Love, loss, and music.

A look at grief in writing, and coping with heartbreak and death.

Let's give some background into my love-life. Nobody asked and I doubt anyone cares, but it's something I need to write about because it's 2am and I'm maddenly depressed. The first girl I fell in love with was in High School. Alice was beautiful, and she helped heal my tattered soul after years of abuse at the hands of both my parents and my peers. She was unrelentingly kind, masked in a coy sense of humor to mask her own issues. She put her own trauma aside to help me with mine. She was the sun to my sky, the moon to my stars. And then she killed herself. I was catatonic after the situation. In my numbness, I attempted my own half-hearted suicide by swallowing a bunch of vicodin with cans of watered-down flat beer left on the counter by my mother. Instead of ushering me into oblivion, it just made me sick and expel the cocktail of death before it could do any lasting damage to me. Afterwards I just kind of forgotten about the whole event, but its damage was persistent and warped my purview on love and investing myself in somebody again after fear of getting hurt again.

I carry a lot of baggage with me. I have always been emotionally erratic and I dislike most people. But there have been a few people who mean a lot to me that I develop a strong attachment to. I go through bouts of depression and paranoia where I need reassurance from people to ground me, otherwise I think people don't care, they want to hurt me, they're going to abandon me, or they're going to abuse me. Unfortunately this has happened enough in my life to validate those paranoid thoughts. I've been verbally abusive, antagonistic, guilt-tripping, and I could never stop misinterpreting awkwardness, fear, anxiety, or feelings of powerlessness at comforting me for apathy or indifference to helping. It's my neurotic fear of being hurt or people's unwillingness to care that's always kept me from understanding that when it's happening in real time and I've hurt people as a result.

Fast forward years later, I met a woman on the internet. We bonded over video games as it was a video game forum we shitposted on. She one of the few people that initially brought me back into talking and socializing with people again a few years after all of that nonsense happened. I would not have undone my regression to such an extent so quickly if I did not converse with her. She was intelligent, witty, and had a dry sense of humor. She also had an infectious curiosity that I needed in my life. She made me care or want to learn about things in a world I have otherwise grown tremendously disinterested in. What started as a crush swelled into a genuine affection and honest love that I hadn't felt since Alice died. I cherished this woman, and I still cherish the after-image of her long after we parted.

It had to end for a variety of reasons. When I'm ridiculously depressed and high-strung and stressed out and she had trouble saying anything or giving the allusion that she would just leave or ignore me when I'm like that, the scars of Alice would come back. Part of my anger and lashing out would be out of abandonment issues and anxiety that someone I cared about didn't care about me back, but a large portion of it is that I'm aware of how volatile and occasionally suicidal I get, and I saw all my guilt and regret over my friend in her whenever this would happen. I saw myself and everything I regretted about losing somebody in her. The primary reason I wanted us to disassociate is because I became more aware of the danger that something horribly traumatic that happened to me could possibly be perpetuated onto somebody I care tremendously about. And I'm aware that I'm probably too attached for my own good—at least according to her—and I have to begrudgingly accept that she would never care about me as much as I have and still care about her. So I broke it off and 7 years later that grievous wound in my heart is still there, but it's been healing. I’ve gotten medicated and into therapy, and the erratic storm of emotions that would blindside me I’ve grown resilient to.

Just a while later after that dissociation happened, I listened to an album called “A Crow Looked At Me” by Mount Eerie, and it's arguably one of the most important things that I've listened to in the sense of how formative it's been for me as a writer and person. In a year full of good albums, this one stood out the most, but I hesitate grouping it with those albums and I hesitate calling it good. It's hard to recommend because of how untraditional it is in an album sense, since it's at best described as reading a diary over minimalistic guitar strums that even Phil Elverum himself describes as “barely music.” It's also hard to recommend since it's one of, arguably the most soul-crushing pieces of media I've ever partaken in, being an intimate and extremely uncomfortable glimpse into the aftermath of Phil's wife passing away from pancreatic cancer only 35 years into her life, not even a year after their daughter was born. There's a particular ideology about the album that reinforced a concept that I've grown to believe in as my writing's progressed and I've been forced to confront more of my personal demons, frequently losing to them in the process.

Apathy has become prevalent in my writing as the years have gone on and the reason I've stopped writing as much is that, while talking about depression and emptiness can seem cathartic and profound, it always felt insufficient. Like I couldn't adequately discuss it. I think talking about those things doesn't necessarily equate to describing them. Apathy and emptiness are nebulous concepts that always feel hard to articulate in prose because they're by nature an absence of something. It is not a feeling, because there is nothing to feel. It's not the same as “feeling bad” or “feeling indifferent” or “not caring”. Being indifferent and disregarding towards things is different than emptiness and apathy. It's something that can only occur when you've been hurt irreparably, when you've lost something important about yourself. When your feelings have no choice but to retreat, to cease functioning in a situation or time period entirely.

