Plus more depression, except I find it a more mild and melancholic depression than a severe one. I particularly like this one. There might be typos (grammatical errors, run-on sentences, etc.) that I haven't corrected; in fact, I'm 89.999999% sure there are. Oh well. This a particularly lengthy one, so uh, enjoy.
(tl;dr: pre-December blues + musings + reflections on my past)
[Posted Oct 17 2010, 08:27:06 PM]
"CHAPTER I: The Bleak Midwinter
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I am going to attempt to summarize the past three days that I have had, from Thursday to Saturday. It could just be described as what’s been on my mind as of late. It’s been a lot and I had a lot of really deep and profound ideas but due to my failure to write any of them down, I’ve probably already forgotten some of the more admirable ones. I hope not; of course, hope hasn’t gotten me very far lately. Instead of simple blind hope, it’s been a desire. I don’t sit around and hope something’s going to happen anymore. If I want something to happen, then damn it, it’s going to happen. This cycle of waiting and hoping and believing the false promises people make to me, I hate it and I’ve grown sick of it. If you want to do something for me, don’t ‘promise’ that you’ll do it. Just do it. Actions speak louder than words and all that.
I deigned this post ‘The Bleak Midwinter’ for a number of reasons. Some of you may recognize it as the title of a song, and that’s because it is. My sister sang it in her eighth grade Christmas choir concert, though this is not the complete story behind the title of this post. In fact, that’s probably an eighth or a tenth or something of it because, though it ties in effectively, it isn’t the substance of the story. My AP English teacher told me bluntly that my argumentative writing needs more substance—“You introduce a lot of broken ideas that start out strong but end weakly. It’s good, but it could be even better with moresubstance! By the way, really nice diction! :D :D”
I am fully aware that this isn’t argumentative writing or anywhere remotely close to it, but it still vexes me to the core of my being every time she scrutinizes my writing as such; and so today I make sure to deliver the best of my storytelling ability withsubstance. I will begin.
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Last year I got the privilege to sing with a frankly amazing choral group known around here as the Nova Singers.* When we were done performing with them, we had the option whether or not to stay at the concert. The choice I took was obvious, and the rest of the concert was astounding—I sat in the back with the few of my friends who bothered to stay, since a lot of them were younger kids and younger kids don’t usually possess the attention span to stay completely quiet throughout a whole choral concert, or any kind of classical music concert for that matter. When I was little I was one of the few who did, as a matter of fact, and already this was what separated me from the normal children.
But I digress. At the end of the concert, to my ecstatic excitement, they were selling CD’s. They were all holiday-themed and had cute little cover arts and things. They were $15 each and I only had thirty at the time, so I bought one. I regret that now; I should’ve screwed my money and bought two, because after I was done listening to the first one, I wanted so much more. My desire was huge.
The one that I bought was entitled ‘Midwinter’, and the song I mentioned above was the last track of the CD. It was a different arrangement from the one my sister sang, and was probably one of the only songs in the whole list performed with piano accompaniment (a lot of the songs are a cappella). And I was lying there on my bed in the dark, with pomegranate tea and peppermint candy, listening to this song. It was the last day of school before winter vacation. It was the best feeling I had ever felt in a while.
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I feel as if I’m in my bleak midwinter now. I don’t know what’s been going on with me lately; I feel as if I’m going a little mentally off. I listened through the CD again on Thursday night because I was having some sort of attack. I couldn’t tell whether it was anxiety or panic or depression or all three; all I could remember was my body physically aching and my constant urge to cry literally every ten minutes. It didn’t subside until well after 2:30am, and I was supposed to be studying for finals but I found myself unable to. |: It sucks to admit that it was mostly SF that caused this. And I think I’ve finally drawn the conclusion that SF has been the main source of this strange bout of depression that I’ve had for two weeks.
