revisiting old loves
maddie talks about her terrible music taste while still secretly thinking she has excellent music taste.
TW: I’m going to be talking a lot about what I call low-level trauma and the differences it may have with things that cause Trauma Proper, for lack of a better term. PTSD and general psychological distress also come up. This could be stressful or triggering for some readers, so I wanted to leave this here so you can make an informed decision about reading this or not.
If there is a term for a softly held and sustained trauma that spans a year, we don’t have a proper one yet. This past year and a half (and indeed, I would argue the foreseeable future), have been a perfect example of this. The lived experience of many of us, watching headlines from behind closed apartment doors, hearing of the unfathomable loss of life from a quiet disease and the systems that be, hasn’t necessarily been bad enough to be called a trauma. Many of us have lived as well as we could, taking things in stride, while the world systems that hold us crumble beneath our feet in ways we many not understand for decades. But it’s still a form of trauma, but perhaps not as strong as that experienced by others. These others have lived with watching their loved ones die from the other side of glass, through a video chat wherein they can’t hold hands in their final moments. They tried treating patients while knowing next to nothing about a new disease that is more infinitely complex than most realize. People the world over have watched their lives and the lives around them go up in flames. And in case you’re becoming complacent, its still fucking happening, and it is unlikely to stop even as we in the United States step out into the proverbial sun.
(Did you know that there was an uptick in brain disease in the years following the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic? We don’t have complete data sets from the time to definitively say, but it’s not unlikely that the H1N1 flu strain may have caused it. There’s so much we don’t understand STILL about things as elemental to human experience as the Flu. Who knows what we’ll learn about Covid-19 in the coming years?)
This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this sort of low-level build of trauma. My year teaching in Dallas has popped up a lot over the past year; in many ways, the similarities between that time and now have been literally inescapable. I talked about this briefly once, as a part of larger narrative. It’s a specter that follows me even now, I’m just less afraid of it, more willing to look into its face and remain calm while doing so. I am not who I once was; I’m fine, I’ve grown, it can’t hurt me like it used to.
There are things about that time that, up until the past few days, I have strictly avoided thinking about. Even if it’s been five years, it can still haunt you. It can still hurt. Before the year in question happened, I was dismissive of actual or perceived trauma that others endured. And now I look at myself, the shame I feel about something as theoretically simple as showing up and teaching fourth graders, and wonder how people can handle the actually terrible things that happen to them and still remain themselves. I couldn’t handle teaching. How do people endure medical or ecological catastrophe, assault and worse, or losing loved ones? And there’s a lot of complicated shit wrapped up in this. I think the simplest thing to say here would be that everyone experiences the full spectrum of traumas differently, and that if a person says they’re fine and they’re over it, there’s a very real chance that they aren’t. Everyone could benefit from some sort of therapy and our mental health infrastructure wasn’t prepared for dealing with post-modernity, let alone a pandemic. Welcome to America, our health infrastructure sucks!
Since becoming unemployed, I’ve ended up reflecting on the time I spent alone while living down south. Teachers don’t get paid much; this is a fact ubiquitously acknowledged while being swept under the rug. Because I wasn’t making much money, I had very little discretionary income. A lot of money was eaten up by rent and gas for my half hour commute and fucking toll road fees; I couldn’t afford to go out to bars and restaurants with fellow teachers more than once every two weeks. I often couldn’t even afford to treat myself to coffee on the weekends, or pay for the gas to get me to Oak Cliff to go to the place I loved to get coffee from the most. So, typically, I’d get up really early on Saturdays, get to Trader Joe’s, right in time for it to open, and get my twenty bucks in groceries for the week. Then I’d head home for a lonely weekend of just trying to fucking exist.
