that time from my memory because I don’t wish to relive the trauma I endured.  My clearest memories are of the chorus rooms and the auditorium, the places where I felt most at home.  They were my sanctuary from my bullies and the general horrors of being a teenager.  Music gave me an escape from abuse and anxiety that have always been thankful for. 

When I think back to high school, it is the music that I generally think of.  But I now am looking back at my younger self with a fondness I’ve never felt before.  I won’t say I hated myself, but I certainly didn’t love or even particularly like myself back then.  Most teenagers experience this to at least some degree, but it was more difficult for me because years of bullying had already sapped most of my self-confidence.  Now, though, I see something in him that I fear I’ve lost, and I wonder what happened to it.

Despite everything I went through back then, I had an optimism about my future.  To some degree, this was probably a self-preservation mechanism (nearly every person who has been bullied has at some point thought “One day, you’ll all be working for me!”), but my plans for the future genuinely enthralled me.  I knew that my time in that hellhole would eventually come to an end, and that I’d be able to find the life I deserved and wanted.  My intention was to study music education so that I could become a music teacher, probably at the high school level (I was too blinded by youth to see the irony in wanting to teach in the place that made my life hell).  I had the privilege of studying under a choral director who is something of a legend in my hometown, and like many of my friends and classmates, I wanted to follow his footsteps into education.

Like any teenager, I was naïve enough to think that my plans were concrete and that nothing could derail them.  I even remember arguing with my algebra teacher about this once; while chatting before class one day, I offered the popular opinion that what I was learning in that class was ultimately useless.  Why would a music teacher need to know how to solve complex equations or draw parabolas?  My teacher smiled sagely and said that my plans could easily change at any time, that I could suddenly find myself propelled down a very different career path.  I shrugged it off because I was just a typical stupid high school junior.

I should have heeded his advice.

During my senior year, I went through a trauma that forever changed my life.  It left me with deep scars and a form of PTSD.  I’m still not able to discuss it openly, even all these years later.  The impact it had on me was deep and profound, and I am still coming to terms with it.  I was forced to grow up very rapidly.  One of the casualties of this was that I was forced to completely rethink my future because education, though still my dream, no longer seemed to fit into the puzzle of my life.  As anyone who has lived through severe trauma will tell you, your life becomes about nothing more than survival for a long time.  For years afterwards, I lived in a state of nearly constant fear, and it became the driving force in my life.

Eventually, as time passed and I began to heal, that fear waned.  But I lost the optimism I had so long ago.  I no longer feel the drive and ambition I once did.  I still have dreams, of course, but I no longer feel the passion I once felt.  Instead, I seem to live in a state of “meh.”  The bright-eyed boy has become a jaded and pessimistic adult.

I’ve known this on some level for some time, and I’ve even pontificated on it from time to time, both internally and in writing.  But it wasn’t until I started transcribing “The Kid Inside” that I actually understood it on a conscious level.  I could finally see how I had changed in the intervening years.  I can even see some of the factors that contributed to this, with the most obvious being trauma.  Some of it is obviously due to the nature of growing up; as we grow older, we naturally tend to become a bit more cynical because our understanding of the world grows clearer.  In my case, I also believe it may be partly due to the medication I’m on for my anxiety.  When I went back to therapy three years ago, I was prescribed Zoloft, and I’ve been on it since; while it does help mitigate some of the effects of anxiety, it also prevents me from feeling much of anything, like putting on a pair of sunglasses.  Sure, those sunglasses may help protect your eyes from being damaged, but they also make the world look rather gray.

But I remember when I saw the world in full color.  I remember a time when things seemed vibrant and colorful, when I still felt optimistic and passionate.  From time to time, I still get glimpses of that world; for example, when I went back to therapy, I was at first terrified because I didn’t know if I was making the right decision.  But after a single session, things seemed brighter than they had in years, which made me confident I’d made the right call.  It is glimpses like this that make me long for what I once had.

It’s normal to get a bit nostalgic as we get older.  We miss being young, not having cares.  We miss friends and family who aren’t with us any longer.  We miss the simplicity of youth.  This is the entire point of “The Kid Inside”, which is why it is such an amazing song.  But for me, it speaks to a far deeper level than just memories of high school that surface without warning.  It speaks to who I was so long ago.  It makes me look back at how my life took such a different path than what I imagined, and that path has been so vastly different from that of most my peers.

My growth into an adult was sudden and tumultuous.  I never got to be a stupid twenty-something.  My early adulthood wasn’t about having fun or pursuing romance.  It was about survival.  I lived in a constant state of fear, and it was that fear that motivated me to just keep moving.  But as time passed, my wounds healed.  Eventually, I was finally able to put my past to bed.  My old fears no longer controlled or motivated me the way they had for so long.  But the increased stability in my life is a double-edged sword because now I find that I seem to have no motivation.  My life was entirely run by fear for so long that it’s difficult to know what to do without it.

This has been the struggle of my life for the past few years, and listening to “The Kid Inside” has made me see this in a new light.  It’s a struggle many people face because it is so easy to make the focus of our lives far too narrow.  For example, when people act as caretakers for a sick or disabled relative over a long period of time, they often don’t know what to do with themselves after the relative passes away.  Now that I have complete freedom to do what I want with my life, I honestly am unsure of what to do.  It is strange to look back and see an immature, naïve kid who had things more planned out than I do now, 15 years later.  True, I was blinded to reality by youth, but I knew what I wanted and what I needed to do to accomplish those goals.  Now I have three college degrees and I honestly cannot say I know what I want out of life.  I do have goals, such as finding work in the media industry and having a family, but they seem so ill-defined now.  It is the definition of irony that my teenage self was so much more goal-oriented than my adult self.