My mom’s more than worried about me now; she believes I’ve been suffering from both anxiety problems and insomnia, and maybe even some sort of anemia but I can’t be too sure anymore. I always get that nagging, prying feeling that it’s all in my head and I should just not care about it. And, believe me—being an optimist by nature, I do it all the time. I’ve lived my whole life living on the bright side. Even now I’m thinking, “but there are so many other worse problems out there, man. Mine are insignificant. Besides, being in a state of delirium is fun!”
I’m really not in denial about it, either: being delirious is a lot of fun, mind you. The frantic, panicked thoughts of hopelessness and despair are not, but watching your walls move at 1AM while on the phone with your friend from Oregon is an experience worth living. Trust me on this one.
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The main reason why SF tore me up so much the other day was that it had reawakened one of my biggest childhood insecurities I can remember. Don’t ask me why I went back there; it was mostly due to my mafia game involving some of its members, you know, and I would make the final decision to leave once my game was finished. And, well, I left earlier than intended. Except I mean it this time. I didn’t even post a ragequit thread or anything. All I did was drop out of a few mafia games without even explaining the reason why I did it, and locked myself out of my account. I’m pretty much done there. I blocked a lot of the users on my MSN, too.
What would provoke me into doing this, do you ask? What was the final straw that broke the camel’s back? I really cannot repeat exactly what it was, because I just cannot explain it properly. I haven’t the straightforward skill with words for it, unlike some people that I know.
What I do know, however, is that I went through this horrible feeling of things that would happen to me in middle school. I recall laughter, and people would never be laughing with me, as I had always hoped; but they would be laughing at me, and poking fun at me, and throwing things at me and I remember asking them to politely to please stop and they wouldn’t. They had no reason to do any of this to me—I know that they didn’t. I begged them to stop. I literally prayed to God that they would stop. And I began to grow cynical. Suddenly, I didn’t really like people as much as I used to. This happened at SF. It hurts the most when you ask them to stop, multiple times, and they do not relent.
This is what I do not miss about middle school. This is also what I do not miss about my freshman and sophomore years of high school, because I wasted my life. When I look at other people who went through so many fun social escapades and experiments and realize that I had close to none of them, I conclude that I really did waste myself for so long. I wasted so much of my life, I could hurt myself.
But it’s in the past now. Mostly.
--
Let’s go back to singing. I believe I finally know why I’ve kept with it for so long. I’ve kept with it for three primary reasons.
The first reason is the social experience. I’ll admit, I’ve made probably at least half of my friends through singing in school choirs. I also like meeting with people in the audience and hearing them chatter on about how wonderful the concert was, or how nice everyone looked onstage, or anything else they have to comment on the performance. I enjoy singing in front of people. I enjoy receiving feedback on my singing, whether it be praise or constructive criticism or what have you. Being in the same choral group for so many years in like being in a giant, dysfunctional family—at least outside of performance.
And it sort of melds into the second reason: I’ve never, ever felt too close to people. I don’t have that social adeptness that a lot of my other friends seem to have. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s that I simply cannot do it. And I can say that not everyone in the chamber choir talks to me, but that’s okay. It’s all right with me because, when we all sing together in perfect harmony and the sonorous music begins to emanate from us as a whole—as one big group and not just a bunch of ragtag choristers with different personality traits—I feel truly close to them. Finally, I feel like a part of something. I feel as one with a group. It’s what keeps me striding along. I walk by everyone else, smile, greet them, they greet me, and we begin practicing. It sounds silly, but I get teary-eyed sometimes, because I love the feeling. I love feeling it. I live for it.
The final** reason traces back to elementary school—back to where the teasing first started. One thing that the kids would tease me about was my voice. They taunted me for having weird hair and a lower voice than a lot of the other girls had; my voice really was lower back then, and it was odd. I couldn’t do the high-pitching squeals that other girls could. Children would call me a guy. They told me I looked and sounded like a male.