It’s not unlike what I’ve been doing for the past few months, actually. It’s not unlike what we’ve all been doing for the past few months. Work, be it at home or in a retail or service setting, home, and grocery store. Maybe a stop for coffee. I looked up in like, January, probably, and was like ah shit, why does this feel so familiar? And then the madness of February set in, with its obscene cold, and I left the apartment even less than before. That’s when I realized it felt like I was in Dallas again. The key difference is that Austin comes home each evening instead of having to listen to me cry my eyes out over the phone about how I couldn’t figure out how to show up for a student.
Y’all, it’s fucking June. A lot has happened in the past four months, and more just keeps happening. We’re all exhausted and want to have a wet and wild and vaccinated summer. I’m still stuck inside, but you kids have fun! I’m on like, twice the number of medications I was on when we last spoke, and one of them makes me sun sensitive. Though I have lived my life mostly being ghostly pale, I do actually tan, even if I get a little red first. I could probably use the natural vitamin D, but I’ve got a med that makes me a bit sun-sensitive and lightly tanks my immune system and it’s a whole thing and I’m fucking tired but I’m alive. I’m here. My apartment feeling like Dallas doesn’t fucking scare me anymore.
There’s a lot in our lives that we typically don’t talk about and we all have our reasons. I’m not great at interpersonal communication and intimacy, even within my own family, so there’s stuff I’ll mention casually and then realize, right, they haven’t heard about that. Like the time in college that I fell in big love with a German exchange student, significantly older than myself, with a girlfriend back home. For a long and hard three months. I basically performed much of the emotional labor he needed while receiving little to no benefit for myself because I was young and dumb and just wanted to spend what little time I could with him while I could, knowing I couldn’t do anything else but offer my time and a person to talk to. I mentioned this a few months ago while getting socially distant coffee outside (hi DayDrink!) with my sisters and their mouths just kind of fell open; how could I so casually mention something like that? How come they hadn’t heard of something like that? Members of our family rarely suffer anything in silence; I guess it was weird for me hide something like that. To date, I still count him among my great loves, and like all great loves and sources of low-level trauma, there are hidden consequences that come along with that.
By this point, you’re probably like “Maddie what the hell, how is any of this related and when are we going to get to judge you for your ubiquitously bad millennial music taste? We don’t give a shit about the not even that hot German guy you loved enough to move to Germany for and like how is that even related to your year of teaching just get to the fuckin point jeez.” Or something like that.
There’s a song by Neon Trees called Songs I Can’t Listen To. It’s a bop, and if pop rock is your thing, or even if it’s not your thing, you should give it a listen. I think it’s talking about something elemental, something that a lot of people who live in societies deeply interlaced with pop culture will relate to.
Like many millennials, I grew up listening to a lot of music. I was raised on Omaha’s Star 104.5 (80s, 90s, and today!) and eighties weekend radio. My dad was a disco kid. My mom’s first music purchase was a Van Halen cassette. I was primed to have music in my life near constantly. And at a young age I established my propensity to listen to the same things again. I had a deep love for Garth Brooks’s The Hits (1994) at age five, and would ask for it pretty much every time we were going to be in a car for more than a half an hour. This carried over to a long and somewhat tortured love of Enya that started in fourth grade and didn’t end until I was well into high school (and honestly it still persists, god I love you Enya. I don’t know how to link or embed videos or whatever but I have footage of me drunkenly screaming “ENYAAAAA” at a visiting Austin while sitting on the couch in my Dallas apartment. I was in a weird place okay?? Also Substack, honey, baby, can we PLEASE get support for footnotes? I can’t be the only person who wants this).
Of course, high school hit like a freight train and YouTube was finding its stride as a medium, great news for a kid who desperately wanted to be emo and didn’t have the money to even buy music let alone afford the black shirts and black hair dye. I mentioned that I joke that I have terrible music taste but secretly think it’s great, and the era of OG Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Paramore is a great example of this. I’ll fucking fight you on the first album released by Boys Like Girls (The Great Escape) though; it’s one of the finest pop-punk-emo-rock-whatever albums ever made, and I stand by that statement (it’s a bummer that they’re like really shitty now tbh).
