{"id":125140,"date":"2018-05-09T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125140"},"modified":"2018-05-09T11:00:21","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T15:00:21","slug":"this-feels-like-never-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/09\/this-feels-like-never-ending\/","title":{"rendered":"This Feels Like Never-Ending"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Dillinger Escape Plan in concert. Photo: Stefan Raduta.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

And I was every question that never had an answer
\nI see right through you
\nAnd never even noticed that there always was a reason
\nThat we were never meant to be left alone.
\n<\/em>\u2014The Dillinger Escape Plan, \u201cMilk Lizard\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. \u201cLow Feels Blvd\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am not what you picture when you think of a metalhead; I have no tattoos, no wide ear gauges, no long hair with which to head bang. There are teenagers who are twice as metal as I will ever be. But I do listen to metal\u2014have done so for years\u2014on both the brightest days and the grayest. I do have a pierced septum; it\u2019s relatively new and more an accessorized front. And I do want a tattoo, though I\u2019ve only committed to the temporary kind. However, skin accessories and a darkly monochromatic wardrobe do not alone a metalhead make. One might assume this crowd to be full of fearless counterculture anarchists who give zero fucks about what anyone thinks. I am not so confident. I am afraid of letting people get too close because I don\u2019t trust others to understand me on a basic emotional level; I rarely trust my own judgment in the myriad of easy and difficult situations that daily life presents; and what little remaining self-esteem I have lies buried beneath a high-rise of self-hatred that manifests in destructive impulses\u2014all of which leads me, on the worst days, to wish I weren\u2019t alive. In other words, I live with major depression.<\/p>\n

What does my depression look like?<\/p>\n

More often than not, I sleep too late; I\u2019m sad and angry at myself for sleeping in; my whole day is thrown off course. With no established routine or foundation, I become sadder and angrier. Hopelessness sets in like quick-dry cement. Feeling all but ruined, I just want to go back to sleep. Instead of pulling myself out of my emotional quagmire through self-care, I feel paralyzed. I sleep more. With any notion of a regular schedule long gone, once I\u2019m finally awake, I recount every single way I\u2019ve failed myself. Tomorrow feels so impossible I don\u2019t even want to think about it. Then all this repeats the following morning because I\u2019ve stayed up too late worrying about what I cannot control. When this becomes the norm, I tell myself that I simply want to disappear. This is, somehow, the best answer. I know that\u2019s not healthy to think, but I’m still searching for what is healthy. What could make me want to stay here through today\u2019s sadness, loneliness, and pain?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent more of my thirty-four years on antidepressants than years off them. Far more. I\u2019ve taken Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil, Effexor, Prozac, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Ritalin, Adderall, Abilify, Zyprexa, BuSpar, and even St.-John\u2019s-wort. Yet I\u2019m not entirely sure any of them ever truly worked<\/em>. Some did keep me out of the subbasement of rampant desperation. But they didn\u2019t enliven me in any meaningful way; they allowed me to minimally survive each day without really having a clear objective why or an excitement for doing so. On most of these medications, I didn\u2019t exactly feel bad, but I didn\u2019t feel good either, which feels like its own version of an inescapable failure to endure, let alone look forward to tomorrow.<\/p>\n

I currently take two antidepressant and two antianxiety prescriptions. I worry I\u2019ll be on these for the next thirty-four years. And I worry they won\u2019t be enough. As David A. Karp writes in Is It Me or My Meds?: Living with Antidepressants<\/em>,\u00a0\u201cYou hope [through medication] to get to a healthy place, but you\u2019re not sure where it is, whether you\u2019ll ever arrive, and even whether that destination exists for you.\u201d When I tell someone I\u2019m depressed, I too often get the response, I\u2019m sorry; I know how you feel. I don\u2019t trust this. The gesture comes across as kind, but it rings empty. This emptiness begets, in me, more emptiness. I begin to believe I\u2019m the only one who feels this way. Similarly, William Styron<\/a>, who chronicles his own battle with depression in Darkness Visible, <\/em>writes, \u201cA sense of self-hatred\u2014or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem\u2014is one of the most universally experienced symptoms.\u201d When self-esteem is replaced by self-hatred, language begins to fail the depressed person. For much of my life, I did not know the right words of wanting; I knew only the names of pharmaceutical solutions and their milligram dosages.<\/p>\n

