significance

this past week, i was hospitalized for depression. i didn't have access to a phone or computer, which meant no music.

my life that week was bland.

i didn't feel as depressed, but i never felt happy, either. i never felt inspired by anything, never felt that indescribable twisting sensation in my chest that music brings on.

i felt empty.

music is never something i want to take for granted.

music is like a life-saving medication for me.

without music, i feel like a flightless bird (tøp reference intended.)

music means something to me.

as i sit at my kitchen table, writing as an assignment from my intensive outpatient program, and listening to johnny boy, i wonder why music can affect me in this way, and yet, for my brother, it's simply a distraction. a hobby.

he thinks in lines, logical patterns, building blocks like the legos he's been playing with since he was 3. he likes order. craves structure and predictability. thrives under it.

i think in webs, complicated thought-relationships that make sense to no one else. i don't think in pictures, or in words, or in logical structure. i think in sound. i remember everything i've ever heard in the exact voice i heard it said in. i connect people, not with their face or name, but with their voice. scary pictures or words never bothered my anxious mind as much as scary sounds--horrified screams, haunting chords, monstrous roars, and hissing voices.

when i was younger, and i would see a poster for a scary movie in a store, it never bothered me as much as hearing someone talking about a scary movie. i can read about medival tortures and unexplained mysteries, but once i hear them discussed out loud, they become more unnerving to me.

which is why music imapcts me so much. it's one thing to see words written on a page, describing how a person feels, but it's another thing entirely for me to hear someone say it out loud.

for them to sing it.

the same way reading a poem relaxes my aspiring-novelist mom, or designing a perfectly geometrical building in minecraft calms my brother with dreams of being an architect, music makes me feel more complete. it touches me.

i feel a pang in my chest, a wonderfully terrible, horribly euphoric, paradoxical twisting that is like my drug.

it makes everything make sense to me.

i can think more clearly when i have my headphones on, the music echoing through my ears, saturating my bloodstream, breifly calming my anxious, depressive brain.

it's something beautiful and terrible, hot and cold, soft and sharp.

it is significance.