The Possible Return of Meaning

September 7th, 2009

I’ve been going through a weird phase with music for the last few months. None of it has meant anything, I haven’t been able to relate to it. For someone like me, that’s excessively strange. Normally I am finding meaning in every song lyric, relating it all to my life, relating it all to my experience. And for the last few months I’ve been wearing out the skip button on my iPod, not feeling anything about anything I heard. And I think it’s been a symptom of a larger disconnect in my life, a sort of emotional time-out from everything. There’s been so much going on, so many things to process, that I don’t think I’ve let myself feel most of it, just because there’s not enough computational power in my emotionally stunted introvert’s brain. Sometimes I can either do or feel – and I’ve been doing a lot of doing.

I’ve almost been afraid to be alone, to sit down and think, to stop doing and digest for a minute. I don’t think I wanted to know what I’d discover. But my brain – despite copious amounts of denial and overprocessing and rationalizing and frenetic activity and drinking and running around and never shutting up and refusing to be alone and refusing to stop stimulating it – seems to be finally sorting things out without my help. And as I reach some sort of understanding, things are starting to mean things again. Music is speaking to me again. Emotions are slipping through again. And that is painful and shitty and sucktastic, and it’s also pretty fabulous.

There’s a line in a Laura Veirs song called “Cast a Hook in Me” (see – I told you I relate all my own experiences to music)

And at night a fractured star fell
And pierced right through the thick of me
I cried out in pain and joy, yes
I’m not dead, not numb, not withering

and I love it because yeah, sometimes pain is all you feel, but the pain means you can at least feel something. And if you can feel something, sometimes you’re going to feel joy. Sometimes you’re going to feel contentment and happiness. Maybe not right now – but eventually it’s got to be joy’s time to come around.

At times I wish that it wasn’t so hard for me to deal with everything. That it didn’t take me so long, and it wasn’t so painful and confusing while I do it. But then I think that I am feeling it harder than most people, that I take more away, that I learn more and then I use it to understand the world better and understand myself better. I wouldn’t trade any of my experiences because I do learn so much, and I don’t want to give up anything I’ve ever learned. Not really. And no, my way of being is far from perfect, but it’s far from the worst I’ve seen either. So anyway, here’s to the possible return of meaning in my life, let’s see if it sticks around.