Chris Cornell, the lead singer of the grunge-metal band Soundgarden, committed suicide on May 18 last year while on tour. His wife,\u00a0Vicky Cornell, published a letter to her late husband. She writes, \u201cI\u2019m sorry you were alone, and I know that was not you, my sweet Christopher.<\/em>\u201d Of all the heartbreaking lines in her letter, this one hurts the most. She recognizes how depression misleads one to make remote islands of us all. In the throes of similar melancholia and aversion, I forget all the things that make me me<\/em>. When I forget those, what is left?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. \u201cSymptom of Terminal Illness\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I never listened to Soundgarden. They\u2019re a hugely influential band that came to represent a particular sound and scene unique to Seattle in the early nineties, but they weren\u2019t a formative group that spoke to my inner teenage angst. In late high school\u2014when my depression felt more and more like an extricable part of me\u2014I would go watch local hardcore bands play across the river in an old porn cinema. I still remember the sheer abandon of attending such shows. But I was shy, cheap, and dedicated to school, so I didn\u2019t pursue it. I ignored those concerts\u2019 aural charges and cathartic releases because I didn\u2019t yet know the questions this kind of music answered in me. Nor did I know how desperately I wanted those answers.<\/p>\n

On May 19, 2017, when I drove by the Fillmore Theater in Denver and the venue\u2019s marquis simply read, RIP CHRIS<\/small>, I did not know who Chris was. His death was sad, but any kind of mourning would have been performative rather than genuine. (Same goes for the more recent suicide of Linkin Park\u2019s lead singer, Chester Bennington, a friend of Cornell\u2019s.)<\/p>\n

The New Jersey mathcore band the Dillinger Escape Plan (DEP) were opening for Soundgarden on their tour, and both bands were slated to soon play Denver. DEP had made it very clear that, after twenty years, this was their farewell tour. They also planned to play a small Denver show alone. I already had a ticket to this smaller venue, a Colfax pub called Streets of London with a six-inch-high stage no wider than a grand piano.<\/p>\n

On May 19, DEP tweeted a picture of a young Cornell. The caption read, \u201cWe love you and have been immensely affected like no other death has affected us\u2026\u2009\u201d That same day, the band later tweeted, \u201cDenver. Three days in a row now. Tiny tiny tiny spot. Possible really bad idea. Place may not be standing on the 25th. Apologies to the owners.\u201d<\/p>\n

I attended all three nights.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou look like you needed that,\u201d my neighbor said upon seeing me return from one. He couldn\u2019t have been more correct.<\/p>\n

Before these concerts, I was planning on moving away from Denver (but had no idea where), quitting teaching, and even changing medications for something more powerful. Commercials for antidepressants kept cycling through my mind\u2014images of bright green fields, mostly cloudless skies, and lots of smiling people gently touching each other. My depression had settled in for the long haul. I wanted big changes.<\/p>\n

Here is where a writer would usually include a David Foster Wallace quote about suicide, one in which Wallace compares the suicidal person to a person trapped in a burning high-rise: \u201cWhen the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.\u201d But I didn\u2019t feel as if I were in a high-rise. I was safely on the ground, searching for something I could love in myself. When I couldn\u2019t find it, I wanted to disappear out of sheer disappointment.<\/p>\n

In my experience of living with major depression, I\u2019ve never dipped so low as to attempt suicide. It\u2019s always been more of a what-if than a logical exit. What would happen if I did <\/em>step out in front of the 15 bus? I veer up to the dangerous edge of the hypothetical so I can return from it feeling a little more in control. Metal, in my opinion, does a vicarious job of leading me to that same edge, sonically instead of hypothetically.<\/p>\n

On a reptile-brain level, listening to metal feels better to me than the best sex, the best drugs, or the best memories of childhood, that time before the word depression<\/em> became one of my defining characteristics. When I play metal vinyls at home, alone, I fight the urge to crank the volume, scale the furniture, and scream at the ceiling tiles. When I attend metal shows, I\u2019m the one down in front among the hot press of moshers, crowd-surfers, and hardcore dancers. Every so often, I turn around. That way, I see I\u2019m not the only one totally reveling in a double-bass-pedal breakdown or the climactic chorus of, \u201cThis feels like never-ending!\u201d If I don\u2019t leave the venue with my eardrums ringing and my T-shirt dripping with the sweat of strangers, then I haven\u2019t experienced the outlet the band is providing. The sheer physical deliverance of a metal crowd is heightened by the music, which gives voice to the desire to confront the very mortality our bodies represent.<\/p>\n

Through raw and existential lyricism, metal embraces the finitude of life while simultaneously wishing for its infinity. My vinyl collection includes metal acts with names such as the Bled, Every Time I Die, and Between the Buried and Me. This music turns introspection inside out without regressing into maudlin self-help clich\u00e9s like, The best way out is always through. Better to use a DEP lyric: \u201cYour heart was trying to bleed, and you\u2019re taking the right road if you\u2019re talking to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

