On Mental Health Recovery #2: The Age Factor

I'm on my 6th listen in a row to the first song on my upcoming album. I know it's obsessive at this point, and shortly approaching the window where productive listening becomes unproductive or self destructive listening. I just can't seem to figure out, why in the world did I play that note there? Why did I attempt that phrase if I couldn't carry it out effortlessly and perfectly in time? I, instead, abandoned it after I couldn't play it and moved on to something else totally unrelated. The remorse pours over me. It doesn't matter if most of it was good, because the pang of excitement that happens when you hear yourself play something beautiful has gone away for me at this point. I recorded back in December. All I have left is the incessant thoughts, the bare bones left once you pluck all the feathers away: I'm the weak link. It's so obvious. Everyone can hear it. Everyone can hear my failure.

It's ironic because I always tell my students not to do exactly this. It's a classic example of the “do as I say, not as I do.” It seems to be a running theme for many of the toxic mental habits that I relay. One - over-obsession or nit pickyness with improvised music, which often bears the largest amount of musical outputs you can't control. Two - looking at one's faults without reconciling one's strengths, or as my therapist called it, “black and white thinking”. I learn my methods from experience. And evidently, it's the gift that keeps on giving - so long as I live and breathe with the devil on my shoulder. If my depression had a personified manifestation, I imagine that would be it. The thing about teachers is that we teach principles that we vicariously find ourselves learning from over and over again. With a poor mental health history, it is like relapse.

I decided to take my own unhealthy habit one step further – breaking rule number four, comparison - and start digging in to the works and recordings by vibraphonist Joe Locke that I hadn't yet checked out. I just have to see how I shape up next to the modern “greats”, only to inevitably let myself down. I really do wake up and choose violence. And yes, his style is so strong and innovative. He's note-y without sounding frantic. He conveys novel ideas while channeling language from Bobby Hutcherson – I recognize an improvisatory riff most certainly taken from Linger Lane. But I had ended up getting distracted from my own self destructive task and being more enthralled by his composing. I played the opening theme for “Love is a Pendulum” in my car over and over from Red Hook to Kensington because I had to know how in the hell he concocted that bizarrely brilliant phrase. The metric modulation to follow turned it eve more so on its head.

I also remembered that he's 60 years old, and we once had a discussion at Dizzy's for the Bobby Hutcherson tribute show on how it took him a while to break in to the scene and make his mark. So it seems everything hits everyone ears at the right timing. If he wasn't his age, the events of his life unfolding exactly as they did, I would have never heard such an interesting compositional phrase that distracted me from my unhealthy obsessive listening habits and instead motivated me to compose for four hours that day. And timing is contingent on ages. It's up to us to choose how we live in them.

I honestly had a lot of trouble writing this week. It seemed there was too much on my mind. A commission to finish. Mixing edits to write down. Lessons to teach. Emails to answer. Tax deductions to be strewn out from my four accounts. I was feeling the weight of adulthood, and I didn't like it. I wasn't where someone like Joe Locke was, and I couldn't be. It wasn't typical for my age, and even more so, my personal path in life. It didn't account for the time lost that I mourned from mental illness, and my stringent mental health recovery steps hadn't lasted longer than a year at a time. I also may be a true adult, but I wasn't decades in to it. Age is a factor, and I was blaming myself for having a wealth of knowledge that was impossible for me to reach at this time and age in my life. No wonder I could never win.

If there's one thing I've learned from spiritual and creative wellness practice, it's that shaming your early efforts can tax you like reprimanding a small child. Not only that, but life is more complex than child vs. adult, and it is also more complex than successful vs. unsuccessful. The critic war my mind wages on my art ensues in search of an answer or final product it will never get. I will never make a work of art, at my current age of 22, or my future ages of 29, 35, 60 (god willing) that will coalesce without some sort of “failure”. It's not just innocence or lack of experience at this point. It always comes down to me, I remind myself. Getting in my own way. Age may be a factor, yes, but mindset is a bigger one.

I decide to go to a nearby cafe in search of an incentive to get out of the apartment, even if it meant freezing my ass off under an outdoor heat lamp next to a wall of plexiglass. The cafe starts playing Arctic Monkeys, which I haven't heard since I went to their concert with my best friend at the Fox Theater in the 9th grade. Because – ah, yes – there was a time when I didn't know how taxes worked. When I didn't have to turn my art into a source of income contingent on other folks' opinions of it. When I only drank at the Lake Meritt Gazebo on Friday afternoons after my friend stole a massive bottle of Carlo Rossi, followed by a trip to House of Curries. When we exist within a time frame, it's hard for us to internalize how much changes or how much time passes us by. So I sit, my inner 13 year old reminiscing on “Flourescent Adolescent”. Next thing I know, I've written my whole blog piece and my mind feels strangely calm. Maybe there is something to being younger – reveling in your own innocence and unknowing, even if just for a Friday afternoon at a cafe – slowly hushing the devil to silence.