This angered me, obviously. This was why I acted so bitter towards everyone else. My parents—my dad, especially—hated the way I acted towards people and it bothered me. I began to rethink my entire personality. My dad told me I was a bad person and would keep calling me by my mom’s name. He scolded me constantly and hit me on the head every time I said something bad. He told me over and over that I was the product of the devil. Finally, my brain rewired. I became polite and quiet and still had no friends, and my self-confidence was practically nonexistent by this point.
I know now why I joined the school chorus in fourth grade. Singing and exercising my voice every day before school made it more flexible. I was finally able to squeal and squeak and do a lot of those other weird little sound effects that girls could do with their voices—and there was more to it, too. My lower voice finally had a purpose.
See, when you’re in a typical choir nowadays, normally you’ll have the director or someone else stress upon the issue that there are more sopranos than there are altos, making the lower voices more in-demand. Well, the directors probably won’t say it themselves—at least mine never does—but you can tell when they need altos. My choir teacher always told me, “Your low notes are so beautiful :D” and I used to grow a little annoyed at being shoved into alto all the time because, let’s face it, being an alto in middle school was boring. They always got the parts that stayed in one place or didn’t move at all whilst the sopranos and the mezzo-sopranos got all of the pretty melodies and the fun pitches that jumped around all over the place—and I should know, because I was a soprano at one time. And yet, what I didn’t know was that it changes when you get into more complex pieces. I was an idiot middle schooler, you know.
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The last day of eighth grade was one of those days. We were signing yearbooks and I was signing the yearbook of this girl named Lauren. She was off somewhere mingling with her friends and so I took the time to read through some of the signatures that she had. It made me sort of jealous, you know… I had not many friends, save for my new best friend Danielle and whomever else she helped me to meet, and that was about it. There was one thing, however, that truly perturbed me a little.
One of the home ec teachers, who I made sure to say hi to every day, wrote something to this effect in my yearbook:
“I like seeing your smiling face in the hallway every day! I hope you have a great summer, and good luck in high school!”
This same teacher wrote this in Lauren’s yearbook, and it wasn’t all she wrote; this is the only part I can remember:
“Lauren,
I really do think you have a lot of potential, you know”
I stopped there. Immediately I felt the envy being to sprout into my sub-conscious again. It was vague at first, and I didn’t think much of it, but the important part is that it was still there, and I still felt it. I wanted a teacher to tell me, someday, that I had potential. I wanted someone to tell me that I had the potential for something. I wanted it. I wanted so badly to be special too, like everyone else.
Last year, in early September, it finally did happen. And it was my choir director who told me.
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I went on a college visit yesterday. That’s probably all I’ll say for now, since I didn’t write this post to describe my senior year insecurities—I’ll save those for another time. Right now, I just wanted to make it clear that I really do hunger for relationships for other people. Annually I get crushes on at least one person I sing with, and I can just never get that close to them, and it just… sucks. There’s usually something else in the way aside from my social ineptness, too. Freshman year it was Morgan, and he already had a girlfriend (and eventually I had a boyfriend); sophomore year it was Dylan, and I discovered later that he was homosexual; last year it was Silvia, and… that is a story I’ve already told; and this year… it may, may, may be another girl again.***
And I’m sort of ashamed to reveal who it is. <___<
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Closing for now. I needed to let this out. It really feels good too, and I hope it doesn’t sound too depressing. I actually go back on a lot of this now and laugh at it. It’s just kind of funny after all of that, you know? High school is so much more fun than middle school was. I say this with fervent passion.
... I hope I get to go to the doctor's soon <_< I've had a lot of weird health things lately
and delirium
****
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*(Unfortunately my best friend wasn’t there to sing with us; she was out of town with a girl she hated the most.)
**(I typo’d that as ‘fine’ before I read through this again :D)
***(For those of you who read TVTropes, think of ‘Foe Yay’ <____< That’s the only hint I’ll give out, mhmhm)
****(In eight days, it’ll be my two-year anniversary of joining the CARA :D)"
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