Intro to Music

My love for music began at a very young age. It started with me always wanting to listen to music in the car, for every ride, even if it was just a couple minutes. Then there are the concerts in the park at Windsor lake during the summer that I went to just about every Thursday for about 10 years, only missing with the exception of when there was absolutely no possibility of me getting there. The atmosphere was absolutely electrifying with the combination of seeing all my friends and new faces every time I went, getting to swim around in the lake, eating funnel cakes and drinking orange fanta, and just running all over the place with the grass cushioning my bare feet. To put the cherry on top of all that, there were always very talented bands performing there so music could be heard all across the park.

At around the age of 8, I began to play piano and take lessons at the Piano and Guitar center, and almost immediately fell in love with it. I remember playing my recitals at the Rialto theatre in old town, and each one would take months to practice for. When I was able to muster up the courage to get up in front of the crowd and play my piece, without my sheet music in front of me, and without making any mistakes, it was an indescribable and unique feeling, each and every time. It was like winning a carnival game or getting 3 strikes in a row at the bowling alley. I remember how sad I was when my teacher, Mr. Bixby, quit his job there, which led me to stop taking lessons because I couldn’t imagine having another teacher as good as him.

Then, when I got to middle school, I started playing the trombone in band. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I did playing piano, but I needed to take it for a music elective. It was still a good experience to be able to go to the class and play in the concerts, but I wasn’t very passionate about it, so I stopped doing band after 6th grade and started choir in 7th. Although I didn’t enjoy it so much at first, maybe because I just wasn’t used to it and most of the kids in there had already been doing it for a year, it grew to become one of my favorite classes all throughout middle school. It was one of the few things that kept me interested in school, seeing that I could go there and see my friends, which I had an abundance of there, compared to when I was in band. I continued taking choir throughout the rest of middle school, but stopped taking music classes after that.

Trials & Tribulations

Music has helped me push through so many things. From using it as motivation to better myself as a basketball player all throughout elementary and middle school and hype myself up before and after every game, to pushing myself to lift heavier in my middle school weight class and just pushing myself to the fullest when exercising in general. It helped me become a better wrestler when I was in middle school, when it took all of my energy and I didn’t think I had anything left in me, the music kept me going. It helped me become a better runner in track and cross country throughout middle school and the beginning of high school, because when I was able to listen to music while running, it’s all I could focus on, not how tired I was . When I used to be very passionate about doing flips, it helped me overcome the fears of tricks that I would have never thought were possible for myself, from doing a backflip on the ground, to throwing down a triple frontflip on my friend’s backyard trampoline from Walmart, all through a simple beat drop. It has helped me become a better boxer, by allowing me to ease into my workouts and flow through them without skipping a beat, ever since I started. Overall, it has obviously been very helpful in my journey to maintain my physical health and drive me to continue setting and achieving my physical goals in that aspect.

Obviously, music has helped me better myself overall, but those are all just physical aspects. When I was in 7th grade, I never wanted to go to class or really just school at all for that matter. I never had the motivation to get out of bed in the morning and it always felt like something I was forced to do, rather than something I wanted to do for the sake of my education. I was always finding any possible way I could to get out of class, or just miss school for the day entirely. After a certain amount of time of doing this, I reached a point where I was going to the extent of convincing myself that I was sick just about every day and was missing a day or two of school almost every week. For whatever reason, I thought this was somewhat normal behavior, but I later learned that I had anxiety that was manifesting itself into physiological symptoms. I felt nauseous constantly, everything always felt like it was moving too fast or too slow, and going to class generally felt like a burden.

I wasn’t nearly as invested in the listening experience of music as I am today, however, it was already one of my favorite things in the entire world at this point. I started to overcome many of my previously stated physiological problems, because I learned to use music to my advantage in a way that I could have something to direct my focus towards. Alternatively to all of my concentration being funneled the exterior ingredients of my atmosphere and only the negative aspects of it, I was able to just zero in on the melodies and words of the music, helping to drown out and redirect some of those intrusive thoughts that I was having. It helped me to get back on track with my attendance and work habits throughout the rest of middle school.

