To be alive

This has quite possibly been the hardest eight months of my life. It began after I graduated from seminary in May. I’ve been trapped in a pit of lifelessness, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was until very recently, maybe a month ago. All my self-awareness was good for nothing when it actually mattered, apparently. I was too close to this one, too consumed by it.

As someone who for so long lived a bustling, vibrant, engaging, fast-paced life, I suddenly found everything slowed down tremendously. The closest analogy I can think of is this (and it’s not-so-coincidentally a music analogy): where previously I was living at a steady Allegro, I was suddenly dragged along by a painful Largo. I woke, made coffee for strangers, ate, slept, and did it all over again. My mind was not engaged. My heart was not engaged. I felt like my life had no meaning, no end goal anymore. I was so devastatingly bored and lulled into complacency by the monotony that I lost all energy to do the things that give me life: sing, write, worship, be in nature, fight for justice. I can’t remember the last time I genuinely worshipped. I was falling behind on my responsibilities, too. People were counting on me and l kept letting them down. Each time this happened I put up another brick in the wall around my heart, because the disappointment was becoming too much for me to bear. I was slowly slipping into this pit of nothingness, and the farther I slipped the harder it became to find the will to pull myself out. It was like I could walk through fire and not feel myself get burned. I had no motivation to do anything but get by. And that’s not like me at all. You can call it whatever you want—depression, a dark night of the soul, I just know that I felt one thing: emptiness. 

Additionally, and maybe as a result, all my relationships were strained, leaving me feeling so alone. Some of my friends left town. Some of my friends didn’t show up for me when I needed them most. And that hurt. I’ve had to readjust and figure out who my people are. My family received the brunt of my anxiety surrounding my next steps. Lots of frantic calls were made. They did a lot of damage control in those first couple of months, logistically, financially, and emotionally. I lived in a shared-space Airbnb (with the passive aggressive owner) for 6 weeks over the summer while I figured out a permanent place to live. It was awful. I haven’t even yet mentioned the pressure I’ve felt to get a JOB. It has been stifling, to say the least. I felt pressure from all sides to get a job in my “field.” But this meant that I had to know what I wanted, or at least pretend like I knew what I wanted. I didn’t have either of those options covered. Something about giving a BS answer on an application or interview just for the sake of “knowing what I want” repels me so vigorously that I could write a thesis on it. The question “what do you want to do?” Or “what do you see yourself doing?” sent a dagger in me every time because I either had to make up a fib or fumble through an honest answer of “I don’t really know, but here are some things I’m good at and interested in.” And neither answer is ideal. I had conversation after conversation and they were all the same. People telling me that I needed to figure out what I wanted. But I didn’t know how to do that. I still don’t. So I was back to square one. Scrolling endlessly through Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn at jobs I knew I would never actually have the will to apply for. I had heard of people sending out 3-4 applications a day, but I find that inconceivable, at least for me. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t apply anywhere. I couldn’t find a reason to. Nothing that I saw sparked my passion, nothing even sparked my interest. Everything received from me an “eh” or a “maybe.” At a certain point I stopped making connections with people and stopped responding to emails. I was paralyzed into inaction. I did, however, get pretty far on a couple of job opportunities. Ones that I really cared about. I made it past the interview stage into the “trial run” phase. But I was rejected for both positions. I couldn’t even find the energy to grieve over those. I read the rejection emails with my eyes glazed over and moved on. 

This pressure and anxiety that the job search brought launched me into a three week-long headache toward the middle of October, by far the longest headache I’ve ever had. It was bad enough for me to be put on steroids. I’d never been in that kind of constant physical pain. It knocked me out of any kind of “normal” living, if you could say I was even doing that to begin with. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t communicate, I couldn’t function. And to think that was only the precursor to my darkest night, when my cat went missing. 

Some people have thought me INSANE for the amount of love I’ve poured into a cat. But I cling to her because she allows me to feel something. To feel love where it’s lacking in other areas of my life, a love that doesn’t judge me or ask for anything but exactly who I am. It’s so hard for me to feel anything anymore. So I’ve given a greater portion of my life to protecting and providing for this cat. It makes me feel like I’m giving back to the world whereas in the rest of my life I feel so useless, so wasteful. So now you can see why I was nearly destroyed when she went missing. This precious life that was in my arms, the one I vowed to protect, I let slip away, literally. That guilt was eating away at me. Ask my mom or my friends or my coworkers who saw me every day for those two weeks— the way I cried, you would have thought that my life was ending. Because it was for me. She was all I had left. She was the only thing that made me feel alive, human. But then a miracle happened when it shouldn’t have. The way my life was going, it made sense for me to lose her. But I didn’t. I got a second chance, and I can’t explain that. We were both permanently wounded by the event, but we have each other, and that’s really all that matters. I also learned something important. The lengths I went to find her proved to me that I actually can be powerfully and unflinchingly persistent about something, if I really love it. There is the crucial caveat. 

