The Sustenance of Arts
Can you hear the silence?
Can you see the dark?
Can you fix the broken?
Can you feel my heart?
(Can you feel my heart, BMTH)
Headphones on. Volume up. Ignore the world. Music is one of my greatest escapes. As someone who lives with depression and generalized anxiety, music has had an extremely personal connection to my everyday life. For years I struggled to find something to make me feel less alone, to find someone, something that understood how I felt inside and when I finally discovered the bands and genres that I listen to today my life was changed. Music is extremely personal. It has the ability to capture any emotion and to change what you’re feeling in the beat of just one note. Nothing has that sort of power. I was in a very dark place for a long time. I was trapped in myself; angry and in the simplest of terms, sad, were my two permanent emotions and I couldn’t find a way to get out. Then I found Bring Me the Horizon. Never had I heard anything so raw, so honest in its pain, so fluent in this language that I could feel reverberating through every part of me. From there I began to explore more bands that were similar and branched out to other genres that were along the same lines; I became more and more invested with every song I blasted. I never stopped being sad, that’s not how this works, but instead I began to find a place to filter my pain. “I may look happy but honestly dear, the only way I’ll really smile is if you cut me ear to ear” (Chelsea Smile, BMTH) When I was down all I needed to do was slip my headphones in and I would be captured in a place where I was understood. Then music began to impact the way I dressed, the way I acted; I began to emerge from my head and let people finally see who I was and once they did I was completely unashamed of the person they saw. Music pushed me to be the person I wanted to be and gave me the power I needed to do it. It gave me fuel for the words in my head and inspired me to start writing. Music encourages the emotion and writing expels it in a way that doesn’t hurt me; it consumed me in a release similar to the way I had previously used self harm and though it never fully cancelled it out, it made an impact. “once I discovered Dvorak’s cello concerto, I turned to it again and again through my travels to suspend the desperation clutching at my gut. Work and music sustained me for a long time.” (180) Like Saul, there is not much in my life that can sustain me. Because of my depression, I am often emotionally detached and struggle to find things that make my life seem worth it but music changes that. Music has the ability to take everything I have bottled up inside and unleash it so that even I can finally understand how I feel. I can honestly say music is one of the only reasons I am alive today and that I am able to even talk about my mental health. Music sustains me in a way that nothing will ever be able to match. I will never be able to fully describe how closely entangled my emotions in those masses of notes and though I don’t understand it, I don’t need to.
Music made me believe that I could finally live again.
Can you see the dark?
Can you fix the broken?
Can you feel my heart?
(Can you feel my heart, BMTH)
Headphones on. Volume up. Ignore the world. Music is one of my greatest escapes. As someone who lives with depression and generalized anxiety, music has had an extremely personal connection to my everyday life. For years I struggled to find something to make me feel less alone, to find someone, something that understood how I felt inside and when I finally discovered the bands and genres that I listen to today my life was changed. Music is extremely personal. It has the ability to capture any emotion and to change what you’re feeling in the beat of just one note. Nothing has that sort of power. I was in a very dark place for a long time. I was trapped in myself; angry and in the simplest of terms, sad, were my two permanent emotions and I couldn’t find a way to get out. Then I found Bring Me the Horizon. Never had I heard anything so raw, so honest in its pain, so fluent in this language that I could feel reverberating through every part of me. From there I began to explore more bands that were similar and branched out to other genres that were along the same lines; I became more and more invested with every song I blasted. I never stopped being sad, that’s not how this works, but instead I began to find a place to filter my pain. “I may look happy but honestly dear, the only way I’ll really smile is if you cut me ear to ear” (Chelsea Smile, BMTH) When I was down all I needed to do was slip my headphones in and I would be captured in a place where I was understood. Then music began to impact the way I dressed, the way I acted; I began to emerge from my head and let people finally see who I was and once they did I was completely unashamed of the person they saw. Music pushed me to be the person I wanted to be and gave me the power I needed to do it. It gave me fuel for the words in my head and inspired me to start writing. Music encourages the emotion and writing expels it in a way that doesn’t hurt me; it consumed me in a release similar to the way I had previously used self harm and though it never fully cancelled it out, it made an impact. “once I discovered Dvorak’s cello concerto, I turned to it again and again through my travels to suspend the desperation clutching at my gut. Work and music sustained me for a long time.” (180) Like Saul, there is not much in my life that can sustain me. Because of my depression, I am often emotionally detached and struggle to find things that make my life seem worth it but music changes that. Music has the ability to take everything I have bottled up inside and unleash it so that even I can finally understand how I feel. I can honestly say music is one of the only reasons I am alive today and that I am able to even talk about my mental health. Music sustains me in a way that nothing will ever be able to match. I will never be able to fully describe how closely entangled my emotions in those masses of notes and though I don’t understand it, I don’t need to.
Music made me believe that I could finally live again.
The New Shame; a genocide of First Nation Culture
“it wasn’t a yearning for new geography that drove me - it was my tiredness of the old. The bush ceased to be a haven. A vacant feeling sat where the beginnings of my history had once been. That part of myself was a tale long dead, one that held nothing for me.” (177). Such a statement was almost unheard of in the old ways of indigenous people. The connection they have to their land, their reliance they have on the earth, and the bond that ties the people with the natural world and their past is what essentially makes up most First Nation ways of life. The fact that anyone who lives as an indigenous person could feel this way is devastating but, unfortunately, very understandable. Of course there is the very obvious example of the Residential Schools. An almost complete obliteration of a culture. Being forced to feel ashamed and having it forcefully removed from your person and mind would be enough to destroy any pride or love associated with the past. For many First Nation peoples, instead of having love and peace in their minds as they consider the old, many people now can only think of extreme pain. Often described as the ‘Canadian Holocaust’ there is honestly no better way to put it and coming from a country often named the ‘peace keepers’ this is truly abhorrent. The Residential Schools, though they are the most well known situation of First Nation discrimination, was not the first and began a long list of problems following soon after. Many people now find themselves fighting to keep their sacred land from being developed; examples of such could be found in the Oka and Ipperwash Crisis’. There are probably much more injustices that are not mentioned, due to the extreme minorities that indigenous people are facing now! The racism can be found in our sports teams, some ordinary logos and even in some children’s films or cartoons yet barely anything is ever said and even if it is, almost always nothing is done so I ask, why wouldn’t Saul and other Indigenous people feel ashamed/ attempting to separate themselves from their culture? It has been destroyed and corrupted by outsiders. It has been made into a joke and the First Nation peoples are the punchline. The past that had once been used a source of massive pride has been placed into a category of a murderous mistake yet still, many people are unaware or just don’t care. Though some things are only now being done to protect the First Nations people and try to make up for the extreme tragedies that were caused it will probably never be enough. Due to the severe lack of practicing indigenous people they will almost never have a voice strong enough for anyone to hear, and unless some group of people decide to add their voices to the cause it will stay that way. Separating themselves from their old culture seems to be the only way to escape the pain that was caused and that truly is heartbreaking because such a beautiful calming way of life will be almost gone. How can we call ourselves ‘equal’ if a cultural genocide came and went without a whisper?
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