Saved From the Fire

“I didn't need to save everything.

I couldn’t”

Journal Entry: Saved From The Fire

I think this is probably the hardest chapter for me to write because I know exactly where it came from, but I also know there are parts of that time I will probably never be able to properly explain. Not because I don't remember them, but because my head wasn't really a place where anything was neat enough to put into words. It was fear and exhaustion and sadness and anger all happening at the same time, with this horrible feeling that something I'd spent most of my adult life building and protecting might actually be falling apart, and that perhaps I was going to be the person who had to face that head on and make some difficult decisions.

I don't want to go in to the details of it here because they aren't mine alone to tell, and to be honest doesn’t change anything here in terms of what I felt, but it was enough to knock something loose in me that had probably been under pressure for much longer than I'd realised. I'd reached a point where I was exhausted from trying to hold everything together and suddenly, I was having to face the possibility that the life I wanted; my family, my marriage, everything I'd worked so hard to protect, might not be something I could save, as a whole, by myself alone.

That thought was devastating.

I didn't want to leave, of course I didn’t. That is probably the simplest and most important truth in all of this. I didn't want to walk away from any of it, but there was a point where I genuinely wondered whether continuing was possible. I don't think I'd ever understood before how frightening it could be to feel trapped between two things you both desperately don't want. Leaving felt unbearable, staying as it is felt unbearable, and somewhere in the middle of that I was trying to work out how much more I could actually carry.

What made it worse was knowing that the reality of leaving wouldn't just mean leaving. There were consequences attached to it that I couldn't ignore. I knew what walking away could mean and I knew this wasn't something I was honestly capable of doing. At the same time, I was reaching a point where I wasn't sure I had anything left in me to keep carrying the weight of it, and that frightened me more than I can really explain to be honest.

I'd always thought of myself as someone who protects. Someone who keeps going. Someone who absorbs the difficult stuff so other people don't have to. I think a lot of my identity had become wrapped up in being able to hold things together, or at least trying to, in a way that felt supportive. Suddenly I was looking at my own life and wondering whether I'd failed at the one thing I thought I was supposed to be good at.

There were moments when my thoughts became very dark. I don't mean that in some dramatic or romantic sense. I mean that the idea of just ending the pain started to feel like an option, and that is a terrifying thing to admit even now. When you're exhausted enough and frightened enough, I think the mind can start presenting escape as though it's a solution even when you consciously know it isn't. It doesn't necessarily arrive as some grand decision either. Sometimes it's just the thought that you'd quite like everything to stop because you cannot see how you're supposed to keep carrying it.

I was on a knife edge, but life around me was still happening.

I was still a husband and a father. I was still working. I was still answering messages, trying to anyway, and doing ordinary things. I could sit with my children and be present-ish with them while internally feeling like my entire life was falling apart. There was no obvious external crisis that gave me permission to stop. Dinner still needed sorting, calls still needed answering, people still needed me and the day still had to happen, so I kept moving.

I think that's one of the strangest things about being in a place like that. You can be doing completely ordinary things while having thoughts that feel anything but ordinary, and nobody necessarily knows. Sometimes you don't even know how to explain it to yourself.

I'd spent so much of my life pushing difficult things away that I'd become almost frightened of what would happen if I finally let them in. I could swallow things, bury them, tell myself I'd deal with them later, and usually there was always something else to do. This time there wasn't anywhere left to put it. Uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, anger, sadness, the feeling that I'd somehow failed. All of it was there at once, and I couldn't think my way out of it anymore.

So, I went to music.

I didn't go there because I had some idea to dramatise what I was feeling. I went there because I didn't know where else to go. I didn't want to talk to anybody in that moment because talking meant finding words for something that didn't really have words. It meant looking someone in the eye and admitting that I was struggling, that I was frightened, that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do next, and I wasn't ready for that. I also wasn’t necessarily ready for an intervention or for focus to suddenly put me in the centre of something that was going to require more from me.

Music didn't ask me to explain anything.