Then came the revelation. A few days ago. A weekend full of singing choral music with seven of my friends made me completely forget that I was ever stuck in a pit of lifelessness. I felt alive again. I was focused, energized, determined, present, rooted to the ground, and had a clear vision in mind for an end goal. I was in full control of my actions. I wanted to be and do better and was ready to put in the work. And I was really good at it, too. I was looking my friends directly in their eyes and reading into their souls as they sang, breathing in the life that they birthed with the sound that came from their bodies, giving my sound to it to make it into something whole. I was unafraid, unashamed to be close to and vulnerable with them, whereas, back in my lifeless life I’ve been avoiding eye contact and avoiding human connection altogether. Whereas in my everyday life I get ample amounts of sleep and, frankly, do very little work during the week and am yet somehow drained of energy, here we were worked tirelessly from sunup to after sundown and I could still feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I found myself ready for more, able to go and go and go. Because I loved it. Because it fed me like the bread of life. I drank it in like water. My fast-paced life was back and I was back. I have not truly been living because I have not been making music like this. Something so intrinsic to my existence is being stifled, pushed deep into the recesses of my body where I can’t access it, somewhere behind or underneath the wall I have been building around my heart. Being able to sing skillfully and harmoniously with other people again ignited my humanity, and suddenly I was feeling everything again—joy, pain, longing, excitement—and I was hungry for more of it. I was on fire, but this time I could feel it, and it was magnificent. 

As soon as I got back to my apartment in Atlanta and the magic was over, I understood the reality of my situation and spoke it out loud, consecrating it into the air around me so that it would forever stick: whatever life I was living before, I can’t keep living it. I will not survive. I have to make some changes and make them now. 

It seems like some sort of ironic divine intervention because six years ago, almost exactly to this day, I decided to give up a career in vocal performance. Nothing felt more right to me at the time. All around me were people older, smarter, and more powerful than me who were trying to define what music should mean to me, to force onto me a narrow understanding of music. And I knew in my soul that was wrong. I knew music was too divine for them to be able to explain it away. But I think I believed that because I couldn’t conform to their ideal image of a performer, that meant that I couldn’t be a performer at all. So I relented that it wasn’t for me and kissed it forever goodbye. This is not to say I regret my decision to go to seminary; I was right where I needed to be. My dad said something to me the other day that clicked with me: theology fulfills me intellectually, but music fulfills me spiritually, and not the other way around. This is very counterintuitive, I know. But it explains my life’s confusing predicament perfectly. It’s why I’ve struggled to find anything interesting in my “field” to apply to. I can talk about theology all day, but I am definitely not a pastor of any sorts. That’s not my calling or my passion. Likewise, I can sing Renaissance music all day and it would move my spirit deeply to do so, but I find musicology dreadfully boring (you can look at my music major GPA for proof of that). Theology is how I relate to and understand the world. Music is how I express and live out my very existence in that world. I’ve searched and searched for the things that light a fire in me. And there are several things that do. But none hold a candle (pun intended) to what happens inside me when I sing. I could write a hundred pages on that. It’s always been that way. And I have no doubt that I can use my voice to proclaim the other things in my life that I am passionate about. I don’t know what lies ahead. I still don’t know what kind of career I want to build, and I’m not ashamed to say that. But I know this much: if I’m not singing—and singing with other musicians—constantly, I will not survive. 

I’m not at all looking for sympathy from my long-winded story. I’ve made a lot (A LOT) of mistakes in the past half year. I’ve let a lot of people down, including myself. And I’ve already exhausted all kinds of pity on myself for that. But I know I’ve made the best with what I’ve had. That’s all most of us on this earth are doing. An overwhelming amount of difficult things were thrown my way, and I dealt with them in the best way I knew how, even if it was messy. I’m strong, I’ve learned that. I’ll bend way out of shape, but I won’t break. I still have a long way to go. I’m not out of this pit of darkness yet. I still feel alone. I am still tempted to sink into nothingness. I still grieve loss. I still fear what’s to come. But I also feel a light. And that light tells me that my God is near me all the time, and soon She will bring me out of the darkness and fill me with life.