Being a girl who was known for never finishing anything she started, the stint with Up With People began when I dropped out of college, I dropped out of Up With People when I got sidetracked by a man, and, true to my reputation, it turns out I didn't exactly see that choice through to completion either--or maybe I did get all the way to the ending of that chapter. At any rate, for lots of years, I was a singer. I sang to my babies--show tunes and lullabies, camp songs, and 70s folk songs--I sang on my church worship team for most of 25 years, I sang at the occasional wedding, funeral, or anniversary party, and most of my time in the car or at home alone was spent with music coming out of me like breathing.
When my life as I knew it changed almost 2 years ago, and I found myself up to my eyeballs in counseling and decisions and feelings of guilt and shame, the music stopped. I switched the car to talk radio, I quit the worship team at church, my babies were long grown and gone from the nest-- so there'd been no bedtime songs for years anyway...for whatever reason I discovered I couldn't handle hearing music like I had before, so for my own sanity, I turned it off.
Over the past several months, I've been listening to music again. I started with non-threatening pop songs from the 80s, the songs from the days when life was stress-free. The only trigger that might go off is a memory from a date with a high school boy, or remembering a song from a favorite mix tape. Easy. I listen to soundtracks from Broadway musicals fairly often. I might be preparing for an audition, or researching a show I want to see. My heartstrings get tugged on a bit when I hear those songs, because I want to be onstage every moment of every day--and that is an unrealized dream that comes with a lot of powerful feelings. I used to have to limit how much I listened to show tunes, because it was painful, and that is still true today. I discovered almost immediately that tuning in to country music is a surefire way to find yourself drowning in yucky feelings about heartbreak and hard choices, so the only time I tolerated that was for some character work for a show last spring, and religious music--both the hymns from my childhood and the more contemporary songs from more recent church experiences--threatens to absolutely slay me. Small doses are ok, but being in church is hard and reintroducing that genre is going to take some work.
Isn't it strange how the thing that used to bring me the most joy and comfort has been so painful? I don't fully understand it, but I know that music speaks to many people in a way that spoken words can't. I guess it was too hard for me to hear the messages in the music, I wasn't strong enough, or I wasn't ready.
I've known it was time for me to write about music for a few weeks now. I'm not sure why, but it seems like it's important to recognize some things about music in my life. I am wired to be touched by music, and I know that is not a universal feeling. I have a couple of friends who cannot stand music--they would have loved the new "quiet me"! Music says things that I am not brave enough to say, and music says things that I need to hear. Every chapter of my life has been marked by songs, and those songs are memories that are sometimes bittersweet. Mostly I am beginning to realize that my decision to stop singing was both an act of self-preservation and an act of punishment I inflicted on myself.
In recent weeks I've discovered I'm stronger than I was when I turned off the music, and I want to sing again. I'm smarter than I was when I turned off the music, and I'm ready to hear what it is music has to say to me. I suspect the messages will be different now, and I suspect my voice won't be the same, but I'd like to think I might find myself singing a new song, just as beautiful as the songs I used to know.
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