It was at this time, in all of its hormonal glory, that listening to music as a sort of therapy became a normal practice for me. We all know that music is NOT therapy and it’d probably be better to not use it that way. This is how you run into one of the many ways in which you can make a song almost unlistenable for yourself. You begin to associate it with whatever negative experience you’re trying to get yourself through. When you come back to the song after a break, it can make you uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of causing a panic attack, even if the negative experience isn’t associated with a PTSD diagnosis. In my personal experience, this is true to the point of avoiding well loved music for years; that’s rough when you have ADHD (surprise, no one is surprised) and use loud music as a way to cope with the fact that your brain won’t fucking turn off (and hasn’t since you were fifteen). Negative associations are a total bitch! It’s like eating something you love and then getting food poisoning and vomitting it all back up and never wanting to eat that thing again!
I wasn’t planning on writing an essay again this soon. I have, up to this point, been experiencing a literal physical aversion to writing. It’s like writing and I are both north magnetic poles on two separate magnets: you cannot make us touch for more than a few moments without working against the laws of physics, and thus the very fabric of the universe.
But then, one of my sisters (hi Ellen) mentioned that she’d been listening to Paramore and My Chemical Romance, letting the nostalgia for high school just come and sitting with it. That in turn inspired me to put together a playlist of the bangers we listened to in high school, or at least most of them. Enya is the exact opposite of emo and Closer to the Edge is a little too peppy and arena-rock inspired to be included in a playlist whose title is, ahem, “a n g e r y.” I’m suffering a little from some Butter induced fatigue and frankly, so is anyone who’s been in a car with me for the past two weeks. (In my defense, it’s a fucking bop and is unlikely to be topped as Song of the Summer™️, but I digress.) I needed a break, so did everyone else, so now we’re here, in the depths of Spotify, cobbling together the best parts of a few albums and tossing in a few wildcards for fun. Wildcards like A Favor House Atlantic by Coheed and Cambria, for example.
And this is where the soft trauma of teaching comes back. Living alone, desperately missing your boyfriend slash fiancé, you start making some weird changes. Austin’s a metalhead, but he has a soft spot for prog-ish Coheed. He has a lot of respect for them as musicians because, make fun of the fans all you want, Coheed can fucking perform. For a guy who was once a teenaged guitar player writing music for his (checks notes) melodic metalcore band, Coheed was a significant influence, and his love for their music has persisted over time. Their albums are (mostly) masterfully put together, and best listened to front to back. I listened to almost exclusively Coheed and Cambria while living in Dallas. With my long commutes and deep desire for something that sounded good when played really, really loudly, it stood in for what I needed most at the time: therapy, probably a medication, and having Austin physically there with me. The band was easy for me to get into. It doesn’t involve a lot of screaming, I can appreciate the technical playing and the production value they dump into each album, and it had a certain level of the angry that helped me work some shit out and pull myself together in time to stand in front of two dozen nine to ten year olds for eight hours. The sound itself was clean enough for me pick up some nuance through my car speakers, and Claudio’s singing is really easy to understand, so the lyrics weren’t hard for me to pick up and sing along to.
With all that said, I stopped cold turkey after I moved out of Dallas. I hadn’t touched a Coheed song for almost five years until Welcome Home and A Favor House Atlantic both popped up as recommendations to add to this playlist. Of course, they’re both total bangers, so I added them for the sake of my Art™️ and prepared to hate myself for it. And yet, time has the ability to heal all wounds. Instead of making me feel trapped and alone, the music merely reminded me of what I had been using it for. In fact, many of the songs on the playlist had been used in a similar fashion at some point or another. There was a stretch of time in high school wherein I would listen to Famous Last Words (MCR) on repeat to cope with having a crush on a certain boy, knowing full well that he’d never like me in the same way. I’d go so far as to say that the song taught me more about love than most of the shitty love songs written around the same time period. I avoided that song for a time too, after high school, because the song reminded me of that boy. And this is to say nothing of the fact that I thought listening to the emo hits of the aughts was passé; I didn’t want to be judged by my hipstery college peers. But my evolving preferences didn’t mean I escaped the “Songs I Can’t Listen To” phenomenon. When I fell in love with the German student, I listened to Bon Iver’s cover of I Can’t Make You Love Me obsessively for at least a month, likely more. Most of my friends (hi y’all!) were like “um, are you okay” which, obviously, I wasn’t, and they knew that, but the song was all I could cling to while being completely beside myself.
