Heavy

“I don't want to be lifted out of this. I just don't want to sit in it completely alone.”

Journal Entry: Heavy

Tonight feels heavier than I can properly explain.

Nothing has happened, at least nothing obvious. Work still gets done. Conversations still happen. I answer the million questions that get fired at me one after another by my youngest daughter. I laugh in the right places when something is supposed to be funny. From the outside everything probably looks completely ordinary, but somewhere underneath all of that it feels like someone has quietly turned the gravity up.

I've been trying to work out whether it's sadness or exhaustion or anxiety, but none of those quite fit either. It's more like I've drifted a few inches away from myself. Close enough to keep doing everything I normally do, but just far enough away that everything feels slightly delayed, like I'm watching myself doing it rather than properly being inside it.

I don't really know why tonight feels different, and I think that's part of what's bothering me.

Usually there is something you can point at. A bad day, a difficult conversation, something that happened, something you can blame for feeling the way you do. Tonight there isn't really anything. It's just there. An uninvited presence that seems to have turned up and made itself comfortable without asking.

Therapy isn't helping in quite the way I thought it would either. Not because it's wrong. If anything, it's probably the first thing that's been properly honest with me for a very long time. The difficult bit is what happens afterwards, when I'm left thinking about things I've spent years finding ways not to think about.

My childhood keeps turning up in conversations that I thought were about work. School turns up when I'm talking about things that happened last week. Things I've carried around for years as personal failings suddenly have different names attached to them, and I still don't really know what to do with that.

Sometimes that's comforting.

Sometimes it's fucking unsettling.

Maybe both.

There is something strange about looking backwards and realising that some of the things you thought were simply wrong with you might have had reasons. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that yet, and tonight I don't particularly feel like working it out.

Silence isn't helping either.

Normally I quite like the room being quiet. Tonight the quiet feels louder than music, which is probably why I put something on in the first place. Most of it feels wrong. Music I would normally love is suddenly irritating me. Everything seems to want something from me. Even tracks I know well feel like they're asking me to become a version of myself that isn't really available tonight. Follow the rhythm, pick yourself up, get into it, feel something.

I don't want to. No…. I don't want to be lifted out of this and I don't particularly want to understand it either. I just don't want to sit in it completely on my own.

So I started looking for something quieter.

Something that didn't seem to care whether I felt better.

That was probably the thing I was looking for without knowing I was looking for it. Not music that was going to change the room, or take me somewhere else, or give me some huge release. Just something that could sit there with me without asking me to do anything in return.

I've always thought about music as something that changes how a room feels. It can lift you, move you, pull you somewhere completely different. But tonight I didn't want anywhere different.

I wanted something that would stay.

There was something comforting about hearing something that wasn't trying to rescue me. It was just there, breathing away in the background while I sat there feeling how I felt.

And after a while the heaviness changed slightly.

Not disappeared. I didn't suddenly feel good. I just noticed that I wasn't arguing with it anymore.

I think there had been a lot of effort in trying to work out why I felt like this. What it meant. Whether I should be doing something about it. Whether I was supposed to be handling it better. Whether there was something I was missing.

It was exhausting.

So eventually I stopped. I just let it be there.

The music kept moving quietly in the background while I sat with it. I couldn't really tell you where one track finished and another started after a while. They just seemed to belong together. There was no obvious destination and nothing building towards some huge moment where everything was supposed to break open.

That suited me. I didn't need the release. I needed somewhere to put the feeling.

I think that's probably what this session became, although I don't remember deciding that at the time. I was just looking for something I could listen to without having to respond to it, and somehow these tracks ended up sitting together in exactly the way I needed them to.

I don't know if that's comfort. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. It doesn't really matter tonight.

Some evenings are just heavy, I suppose. I don't particularly like that answer because it doesn't give me anything to work with, but maybe that's partly the point. I don't have to turn every feeling into a problem just because I can feel it.

I'm still listening back to it now and I can feel the person who made it. That's probably the strangest part.

I remember how I felt when I made it, but listening back isn't quite the same as being there. Some of the weight has gone and some of it hasn't. I can hear why I chose certain things without necessarily remembering making the decision.

And there is something in that which I hadn't really expected.

It was uninvited, this feeling. I didn't ask for it and I wouldn't particularly mind if it didn't turn up again.

But listening back, I realise I don't completely want it to disappear either.

Because if it does come back, maybe I'll recognise it a little quicker.

Maybe I'll know I don't always have to get rid of it.

I don't know. P

art of me hopes it doesn't show up again.

Part of me is already curious about what I'll hear if it does.