One would think of all the overthinking overthinkers do that they would have already thought of at least a million ways to cure or alleviate the, at times, maddening thoughts that occur when one is overthinking.
Yet here we are. Simply stuck in all the maddening thoughts swirling… Traveling through years and light-years. Of the fiction and non-fiction memories in varying resolutions. Of mentally recorded conversations. Of what might have beens. Of what could be.
Overthinking.
‘Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’
– Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I’d been digging through my emails looking for an mp3 of a song I wrote and had shared with some people but no longer have any recollection over what the lyrics were or how the melody went except for the last line. It also seems I never wrote the words down anywhere or if I did I don’t know where the paper is anymore.
Part of the reason why I couldn’t remember 99% of it was because I hardly ever played it. Coz I never could. Never could in the sense that I could never get through the song fully from top to bottom. All I remember was how I got around to writing that song and its backstory.
I’d written it August of 2011. I was 22. As with nearly everything I’d created around that time, this was another attempt at making peace with the fact that I’d lost my father.
I’d had a particularly rough night working through another bout of immense grief and did my best to sleep it off. In that sleep, the man whose presence I’d been missing came to visit me.
In the dream, we spoke. We hugged. I held him close and buried my face in his neck. I remember taking a long deep breath and getting a whiff of that scent that was uniquely my father. Then he said, ‘Bye-bye to yesterday’.
The dream felt very real. Too real. I woke up sobbing, feeling like a little girl lost without her father.
Born out of that dream was a journal entry (that later became a blog entry) and a song. The song I was looking for.
Grief is tricky thing. It follows no protocol. It comes and goes as it pleases without warning. Every anniversary is its own giant that either passes by peacefully or comes down hard on you. This year was tough. Each day approaching brought me back to 2011.
However, these emotions have always been welcome. At least, to me. They’re meant to be there. It’s all human. And you simply deal with it in your own terms. This year, it seemed, my way of dealing with the grief was in wanting to play that song. Something in me needed to play it. To find a way back to that song.
The file I’d been looking for is the only audio I have of the song. I remember wanting to record it as soon as I could so I didnt have to keep practicing it and I could just be done with it. It’s one of the very few times I got through the whole song without getting flooded over by emotions. I remember sending it to my siblings yet over time, with technological updates, I knew their copies were long gone.
However, something told me to keep digging. And dug I did. I dug as far as I could. Through the oldest corners of my oldest virtual imprints.
One afternoon, through all the digging, I found the lone copy. I was surprised to find that the biggest surprise wasn’t finding the song – it was hearing it.
I was listening to my 22-year-old self. 22-year-old-Kerly sounded so sure of herself. She sounded so light. There was a brightness to her voice. Filled with so much youthful hope amidst all the madness that was the world and this grief.
This led me to listen to some of my other old songs.
I was caught off guard.
Somehow, the songs were a lot easier to remember than the person who sang it.
08.25.2018 03:25am
[Thoughts written as I revisit my love (nay, obsession?) with Paolo Nutini while drunk on mint tea coz I’m hardcore like that]
Write everyday. This is something I’ve been told by many people in my life many times over. Write everyday. Write something – anything – everyday.
I used to write everyday. I grew up keeping a diary which I gave many nicknames coz I wanted to be original and since I treated my diary like a friend it seemed only fitting that my friend would have a name that’s not generic as ‘diary’.
The obsession with keeping a diary started perhaps when I was around 9 or 10 years old. The diaries started out filled with dreams I could recall and also showcased my love for Backstreet Boys and how well I knew MTV (back when MTV was still MTV).
As the years pressed on, the pen and paper later became my outlet as I entered the weird and confusing and angry teenage years. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I had friends but it felt better when I wrote. I understood myself better when I wrote it down. Unloading emotions that my teenage heart and mind could barely hold.