Many years ago, I formulated a theory which postulated that, as part of becoming adults, we all must experience some form of trauma.  The blindness of youth must be torn away so that we can see the world for what it is.  This theory has been consistently proven true, as nearly everyone I know experienced trauma in some form on the road to adulthood.  However, as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to realize that it isn’t quite that simplistic.  Though it is trauma that helps us grow into adults, the rate of growth is unique to each person.  For most people, it is far from rapid, taking anywhere from months to years.  It is also dependent on whether or not you learn from the trauma; if we don’t open our eyes, then true growth and maturity will continue to elude us.

My recent feelings of nostalgia and my difficulty with determining the next step in my life make me suspect that maybe I’m not as far down this path as I thought.  Though the trauma that propelled my growth was sixteen years ago, I’m still learning the lessons from it.  I only started to truly deal with the trauma a few years ago because I was focused purely on survival for so long.  But I don’t think I could have dealt with it much earlier because I wasn’t ready.  Trauma is difficult to even address, let alone work through, but you cannot do it before you’re ready.  Unfortunately, just as my inability to address my trauma sooner stymied my growth as an adult, so too has dealing with it.  Old fears may no longer plague me the way the way they once did, but working through it has exacerbated my underlying anxiety disorder and has unlocked very old emotions that I thought sealed long ago.

The second part, the unlocking of old emotions, is, I think, the key.  We all tend to seal certain things away in the recesses of our minds.  Sometimes it has to do with strong emotions attached to them, both good and bad, but other times, it is done purely as a survival instinct.  Again, for me, it is the latter; in my effort to simply survive my ordeal, I sealed away the normal feelings and concerns most people go through in their late teens and early twenties.  From time to time in the intervening years, those seals have burst, but I didn’t really understand what was happening.  In all honesty, it wasn’t until I made the decision to return to therapy that I had any real inkling of what was happening.

In essence, I am experiencing a growth that most people experienced about a decade ago.  I am asking the questions most people ask in their early twenties.  I’m trying to understand who I am and what I’m supposed to do with my life.  I’m trying to figure out my goals, and the best way to attain them.  I didn’t ask these questions when most people do because I couldn’t.  But everyone grows at a different rate, and even late growth (I was always a late bloomer) is better than no growth.

However, I am also experiencing the growth that trauma survivors go through as they begin to process and deal with what they’ve endured.  They ask exactly the same questions because trauma can, and often does, shake you to your core.  It makes you question who you are, and everything you think, believe, and feel.  It even makes you question what you know. 

Reexamining these things and asking these questions has been incredibly difficult for me.  But I must ask these things because there is yet so much I don’t understand.  However, I have come to understand one part of this, which is that the trauma that propels us to adulthood forces us to grow in two ways.  First, it forces us to open our eyes to reality, to what the world is.  Second, it forces a deep personal growth by making us reexamine everything down to our core.  I believe I attained the first growth many years ago, but I’m only just beginning to truly understand the second.  I was blind to it because my focus was purely on staying alive. 

On some level, I think I’ve been aware of this for some time; I’ve often felt like I was behind my peers socially, but never quite understood why.  I contemplated this question frequently, and often felt very frustrated by my feelings and my inability to find an answer.  But that was only because I couldn’t admit that the answer was me.  I held myself back because I didn’t address my trauma.  Instead, I did my best to make myself as comfortable as possible, which is a dangerous hole to fall into, especially when you have anxiety. 

But things are changing now.  I am finally beginning to learn the things I should have learned so long ago.  The growth that eluded me is now within my grasp.  I still have a hell of a long way to go, but at least now the path is a bit clearer to me.  Beginning to deal with my trauma has at times made me feel like I’ve taken a few steps backwards, but that is often the case when working through such things.  In actuality, this is a misperception; you take a huge step forward just by finally making the decision to do something about your emotional damage.  It is only if you stop dealing with the damage that you take a step backward.

This is why I found myself so drawn to “The Kid Inside” while transcribing it.  Initially, I was intrigued by seeing aspects of myself I feel I have lost, but I see now that the song holds a deeper meaning for me.  The song is about looking back at once was, both the good and the bad, and this has always been hard for me.  For a long time, I’ve been reluctant to look back at my past because of the pain that resides in it.  I was always willing to look at the good memories, like the music, but I avoided the negativity as much as possible.  I didn’t want to think about what I’d endured.  I just wanted to leave it behind.

But you can’t just leave such pain behind.  It must be dealt with, at least on some level and to some degree.  More importantly, no matter how you deal with it, it will always be with you.  It is true that I have lost parts of myself I valued greatly, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever.  By starting to finally deal with what I went through, I open the door to a wondrous metamorphosis.  I can reclaim what was lost and reforge myself into the person I want to be.

I don’t know what the future holds, or precisely where this path will lead.  Hell, I still don’t really know what I really want to do with my life.  There is no universally right way to navigate such a path, nor a right way to deal with trauma.  The only wrong choice is to do nothing, and I know that isn’t an option for me; doing nothing for so long is what mired me here in the first place.  Looking back is the key to moving forward because we can’t decide where to go without knowing where we’ve been.

We always have the power to change our lives, to make things better.  The problem is that trauma, by definition, makes us feel powerless.  But by starting to address the damage, we begin to reclaim that power.

It’s up to us to decide how to use it and where to go.