You know, I had planned on updating this blog on a daily basis, but I’ve been so mind-numbingly depressed lately that everytime I sit down to do it, I just can’t cope. The only thing that keeps me sane when I’m depressed is music, so I’ve been listening to my favorite songs on shuffle, trying to keep myself at least stable enough so that I don’t start cutting again. When I feel like this, I am reminded of how music has saved my life time and time and time again. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. I started a series on my private Facebook page about the Albums That Saved My Life and thought I’d share some of my entries. I don’t usually get personal here, but what the hell… at least this way I’m posting something! I hope you find something of value from these ramblings…
Closer by Joy Division (1980)
I was always a melancholy child, but my depression became crippling in the 6th grade, when I stopped going to school for extended periods of time because I couldn’t cope with the realization that I was a freak. My desperation continued to worsen before it reached an absolute, molasses-like apex in 10th grade. It was around this time that I read a review of the last Joy Division album, Closer, in Rolling Stone. At first I thought “Joy Division” was the name of a female singer, but reading the article I realized it was a critically acclaimed British band whose lead singer, Ian Curtis, had committed suicide the year before. Instant fascination!
I immediately rushed out to buy the album with my $7.50/week allowance. (It was actually my lunch money, but I starved myself all day so I could use every cent for records and magazines.) I was immediately impressed by the quality of the packaging: nice, heavy, textured cardstock with a gorgeous black and white photograph of a deathbed vigil and marvelous typography. The packaging had no “side one” or “side two” listed, so I started by listening to what I later found out was side two – one of the most mournful and majestic sides of music ever created: “Heart and Soul,” “Twenty Four Hours,” “The Eternal,” and “Decades”. These songs became the soundtrack of my suicidal years filled as they are with some of the most desolate lines in the history of popular music: “Existence, well what does it matter?/I exist on the best terms I can/The past is now part of my future/The present is well out of hand.” I would sit in my room and play the bass line to “Twenty Four Hours” on my guitar, and imagine that I had written the song. Well, I could have written the song. The emotions were mine.
… A cloud hangs over me, marks every move
Deep in the memory of what once was love
… Just for one moment thought I’d found my way
Destiny unfolded – I watched it slip away
… Just for one moment heard somebody call
Looked beyond the day in hand – there’s nothing there at all
Now that I’ve realized how it’s all gone wrong
Gotta find some therapy – this treatment takes too long
Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway
Gotta find my destiny before it gets too late
In one of my many efforts to get my parents to take my mental problems seriously (cuts on my arms were another, more enduring, example), I started writing these lyrics and posting them all over my bedroom walls. At the height of my desperation, I even wrote suicide notes that contained some of these lines in my own blood (though I didn’t post those). It took a few days, but my mother finally asked me about the lyrics and if I was feeling those emotions. Even though I desperately wanted to talk about it, I chickened out at the last second and said, “No, not at all – those are just some of my favorite lyrics.” My mother told me that I shouldn’t listen to that music because it was making me depressed. She didn’t understand that I listened to that music because it expressed my own depression better than anything else ever could. Better, even, than The Bell Jar.
Closer is the soundtrack of years spent in a dark bedroom, crying in despair, cutting myself and hating myself, and trying desperately to hold on for the promise of something better in the future, fearful that the day would never come. Its power is immense.
Closer, Side Two
Sundry