The summer between middle school and high school, I fell into a deep depressive slump that I just couldn’t seem to climb out of. Although I had dealt with mild bouts of depression throughout middle school alongside my anxiety, I hadn’t really thought much of it. What I was going through was heavier than anything I had ever experienced, and I really didn’t know what was wrong with me. That was, of course, until I visited a psychiatrist and found out that I had a chemical imbalance that was causing depression and anxiety, and me to feel this overwhelming sensation of despair and hopelessness. I was prescribed Fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac, which only made things worse. I felt like a complete zombie for the entirety of freshman year. No highs, no lows, only emotionally numb and completely desensitized to everything that was going on around me. I felt like I had nobody there for me, and music was the only thing I even enjoyed in the slightest. I had no motivation to do anything even remotely productive, aside from exercise and my tendencies revolving around school had completely fallen apart. 

Then sophomore year came around, and I thought everything was going fine. I met my best friend during the first semester, and I was constantly ditching class to go hang out with my friends and avoid all of my problems that were going on at school and home. I was so caught up in all the fun that I was having, that I didn’t realize how damaging it was for me to continue feeding into my bad habits revolving around school. After the semester ended, my best friend moved to South Dakota, and my other best friend transferred to different schools. At my new school, I fell into the same cycle of being caught up in careless habits and started hanging out with kids who, like me, didn’t care about school and just wanted to constantly have fun and mess around without consequences because that’s just the crowd that went to that school.

After about 6 weeks of going to that school, I was alone and fell into deep,  intrusive, violent thoughts one dark and dreary night. Without going into too much detail, I ended up getting in a car accident, which threw me into psychosis and I almost ended up dead 3 different times within the same night. I woke up in the emergency room and I wasn’t allowed to go home with my parents. This was easily the most traumatizing event that has occurred throughout my entire life and I wasn’t the same for months to come. I was diagnosed with PTSD and was struggling with depersonalization/derealization and I was taken off my current meds to be put on WellButrin. Roughly a week after being hospitalized, I was able to go back to school and start integrating myself into the classroom once again. At this school, there were 6 week periods called hexters, instead of semesters and only two absences were allowed before you were dropped for the hexter. I had already missed the first two days of the hexter due to my incident, but my teacher and principal had allowed me to come back under the condition that I didn’t miss any more days, which didn't last very long. After only one day of being back and being excited to see all of my friends again, I came in the next morning, only to be pulled outside before class even began and told that I was being dropped for the hexter because my teacher “didn’t think I was ready to be back”. I was devastated. I didn’t like my teachers there to begin with, but I also hadn’t yet realized how bad of an environment that school really was for me. The teacher kept reassuring me that It wasn’t the end of my time there and that I could continue going there next hexter. As a rebuttal, I kept reassuring her that I didn’t want to come back and that it was, in fact, the end of my time there.

I fell back deeper into my slump of depression and hopelessness and returned to fossil, where I was welcomed back with open arms. I thought everything was pointless, and that there was no hope of anything getting better, but strived to do the best I could in my classes, to make up for all the wasted time I had spent at the other school, not earning any credits. Music was the only thing that I felt I had and I spent every spare second I had ingesting new music and crafting new playlists. I used it as motivation, and despite coming back halfway through the semester, I ended with some pretty decent grades.

Back To Music

I began to find myself again, through music and spending more time with friends and family, and to my surprise, I was actually beginning to enjoy things more and more all over again. It was like I had finally reached the light and was experiencing real joy and emotion again for the very first time in ages. I was hanging out with friends, listening to albums cover to cover, making art for my room and perfecting my craft of making playlists, and the best part of it all is that I was doing it because I was met with true happiness when doing these things, rather than having to them to feel like I’m escaping something. 

I fell in love with the listening experience associated with music, and I don’t enjoy anything more than closing my eyes with my headphones on and letting the music flow through me, while picking apart and digesting each little ingredient put into each song. For example, I spent one night listening to the album, “D*MN” by Kendrick Lamar cover to cover for the first time and I was astonished and how much of an absolute masterpiece it was. The mixing and production were incredible, the transition from each and every song to the next was literally perfect, and the messages portrayed through different perspectives really incited a deeper level of thinking than any other collection of music I’ve come across. 

I have been able to stop taking medication completely, now that I am so high-functioning with my depression and have all the many tools I need to cope with my problems, including music and meditation, and I’ve never felt better. I truly believe that music flows through all of us and there’s music for everybody that can help them reach a deeper level of consciousness and interconnectedness and that is a very beautiful concept. I am very grateful for the trials that I have been able to conquer with the assistance of music and  I believe that with the right mindset, music can aid in overcoming or achieving just about anything.