At its core, metal doesn\u2019t offer a solution to dying; it instead asks: If we are here for only a short while, why should we suffer alone, confused, and scared? For a depressed person like me, this empathic reach means far more than the patronizing \u201cI know how you feel.\u201d It\u2019s a transmission of willpower that says I can\u2014and should\u2014make it through to the next day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. \u201cUnderstanding Decay\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can remember feeling so depressed that I would just drive and drive and drive, and then I\u2019d park somewhere and cry for reasons I couldn\u2019t explain.<\/p>\n

I can remember not eating for three straight days, preferring substance abuse to food.<\/p>\n

I can remember biking to the nearest graveyard with a bottle of Jose Cuervo Black in my bag and then proceeding to drink as much as I could before I threw up behind a headstone.<\/p>\n

The medication I take now still falters. Depression saps me of any active desire. And yet metal lifts me out. It\u2019s rare, in my experience, to know the desire and <\/em>to have the means to fulfill it. It gives perpetual purpose to living. This music isn\u2019t a temporary reprieve. There\u2019s no withdrawal, no separation anxiety, no psychiatrist\u2019s signature required. Listening to metal, I think of all the other people listening to it: \u201cWe were never meant to be left alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Darkness Visible<\/em>, Styron, upon hearing Brahms\u2019s Alto Rhapsody<\/em>, writes, \u201cThis sound, which like all music\u2014indeed, like all pleasure \u2026 pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all [my] joys.\u201d To pierce their hearts and think of their joys, most don\u2019t choose metal. Yet perhaps that\u2019s what makes it all the more invigorating for me. By drawing on the power of a personal craving, I retake control. I can decide. I can decide to be myself.<\/p>\n

Taking one\u2019s own life is the last desperate act of agency. When one believes there is no answer, suicide becomes the only answer.<\/p>\n

The Scottish writer John Burnside writes in his poem \u201cTaxonomy\u201d: \u201cThere is something we love in ourselves that a meadow answers.\u201d\u00a0The meadow, for me, is metal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4. \u201cSetting Fire to Sleeping Giants\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the second song on the second night of DEP\u2019s three-night Denver stand, I was in the front row. Everyone lifted the lead guitarist into the air. He kicked down several ceiling panels and then hung from the rafters by his legs\u2014and throughout, he kept playing the song. This was a typical night with DEP. The goal wasn\u2019t total anarchy or heightened anger. What they created was a collective atomic release. Even the band\u2019s name contains the phrase escape plan<\/em>. Metal\u2019s urges are founded in a desire for immediate connection (\u201cI gave you everything you wanted \/ You were everything to me\u201d) and the way those connections grow out of reach (\u201cI\u2019m frightened in sleep, thinking my world will be gone \/ Promise me I won\u2019t die\u201d). Vicky Cornell writes that her husband was \u201cexcited for life\u201d\u2014that\u2019s the same excitement I\u2019ve long wanted for myself.<\/p>\n

In the wake of Cornell\u2019s suicide, DEP might have canceled its remaining tour dates. But that wouldn\u2019t have been metal<\/em>. Everything this type of music encompasses (catharsis, community, care) reaches deeper into me than any other extended hand\u2014prescription or otherwise. During those three nights, my voice joined two hundred others.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the third concert, DEP played one of my favorite songs, \u201cSunshine the Werewolf.\u201d The lead singer pushed his way into the tight crowd, still screaming the lyrics into the mic while shoving people away. There\u2019s this breakdown in the song where he sings, \u201cDestroyer! There\u2019ll be another just like you. You\u2019re not the only one. I\u2019m not the only one.\u201d I\u2019d pushed my way right up to the singer. He turned to me, held the mic between us, and we yelled these lyrics together. \u201cYou\u2019re not the only one. I\u2019m not the only one.\u201d It was a delicate synaptic bridge, crossed in the sweat and sloshed beer of a strobe-lit mosh pit on a Tuesday night. It opened in me the question I\u2019d so longed to ask without knowing the words: Can I make it to tomorrow? And the answer: Yes. I\u2019ve found something I love in myself, and that makes me want to stay here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alexander Lumans was a 2018 NEA Grant recipient, a Philip Roth Writing Fellow at Bucknell University, and a participant in the Arctic Circle Residency.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  And I was every question that never had an answer I see right through you And never even noticed that there always was a reason That we were never meant to be left alone. \u2014The Dillinger Escape Plan, \u201cMilk Lizard\u201d \u00a0 1. \u201cLow Feels Blvd\u201d I am not what you picture when you think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1487,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[34006,34001,34003,34004,34005,34002,34000,34007,11],"class_list":["post-125140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-alto-rhapsody","tag-chris-cornell","tag-darkness-visible","tag-dep","tag-dillinger-escape-plan","tag-is-it-me-or-my-meds-living-with-antidepressants","tag-soundgarden","tag-sunshine-the-werewolf","tag-william-styron"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThis Feels Like Never-Ending<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I am not what you picture when you think of a metalhead. 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