For some of the most traumatic occurrences in my life, I do not remember most of them, at least in explicit detail. I was not there when they happened. I could not have been there when they happened. Something about yourself is now gone and your body just has to reconstitute itself to function again properly without it. Trying to do that and failing is what depression from tragedy is, where you have to acknowledge your inability to function without something in your life anymore. The clawing feeling of a familiar presence slowly being replaced with the vague memory of it instead, where the emulation in your head is what the new normal is. Memories become a weird sort of uncanny valley with a surreal disconnect to them while you slowly adjust to what's become reality.

I listened to that album and hated it. I've never felt that hurt before by a piece of media. I'd never felt like I understood something more than that album in the moment I listened to it. Whenever my life got dark, I'd retreated into books. I'd retreated into writing because it was my coping mechanism. And a small part of me had felt like I was articulating myself through writing, telling people my feelings and stories in a way that they could understand or comprehend. But when I listened to that album, it hurt me. It hurt me in a way I didn't want to remember. I realized my writing wasn't helping me at all. That album made me remember what it actually felt like to lose somebody I cared about or loved, to absolutely detest the circumstances of my life in that moment, every cold and grotesque detail that slowed me down and still has. That album disarmed me. It rendered my therapy inert. It felt like nothing I could write would ever encompass how hurt I've been by everything that's happened in my life. It all suddenly meant nothing. It could not help me cope anymore because my writing was an emulation. After listening to that album, continuing to write about heartbreak and death felt like self-indulgent tripe. It felt like it would never be enough.

Real emptiness, actual depression, is numb and flaccid. It's a slog, a slow burn, an agonizing wither that nobody wants anything to do with. Sadness, tragedy, and depression are frequently not a gunshot, but being stuck in quicksand and slowly dying of exposure. And when it's presented in a form of media meant to be consumed, it should repulse the person absorbing it. It's not meant to be enjoyed, it's not meant to be taken as an art or a story where you feel like you're a better person for partaking in it. It should make you feel like shit, like you didn't learn anything from it. It should feel voyeuristic and exploitative. It should fill you with dread, it should make you want to distance yourself from it because it confronts you with an ugliness that you either can't adequately comprehend and cope with, or if you're far too familiar with it, are aware of how devastating it is. And if you have any shred of empathy, you shouldn't want it to exist because since it does, that means it was somebody's reality. Why would anybody ever just be eating handfuls of shit and ask if other people want to try some? I don't know what you have to gain from it; I can tell you I haven't gained much sharing it. It doesn't help me remember any better. It does not give me emotional catharsis. There is no lesson or moral to be taken from grief. A piece of you is gone for good and you just have to shrug your shoulders and go “Welp, I guess this is my life now.”

It doesn't get any better. You just sort of learn to live with it.

Writing a book doesn't bring dead people back to life. To quote the opening verse of “Real Death”, the devastating opener of the album, "Death is real. Someone's there and then they're not. And it's not for singing about. It's not for making into art. When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb." All these words and memories are fabrications that we lend meaning to in order to justify their existence, and then you snap back into the realm of the living where we realize all these nebulous concepts we think about more or less mean nothing and change nothing. “Art” isn't real, at least not real in the way something like death or suicide is.

Writing about personal tragedy and depression is not necessarily meant to accurately portray that feeling to the reader, moreso that it's meant to act as a surrogate or a shitty emulation of the part of themselves that has gone missing or was taken from them. Cheap melodrama and sentimentality is a punch to the face, a sting meant to evoke immediate emotion or sympathy. There's an audible gasp from the audience and then some sobbing and powerful erratic emotions because we as human beings relate to strong displays of emotion. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this, media has grown to trivialize, even glorify how tragedy and loss actually affects the human soul. There's always something that's a bit less genuine about it.

“A Crow Looked At Me” was an album that has altered my perception of why I write about my struggles with depression, loss, and coping. It's made me rethink what it means to use tools of self-expression to cope with tragedy going forward. I think in order to grow as a person, not every piece of media that makes you a better person is supposed to leave you feeling “good”. Music, shows, video games, how shallow of us would it be to reduce these things down to mere escapism, or that every sad thing that happens in them plays on junk food sentimentality rather than actual palpable grief or sadness, in a world where sometimes life is just shitty or unfair.

And while that's a transformative thing to go through, I still wish that this album didn't exist because that means these things happened to Phil. I wish that I could've reevaluated something like this by not having to listen to this album. I don't want to learn anything from feeling hurt like this from a piece of media. There is a good chance that after only about three complete listens to this album, I will probably never listen to it again. I think the album accomplishes what it set out to do because much like what Phil's gone through to make this album, I don't want it to be real either. Despite my lack of familiarity with his other works like other Mount Eerie albums or the Microphones, I just want Phil to be okay after something like this. This is an album that I would not wish upon anybody to have to write.

And if all this makes it sound like this album is something you don't want to listen to, then I don't blame you. But it's also an album that nobody wanted to exist, especially not Phil. You won't feel like a better person for having listened to it, nor will you find it easy to judge based on traditional parameters of how you think you should approach a music album. But it will leave an impact on you, perhaps one you wouldn't want. But that's sort of what the whole album is about, and it's the closest I've at least gotten to empathizing with real grief and depression from a small piece of music while attempting to relate it to my own feelings of heartbreak and loss.