I'm Not Dead Yet
Hello! I’m back from the grave to once again kill the mood (one of my favorite party tricks).
I’ve been trying to write this post for five months or, really, two years and five months if you take my abandoned draft from January 6th, 2021 into account. (Three guesses as to why I stopped writing in the middle of it.) I don’t journal, so my lyric notebook, blog drafts, and faulty memory are really the only insights into my psyche at the time.
2021 Melanie was overly optimistic, not just because she didn’t anticipate an insurrection taking place within the next twenty minutes. The last two years have been a chaotic mix of joy and despair, laughter and tears, love and hope and devastation. In many ways, I’ve been extremely lucky; but, if I’m being completely honest (which I endeavor to be), the bad slightly outweighed the good. I know this is the internet in 2023 and I’m supposed to post some optimistic bullshit, but a lot of shit sucked. And I didn’t post about it because it was the internet in 2021-22.
So where have I been? What am I bitching into the void about today?
Way too much of my energy for the last three years has gone into learning how my post-covid body works and trying to haul myself out of the resulting blackhole of depression. I started 2020 a healthy, rock-climbing, 5K-running 28-year-old and I’m almost halfway through 2023 as a an asthmatic 31-year-old who can wind up in a health crisis over a sinus infection.
It’s been a painful learning curve, both in the sense that asthma is surprisingly painful and the emotional sense. It took two years, a comical amount of medication, surgery, and discovering I’m actually pretty allergic to eggs (guess who spent the pandemic up to that point getting stoned and hand-whipping meringue?) to even begin to get my new asthma under control.
That process involved navigating - or, more accurately, battling - the American healthcare system to the point that I filed and won a complaint with my state’s insurance regulator all while being exhausted from being in a constant flare-up. Asthma is also pretty tiring.
In the meantime, I couldn’t sing. I tried - I did Twitch for a while until it started giving me anxiety attacks and even tried rehearsing with my band again - but it would lead to me spending days sick, falling asleep at my computer while trying to work. Music has always been my catharsis and, without it, I got depressed; and, once I got depressed enough, the art went too. It took months of wallowing and self-medicating to admit how deep in that hole I was and, in hindsight, I was in way worse shape mentally than I realized even when I was willing to admit that I wasn’t ok.
Some time in 2021, I reached a point where I accepted that I would never sing professionally again, which does sound like depression talk but was actually an improvement over constantly being in crisis. Sometimes hope hurts too much, especially when the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be receding into the distance.
Of course, I couldn’t really discuss this with anyone because the people who love me as an artist or just a human-being would offer well intentioned suggestions and tell me not to give up, and I would have to explain my whole health situation again to people who meant well but were unintentionally reopening fresh scars. I stopped posting things or even checking my social media. I stopped seeing friends. I crawled a little deeper into my hole.
It took waking up in the middle of the night not breathing for me to decide I needed a better standard of living, regardless of whether or not I would ever play music again. This sent me down the long, winding road to sinus surgery and allergy testing. And it helped - immensely - but it took hitting one of the absolute lowest moments of my life for me to muster up the courage to face the healthcare system again.
The month I turned thirty, I scheduled my surgery (which also involved removing a previously undiagnosed cyst from my eye socket that is likely the cause of my lazy eye), found out I was allergic to eggs, and got diagnosed with ADHD. It felt like I knew nothing about myself at an age were I was supposed to be more secure in who I was than ever. But it also felt like I’d been handed a whole basket of answers I never thought I would find.
I’m still not 100%. I’m never going to be 100% again. And that’s OK. When I turned thirty-one, I felt kind of shit that I had had all these answers for a year and still hadn’t found solutions. But some things don’t have a solution and some solutions don’t fit neatly into the timeline of one year. Some things just end, and it’s ok. Nothing and no one lives forever; even mountains eventually wash away.
This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on art and music, but it does mean I have to re-dream my life in a way that I haven’t been ready to do until now. The last few years have proven to me that music and art have a gravitational pull that I can’t escape. They will always be core to my identity and, hopefully, my way of making a living. My day job involves sync licensing and I love it; it’s the dream job I didn’t know I wanted. I started writing fan fiction for the first time since high school (no, I will never share it), which spiraled into an idea for a graphic novel that I’ve been chipping away at for the last several months. And I played my first show since 2020 at Fertile Ground Gathering and it was life changing.
FGG has big magic, the kind that finds broken people and holds them in community. And they found me - first, when I had just left an emotionally abusive relationship and again when I was (am) lost in the wilderness of a future that is nothing like the one I planned. I went to the festival expecting - intending - to be broken open, and I was. But I was also put back together in ways I didn’t expect.
During my prep for the event, I went back through my old lyrics for songs I avoided playing because they weren’t “exciting” enough for a Nashville stage. I came across one that I’ve definitely rehearsed with a band but never played out called “Miss the Ground.” I wrote it four days before leaving my toxic ex (because I’ve never been in touch with my emotions and song-wrote myself out of that relationship long before I actually blurted out “we should break up” seemingly out of nowhere). At the time, it was about finally noticing how constricting the cage I lived in was - and a cheeky way to adapt one of my favorite quotes from Life, The Universe, and Everything. Reading the lyrics now, it feels more like some bizarre prescience I didn’t know I was channelling:
Somewhere between the urge to run and the urge to go numb is the desperate urge to be free
Somewhere between the lines that I’ve drawn and the blank page beyond is the need to go out and see
I was always a flight risk
A jumper on the ledge now I’m toeing the edge
I’m diving head first into the blue
Nothing but sky on the soles of my shoes
You say I’ve got myself all turned around
But flying’s just falling ’til you miss the ground
Somewhere between the comfort of home and the fearful unknown is the person I’m going to be
Lost in the woods but the strangeness feels good trading should be for could and living on pure belief
I’m definitely recording this one at some point, as well as a few others that I thought were too touchy-feely but were well received at FGG. I’m still lost in the woods, still toeing the edge; but the jump is looking less scary (and the ledge was gotten much narrower since 2020). I’m finally comfortable saying fuck my branding, fuck my “sound,” fuck who I’m supposed to be; my brand is going to be the naked honesty that I have so badly needed but refused to offer, even to myself. Anything else is just a new cage to build around myself.
So look forward to art and music from me (if that’s something you look forward to). Just know that the pace will be different. The sound, the format, all of it is going to have to be reimagined. There’s going to be experimentation and false starts and mistakes, because I’m human and only psychic in retrospect.
But I’m not dead yet. I think I might even go for a walk.