Of course, leaning on music like this means that there are still things I’m not ready to listen to yet. While I can ease back into most of Coheed’s discography without spiraling, I still cannot listen to The Color Before the Sun without breaking down and becoming a complete mess. I tried to listen to it at some point in March because there’s a specific song that related to the shit I was going through with diagnoses and medications and it made sense to try but as soon as I got to it, it hit me really hard. Like way too fucking hard. I’m not ready yet, and that’s okay. In the most vague sense, these big experiences stick with us for reasons past our understanding. To put it into context, I’m happily married, I’ve been so for nearly five years (jfc what is time), and some songs, including the ones I’ve talked about here, still bring back the painful twinges of previous loves. We can forget the song exists, we can forget the love and the pain that came with it, and yet the two still remain entwined in our heads. Recalling one begets the memory of the other. I don’t think this should be a source of shame. Love is one of the most basic human experiences; it has allowed us to prosper and evolve into what we are as a species today. Music, at its base poetry, is perhaps one of the oldest art forms we have, probably as old as discernible, systematic language itself. The two are deep parts of our shared experience as a species. I mean, fuck, that’s a whole book right there.
Moving past love, associating music with various times in our lives is a natural and normal part of our existence, at the very least as humans living in the twenty first century. I think it allows us, when we are ready, to look into our past selves and live within that space. It’s kind of a cool memory trick (or maybe cruel, as this is the same process that can lead to a panic attack, among other strong psychological symptoms), and I think it works with TV shows and books too. It certainly works with defunct social media accounts, which, wow, sometimes I scroll through my old, derelict tumblr to remind myself of who I once was, just for fun. I think these moments can be cathartic, and I think that’s healthy. Listening to a song or paging through a book and thinking about how it doesn’t hurt to experience it anymore … It can be a tremendous reminder of growth. And of course, maybe you’re not ready to confront something like that within yourself yet. I promise you that it’s okay and your pain is valid and it’s okay to not look at it yet. I needed to tell myself that in March. Some stones need to be left unturned for a while. You might never get there, and that’s also okay. We all take these things at our own paces. If you think you can, however, I recommend reflecting on these small things within yourself. Humans are both unchanging and constantly changing; this is normal and natural. Our relationship with music and time is perhaps the most appropriate example of this. It’s kind of nice listening to something you used to love and discovering that you still love it after all this time, even if you’ve grown and changed. Sometimes we need that reminder.
Hi kids. It’s been a sec! That came out of no where! Like wow, what? I think it’s the longest essay I’ve written for the newsletter so far, plus, I mean, with the amount of linking this took and such, this thing was a labor of love. I just … It felt like I needed to write this for myself, especially after the past several months. I try not to hide my health struggles because I feel like that stigmatizes something that need not be stigmatized, but I also feel like I talk about it way too much. The past few months have been consuming on that front, and that’s part of the reason I’ve gotten almost no writing done. And I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not likely that I’ll be sending out essays regularly, just as they come! I have a big move coming at the end of July and like four or so doctor’s appointments coming up plus more therapy sessions in addition to over-planning said move so like, not tons of emotional bandwidth to put together essays for my own personal satisfaction. I promise, I am actually doing okay, just taking shit in stride. My health problems are mostly mild, but when you get like five different mild conditions going on, each just complex enough to be seen by a specialist, it ends up being incredibly disruptive! And this is to say nothing of the still happening pandemic. We’re doing great, y’all. I appreciate your support and patience during this time. It means the world to me.
