Written a year ago, and recently uncovered
Art Through the Dark
I’ve been volunteering lately with the charity Nami Davidson (National Alliance for Mental Health) here in Nashville and wanted to share a little bit about my story and why work like this hits close to home.
We all deal with something in our lives. In fact we will all be dealing with ‘somethings’ forever. Whether it comes in the form of anxiety or depression, aspergers or schizophrenia, poverty or systemic injustice, heartbreak, sorrow, death, loss, lies, deceit, or just not understanding why we can’t ever seem to be content with the seemingly random and unfair cycle of life and the cards we’re dealt.
My story began when I was very young. I had parents who weren’t American and had spent most of their lives traveling and developing a sense of the world. I was born in Hong Kong and somehow with all of that ended up growing up (the first 10 years of my life) in a middle upper class suburb in Massachusetts. Life there wasn’t real and I can only imagine it still isn’t. Their way of dealing with a homeless population was to put them into a police car and drive them to the next town over, dropping them off as though they were a bag of trash on the highway. I grew up detesting a lot of the authority figures in my life. I refused to say the pledge of allegiance in school (yes that was still a thing when I was a kid). I refused to accept anything I was told (and still do). I was a thinker and for all the benefits that can bring, it can be an absolute curse in a world that cherishes and rewards surface level conversations and lowest common denominator connections. This was and still is at the root of a huge amount of the anxiety I deal with on a daily basis.
Most of the people I encountered saw life as a riddle. A game they were trying to figure out. The end result of that game was to get all the money…or all the fame… or all the some other distraction. And yet as a child all I could do was over analyze everything I heard or saw, good and bad. That overanalyzing led to life long anxiety and depression that I’ve never been able to completely shake.
I was also surrounded by a lot of addiction my entire life and witnessed people close to me fighting demons that seemed unnecessary for a child to have to deal with. That left me in a place where I spent a lot of time alone trying to understand how all these people I grew up thinking were ‘perfect’ were so very flawed.
When I was younger I would tell myself that as I grew up these things would change. That my innate anxiety and depressive tendencies stemmed from a simple lack of knowledge. So I yearned to learn and travel. I pursued my dreams, travelled the world, read books, met people of every walk of life. I lived in absolute squaller and incredible mansions. Every year, month, day and minute of my life was a constantly changing journey to calm these emotions that appeared to rule my life. At times I thought it was working, until I realized that all of that was a bi product of the real solution which was the catharsis I found through art.
So what is the point in a story if it doesn’t apply some thought to a solution. That was where music came in. All through my life people, both in a personal and professional sense, were worried about my mental state. I was always away in the clouds. I thought about every little thing until there was no detail left to discuss. I was never content, but then who is? And none of this has changed to this day. I’ve just figured out how to better deal with it. From the age that I could hold a pencil or press a key on a piano, I understood that music was the color to life. It was an untouchable transcendent energy that could bring change to peoples lives, myself included. I also began to understand the beauty in words. Writing down your thoughts in a journal, as cliched as that sounds, became a way to feel like the bad experiences in your life weren’t a waste. I realized that when I’m gone these thoughts and experiences don’t just evaporate.
In order to get past the idea that we don’t matter, it’s important to find a way to feel like you can create a positive out of the negative; that what comes out of your experiences holds longevity. To take the utter crap we all deal with on a daily basis and turn it into something that will improve someone elses life, either right then or years down the line. That’s how I deal with anxiety and depression.
I’m not writing about this to gain any pity or praise, because I’m extremely lucky and grateful to have found a passion/vocation so early in life that literally gave me a sustainable way to calm the demons in my head. From it I’ve put out a lot of music that I’m extremely proud of and every week receive messages from people who say one song or another has impacted their lives in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone down this road.
So what’s the point? The point is that most artists deal with mental discrepancies that cause us to gravitate to art in the first place. That’s the math behind when people talk about “real” versus “fabricated” art. If you are a young person dealing with this feeling of hopelessness, just remember you aren’t the only one. You’re vocation is out there and whether or not you have found the passion that drives you, it’s out there. All those horrible experiences aren’t a waste. If nobody ever turned hardship into positivity then we would have no Ghandis or Martin Luther Kings. The world would be a vicious spiral. Just have an awareness that passion is what keeps things rolling so be open to finding yours and be willing to work every day to create something that’s bigger than you, more important than you, and transcends the measly amount of time we spend on this earth.
K