I am being dramatic, of course. I don’t think my teenage years was all that complicated or that I was complicated but I guess part of that was because I had something to turn to. I had my music. I had my writing. Left with in my room a radio, my guitar, a pen and a few sheets of paper and maybe my diary, I was good. That was heaven.
Write everyday.
I used to write everyday.
Then I started to work and growing up took more of my energy that I couldn’t write down things anymore. I didn’t want to write down things anymore. What was there to write? What was the beauty about growing up and having to own up? I had no more daily mundane things to write because it was all becoming much too big and heavy to bear most times that words didn’t do any of it justice.
I focused on my music. I always tried getting a song out of me at least once every two months. I wrote alot of songs that were, looking back now, quite honestly good and were significant in helping me learn about myself and the world around me. In my youth, I was fearless and hopeful. That showed in my writing.
The deeper I got into my relationship with coffee, I discovered, the better my writing got. The more caffeine I got, the wittier the lines were and tighter the structure if it was a song or a poem.
But like I said, growing up became too much. It took all my energy. I had nothing left to spare. I couldn’t shut the noise in my head that was screaming for the noise of the world to shut up.
However, it’s in these moments that I try. I wait for a calm to come around. The calm that takes place before the madness. I take a few deep breaths. I pick up a pen and find a few sheets of paper – still feels as good as it’s always felt – and I write. It will start off rusty, words won’t come as smoothly as they did but I write. You’ve first got to write off the dust before you find yourself again.
And here I am, writing. Revisiting my old self. To when I was sure and fearless.
An introduction – nay, ‘excuse’ – to my absence, my lack of posts:
April 15th, I celebrated my 29th birthday. Alas! The last stretch of my twenties has officially begun and am now left to wonder what else is ‘out there’.
My twenties haven’t been easy. As a matter of fact, to say ‘it’s been a pain’ would be quite the understatement. Each year, a new challenge has come up to shape me up and tear me down and put me back together again. No, my twenties – so far – hasn’t been all bad. It has, of course, had its fair share of loveliness that’s allowed me to withstand and survive each year.
This has brought me to my own version of ‘Life is a balance’. It’s not exactly original but, allow me to explain:
I believe everything in life ultimately balances itself out. For example, if you’ve had a bad morning, to balance it out, the gods, fate or whatever you believe in, will come together and make sure you’re going to have a good, or at the very least decent, evening. This ‘balancing out’ comes in every version of the bookends. It’s in every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year. If you’ve had a not-so-good start of year, trust that you’re going to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the year. It will balance itself out.
This is something I’ve come to believe in as my introvert self continues to contemplate over life, its inner workings and intricacies. It’s not so much an out but more of a saving grace. This allows to me have something I turn to whenever life sneaks up on me and shows me I’m not in control of things – really, of anything. I learned to just take deep breaths, pause, and tell myself, ‘it’ll balance itself out’.
About a week after my 29th, a new concept popped up in my orbit. I read Leslie Odom Jr’s book, Failing Up. A lovely, enlightening, uplifting book. There’s a bit that talks about Saturn’s Return and I was immediately intrigued (as I have an interest for things that are not necessarily within this atmosphere we exist in). The book eventually explains that since Saturn takes approximately 29.5 years to complete its orbit around the sun, your 29th will be the first time ever that Saturn’s been back in that same spot it was when you were born. This cosmic activity is often thought to bring about significant changes in life. Taken with a grain of salt, I thought deeply about this.
There’s no denying that the 29th year, the last of your 20s, your last go at being a pseudo-adult, is meant to bring in a tidal wave of changes. Bookends, remember?
However, it’s good to keep in mind that whatever those changes are, they are left entirely to however you perceive and accept them to be. So, it’s best to make the most out of it – something we always hear but needs to be repeated constantly.
Breathe through it. Breathe through your highs and lows. Breathe through your laughter and suppressed pain (please know you’re not alone). Breathe through all your endeavors. However cosmic or minute the bookends may be.
From This Suok 