I’m not the most sophisticated music person around. I have my artists and styles that I gravitate to and I mainly land on albums that I obsessively listen to over and over. A few times I have experimented with making myself branch out, and I serendipitously stumble on things (most recent was a foray into Sufjan Stevens after reading a miscellaneous blog post that mentioned the album Illinois). But mostly I stick to comfort tunes.
One of my classic go-to musicians is Aimee Mann. I annoyed the shit out of my college friends when I watched her perform Save Me for the Academy Awards, and have never forgiven Phil Collins or the Academy for giving the Oscar to that stupid Tarzan song. I likewise annoyed other friends when she made that appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And my husband and I cracked up at her appearance on Portlandia.
I decided a few weeks back to go hunting around for any new material by her and came across 2017’s Mental Illness, which isn’t particularly recent, but since my list had stopped at Lost in Space back in 2002, it was new to me. Simple Fix was the track that first got its hooks into me. I’ve since added Patient Zero especially and Lies of Summer into the mental playlist on regular rotation. There’s something about a moody / folky guitar, or piano, and lyrics that cut through your soul but are also quite clever or allusive. Maybe because I listened to so many of my parents’ folk rock / 70’s albums when I was growing up.
The theme of mental health is still thick on me, but I definitely feel like I’m back on an even keel again. I have started HRT and whether it’s a placebo effect or a real thing, the difference was almost immediate and palpable. It doesn’t hurt that I will have 2 weeks off work during the school holidays, and after that I have less than 10 Mondays left to my countdown. But even without that I feel like I have way more Cope.
Right now I’m reading a book (James 5. A. Corey’s The Faith of Beasts) which has a character with a severe ongoing mental illness that she manages with medication. She says she takes the meds to keep her brain from going rotten.While I was nowhere near as debilitated as what was depicted in the book, the rotten brain analogy hit the nail on the head for me. None of my circumstances were particularly bad or objectively problematic, but my brain insisted on instilling me with an overwhelming sense of existential dread of doing anything. It took most of my energy just to get out of bed and attend to basic self care and responsibilities, with very little mental power or will left over for anything else.
It’s nice not having that on my plate right now.
But let’s call a spade a spade
I’m going nowhere
I’m stuck in this hole, afraid
To make a move
So once more around the track
Another lap
And I think I can get it back
To where we prove
There’s a simple fix
For our mess