Renegade

Fifteen months ago I started therapy.

It was hard. Confronting things that I had buried for many years was hard, and it took several sessions to even start to open up.

 

I came out of the other side of this knowing myself a whole lot better. I've spent the last 9 or 10 months processing.

 

The therapist diagnosed me with PTSD.

 

I'll go into what the cause of the trauma was some other time perhaps, but for now, let's just say that at some point, decades ago, I built a wall around myself. I walled myself off not just from everyone else but also from myself.

 

Therapy did not in itself seem to change anything, but what was I expecting? For the therapist to wave a magic wand? For things to happen overnight? What follows couldn't have occurred without it.

 

Two days ago, something happened. A music reaction video popped up on my youtube page. 

Not anyone I'd ever heard of, but I started watching it and was quickly drawn in by what I was seeing. 

I've spent a lot of the last 48 hours binge watching other reaction and analysis videos of the same song, and one (three) other song(s). A musical triptych. 

 

The reactors and analysers are musicians, cinematographers, youth justice advocates, psychoanalysts, therapists, composers and songwriters, voice and acting coaches... 

 

Each reviewer had their own take, and by looking at these two videos, each with its own applicability to my situation and history, multiple times through the eyes of such various people, I felt something that I'd sometimes glimpsed during therapy fall into place.

 

Here is the first video they were reacting to: 

 

 

 

What struck me so profoundly was the monologue at the end, where Ren described his struggles as a dance, rather than a war to be won. Somehow framing it in this way made things much simpler. 

Watch the videos. Take the time to learn the back story of the artist, and you will perhaps understand why. 

 

The detailed post I've been struggling to motivate myself to write for the last two months isn't needed, and would anyway be a depressing, turgid affair. 

 

 

This is the second video. 

 

 

 

This one made me realise I'm not as singular as I thought. Of the three characters in the story, the one I relate to is Violet. Someone once described me as "The man with no opinions" 

 

Unlike Violet, I was not sexually abused by my father. 

 

Because of the trauma, I have made many mistakes, and have carried a burden of guilt for a long time, but it feels like there is a crack in the wall at last, and a big broad chink of sunlight is coming through.

 

I, like Ren, am finally starting to stand on my own two feet.