Other than just trying to survive, I’ve, um, started teaching myself Korean with the help of this program. I didn’t expect to get this far into becoming a BTS fan to be honest, and frankly, I’m getting tired of not understanding the words to my favorite songs. Plus, I have retained an affection for k-dramas and Line Webtoon that English subtitles and translations cannot alone sate. I’ll level with you. I think part of the reason this essay happened is because I was avoiding the next bit of grammar in the lesson plan: basic conjugation in the present and past tenses (send help). I promise that as soon as I’m done typing this out, I’ll get to it. All that being said, it has given me a tremendous amount of energy and joy to work on, and I really needed that kind of boost after the oppressive hell of February and March. There are other factors (being diagnosed with ADHD and starting a low dose of Adderall, the coming of spring and its sunshine, etc), but having this language to learn as a project to work on daily has helped immensely.
If you’ve made it this far, wow, thank you for reading! Here are some enjoyable things I’ve found over the past few months! Thanks for being here!
Generally speaking, there are only two people on the internet whose reading recommendations I will take with no questions asked: Alicia Kennedy and David Zilber. And it was Alicia who mentioned How to Do Nothing in a really good essay published in January. The book has been my bedtime reading recently and I’m really loving it. It’s not a self help book at all, despite how the title sounds, which is probably the best part??? Odell is an artist, and she has a significantly different way of approaching the cultural problems surrounding the attention economy. I especially loved chapter six, wherein Odell talks about how social media and its accompanying noise requires us to pitch ourselves as unchanging brands versus beings capable of change and growth, thus stunting our ability to actually talk about anything important. I really like this book. Definitely consider picking up a copy.
I can’t not include Butter. The song fucking slaps, and I will not apologize for the love I hold for my seven weird sons. In fact, here’s a performance (ugh, the styling on these costumes) that shows off the choreography better, and here’s another (yes Hobi make that choreo your bitch) because I will not shut up about it. Additionally, being a part of the first twenty four hours of organized streaming on ARMY Twitter was one of the most strangely positive and wholesome internet experiences I’ve ever had. And on Twitter no less!! I even made a playlist for streaming. Originally it had Butter on it like every other song, but now that the honeymoon phase is over, I’ve edited them out and have just let this become another playlist that gives me the zoomies.
This essay on Kimye was perhaps the best obituary we could have gotten on the relationship. What a finely wrought piece of culture writing. It feels like we’ve come to the end of an era, and I suppose we have, in more ways than one. I guess I always rooted for Kimye insofar as I was aware that the relationship existed and in that it somehow feels good or virtuous to hope a celebrity marriage persists and appears productive (read: stable) over time. But obviously, there is always much more to the story, and 2021 has seen many appraisals of old pop culture institutions. Hopefully the trend of revisiting will continue.
Somewhere in the past month or two, I put something like 45 hours into a fresh save file in Stardew Valley in the span of two weeks. I then came across this piece on Longreads and thought fondly of my very first Stardew save file. In the game, salmonberries are a foraging product you can gather in the spring, and you can eat, sell, or preserve them to sell at a higher price. In that first save file, salmonberries saved my ass and helped me get through that first spring when I had no idea what I was doing (in both the game and in real life). And this is to say nothing of the actual real-life relevance that this fruit has for Indigenous communities. This piece was wonderful, please consider giving it a read.
Thanks for hanging out with me today, I’ll be in my corner listening to my playlist and conjugating verbs. Talk soon! Maybe!
Questions, comments, concerns, cries of pain? Do you have a song you love but can no longer listen to? I’d love to hear about it! Reply to this email if you want to talk, or reach out to me on Twitter (movervoltage, currently private, request a follow and I’ll get back to you!) or instagram (m.overvoltage). Stay safe and healthy <3