Heart as hard as nails

The snow is melting now, and it is revealing its secrets, all the discarded wrappers and cigarettes and dog shit that it protected like wayward children throughout the season. All disgusting and terrible things held without judgement. The snow is melting, and I am thinking about hope because I think I have to if I want to survive.

I’m fighting a battle that so many of us are, immense waves of depression and anxiety that I have known all my life, which feel particularly amplified at the moment. I’m fine, I promise I’m fine, but I’m also waking up every day thinking about very specific Jason Molina lyrics, which might be a cry for help but is maybe a sign that I am fighting to feel better.

I made my heart as hard as nails, that may be the way you live your life, but it's almost got me killed

This new depression I’m stuck in has affected my ability to write, even though I have written hundreds and thousands of words since it settled in. It’s just that I hate each and every one of them, and it’s only that they are all the words I know, and we are stuck in an endless battle together. I am looking for new words to call the battle a draw, in hope that we might begrudgingly move on without a clear winner.

I’m thinking about the taxonomy of sad songs a lot lately, which I have written about before, and I am choosing to do so again because it feels appropriate. I worry that we have let Sad Song mean too many things, that it’s too easy a phrase to describe such a deep well, and it’s time to find new words for the walls we hit on the way down.

When I was a kid, my dad made mixtapes to play softly in the background while my parents and their friends drank coffee and ate freshly baked desserts, and it was hearing the tapes he made that I first heard Sade and thought about beauty. The soaring tones of her voice, hanging low in the air like the perfect memory of cigarettes smoked in bars that have long since closed. A voice like a candle burning wax to the table, that tells stories of lovers and lovers lost. There is sadness in much of Sade’s work, but it is more than that. It is alarming and beautiful and built of so much hope and desire. It is sad only because she has loved, and sometimes lost, as with “Like a Tattoo”, which shares of scars left on the body that carry the shame and burden of the past within them. The promise of Sade is that you can feel everything, and it will hurt you sometimes, but you will love and remember how, and live to tell of how beautiful it was to be scarred so deep. How silken and laden with honey the timbre’s of sadness can be.

I’ve been to the doctor a few times lately because my health is also in an unknown place, and we are doing blood work to test against the other blood work. Sometimes, medicine works like something close to witchcraft, and we are waiting to hear what the blood will tell of the body. My chronic pain is flared, and the young doctor shadowing my regular physician asked me the one question no doctor has ever asked me so plainly: “this pain that you feel, do you want it to get better?”

Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I want it to feel bad, to wallow in all the terrible feelings of a life. On the walk to the subway and back again, I played Craig Finn’s “God In Chicago”, which I spoke about with John Moe when I was a guest on his excellent podcast Depresh Mode. I love when a song knows its only job is to tell a story, and strips the pretence away. Largely spoken and not sung, it’s a story of an untimely death, a hidden stash, and young lovers finding themselves and each other in the murky chaos of loss. It’s at once deliriously sad, and marvellously beautiful. As it comes to a close, and the young woman at the heart of the story has finally felt the weight of everything and started to break down, I do too, and I often wear sunglasses on grey days so no one can see I am crying.

These are all sad songs, the same as “North Star”, the Jason Molina song I have floating in my head when I wake up, but they are each different. Genre and form and function all separate them, and they are unique to each other. Each of them bricks that build the well to hold all our tears and cast off desires. Each of them serves a different purpose, that would not always work to the same end. Some that beg for hope in dark days, and some that are wistful, and others that are simply here for wallowing.

The snow has come back now, just a little, and I am trying to fight the defeat I feel watching it fall, as snow might be the most hopeful thing that falls to earth, which I say as no stranger to plummeting. I have fallen from great heights before, including the time I fell off a roof and another when I fell off the top of a 6’ ladder, which toppled over sideways and graciously provided a surface for me to strike my head upon when my body came to rest on the ground. It is one of a small handful of very real near-death experiences I have and hold in my heart. But I am not snow, although I would like to be. Each flake of it a unique and special thing, a body so small and insignificant that only becomes something more when joined in community. Alone, snow is nothing, but together it holds on, it lingers and gathers secrets, it can be shaped and shovelled, and it can become anything at all. And it will go someday, as we will all go someday, but for now it and us are still here, and I am choosing to use the falling snow as a word for hope.