lowquality.net

For every week that goes by that I thank God for the inven­tion of anti-anxiety and anti-depression med­ica­tions, there are occa­sion­ally some days where it feels as though I am tak­ing noth­ing at all. Those days are pure Hell: I can’t focus, I can’t keep my thoughts together, I am irri­ta­ble, I am rest­less, every­thing I do feels like an incred­i­bly hope­less and point­less chore. Expe­ri­enc­ing these occa­sional days is far less soul-sucking than it once was, now that I know the con­di­tion isn’t entirely per­ma­nent, but they still can be quite unbear­able. Prior to tak­ing meds, this was a feel­ing to which I believed I would never be free of. Now I know it’s some­thing I have to find cre­ative ways to work through, which, in itself, is a work in progress.

About a week ago I was hav­ing a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult day and even lay­ing down to take a nap just seemed impos­si­ble. I wanted to play bass but I felt just totally unin­spired and unen­thu­si­as­tic and just com­pletely drained. I had resigned myself with sim­ply crash­ing on one of our comfy new sofas and try­ing to just rest and maybe even sleep but I was unable to do even this as I kept find­ing myself hijacked by intru­sive, pan­icky thoughts.

I don’t know exactly why I thought to try this, but in an attempt to con­trol my thoughts,  I started to visu­al­ize the fret­board of the bass in my head and I began try­ing to hear the pitches of the open strings and then started to do solfege in my head based on fin­ger­ings of scales and arpeg­gios. I did this totally with­out a bass or even singing, I was just try­ing to see how well I could “visu­al­ize” (what’s the hear­ing equiv­a­lent to “visu­al­ize?” “Aural­ize?”) the scales in my head. I ran through the major and minor scales and did a few Berklee Ear Train­ing exer­cises I remem­bered. All in my head, with­out actu­ally singing.

What’s most amaz­ing about this is that I am totally con­fi­dent that my rel­a­tive pitch was dead on the money. I don’t have per­fect pitch and I was too suc­cumbed into the depths of my per­sonal cri­sis to check my notes on a key­board but I know that, based on what­ever pitch I had set in my head as do, I was “singing” all of the other notes cor­rectly and confidently.

I know what you’re think­ing: “But you’re a musi­cian, Justin, this should be easy for you. I don’t even know what a solfege is.” That’s partly true. In col­lege, Ear Train­ing was a major source of anx­i­ety for me. I just couldn’t get it– or at least couldn’t focus on it well enough to get it. The work was frus­trat­ing and left me feel­ing vul­ner­a­ble (not hav­ing that big bass to hide behind was a prob­lem) and I just plain lacked the con­fi­dence needed to get through the work to the level that I needed to do it. Prior to tak­ing Ear Train­ing courses at Berklee, I believed I had a fairly good nat­ural sense of pitch and, after fail­ing nearly every Ear Train­ing course (at least once), I became less and less con­fi­dent. But here I was using these very same skills to soothe and calm an episode of anx­i­ety, which, in order to develop, filled me with so much panic.

I’m almost pos­i­tive the idea to try this came from Jaco, and how ironic is that? Jaco lived his final years in an incred­i­ble amount psy­chic pain and as an indi­rect result of this pain, lived home­less and with­out a bass for peri­ods of time. It is well doc­u­mented that, dur­ing these peri­ods, Jaco would “prac­tice” with­out a bass– he would just visu­al­ize the fret­board and (pre­sum­ably) sing the notes he pre­tended to play. Think about that the next time you see a crazy home­less guy play­ing air gui­tar in the park.

Any­way… I would be a great blog­ger if I could some­how roll this up into a “music cures all” chicken soup for the soul kind of post.. but that’s bull­shit. This didn’t have any­thing to do with the heal­ing power of music. I was able to will myself to some level of san­ity with some rudi­ments. When I am in an “episode” (I guess we’ll call it that) it’s not unlike hav­ing the worst song I’ve ever heard stuck in my head over and over again. Instead of just being an annoy­ing Sugar Ray song, though, it’s some­thing per­son­ally relat­ing to every­thing that I could find wrong with my life that I have absolutely no solu­tion for. It’s a loop­ing spi­ral of hope­less­ness and despair. I know you’re skep­ti­cal, but, believe me, that’s a lot worse than Sugar Ray.

When I was in mid­dle school, my buddy Joe said you could get any song stuck in your head out by “singing some­thing cool” (in his case at the time it was Wicked Gar­den by Stone Tem­ple Pilots). I think the force of will to break the loop and make your own music erases the loop. I think maybe that’s what I was try­ing to do. It really does take some effort to get those songs-on-repeat to stop. As annoy­ing as they are, it seems so much eas­ier to just let the bad music drive you crazy than it does to try to replace it with some­thing bet­ter.  Some­times these pan­icky thoughts per­vade my think­ing because I’ve got noth­ing else to keep me cen­tered. It doesn’t have to be music. Forc­ing some­thing as sim­ple as a major scale into my mind may not be a sooth­ing exer­cise, but it’s a sig­nal to replace the noise.

Ok.. so it’s chicken soup for the soul.