I could put my headphones on, sit in the dark and start playing with sounds until something felt close enough to whatever was going on inside me. That's something I still find difficult to explain to people who don’t naturally do, because I'm not really searching for a piece of music that says exactly how I feel. It's more instinctive than that. I'll hear something and think that's closer, or that's not it, and then something else will come along and suddenly the whole thing moves somewhere else.

And when I'm actually building the arrangement, that becomes even more instinctive.

I'm not sitting there thinking, right, this is the part where I process this emotion and now I need some music that represents hope. It doesn't work like that at all. I'm listening to what is happening in front of me and responding to it. A key comes in differently than I expected, something sits against another track in a way I hadn't planned, a snippet of something appears at exactly the wrong or right moment, and suddenly I'm following that instead.

That's probably one of the reasons I trust this process as much as I do.

You can start with an idea, but once you're actually in it, the music has its own momentum. You have to listen properly because if you start trying to force it into the thing you thought it was going to be, you can kill it. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop trying to control it quite so much and see where it takes you. If I’m guided by the feeling and stay true to that then what I end up with will feel honest.  

I think I was doing that with this chapter without really knowing I was doing it. I think that’s true as well, because I really felt I had nothing else to give and nothing more to do.

I was sitting there with all of this shit in my head, moving through different pieces of music, trying things, listening to what happened when one piece of music met another, and gradually the music started reflecting things back at me that I couldn't have described myself.

There was a point early in making it where everything seemed to stop. I remember the music playing and there being this strange stillness where I wasn't really thinking about anything anymore. I was just numb. I wasn't solving anything. I wasn't having any revelation. I was just sitting there listening.

And the music kept going, so I kept going with it.

That's probably the closest I can get to explaining how I use music when I'm in a place like that. I don't necessarily put something on because I know what I need. I start somewhere and listen, and then I respond. One track changes the feeling of the next, a transition works or it doesn't, something hits harder than I expected, something else suddenly feels completely wrong, and eventually you've travelled somewhere without really noticing that you've moved.

That was happening here.

The beginning of the chapter feels like the tremor of it to me now, the uncertainty and heaviness and that feeling that everything I knew might be disappearing. There is a part where it collapses into something much emptier, and there is this numbness where I'm not really sure what I'm listening for anymore. Then gradually the music starts moving again, and I start moving with it.

I don't think I planned that. I don't even think I understood that was what it was at the time. I was just feeling the music and the sound.

When I listened back, I could hear that the music had created a natural arc that I hadn't consciously designed. It had gone through those different states because that's where I had been, and somehow the act of building the arrangement had allowed me to move between them without having to sit there and explain to myself what each one meant.

There was still all the shame in there too. I felt like I'd failed as a husband, failed as a father, failed as the person who was supposed to protect everyone. I felt like if I couldn't keep this together then perhaps I wasn't strong enough, and if I wasn't strong enough then what exactly was I?

I can see now how unfair that was, but I couldn't see it then. At the time I thought resilience meant never getting to the point where you needed help. I thought being strong meant absorbing everything and continuing as though it wasn't hurting.

I don't think I believe that anymore.

There was still a very small part of me that didn't want to give up, although I wouldn't have called it hope at the time. Hope felt like too big a word for where I was. It was more like there was something in me that couldn't quite let go, even when everything else was telling me there was no point.

Maybe I didn't need to know whether things would work out. Maybe I just needed enough of that feeling not to make an irreversible decision in one of the worst moments of my life.

That was enough - and I think that's where the title came from, although I don't remember consciously deciding it at the time. Saved From The Fire.

For a long time, I think I was still trying to get back to how things were before all of this. As if there was some version of the story where, if I worked hard enough or understood it properly or did enough of the right things, I could somehow put everything back exactly where it had been.

I couldn't.

Life had happened and materially changed the baseline.

Some things had changed and some things couldn't be undone, and I had to accept that before I could actually start moving forward. I think that was probably one of the hardest parts because accepting that didn't mean I was happy about it. It didn't mean I agreed with everything that had happened or that the hurt suddenly disappeared. It just meant I stopped wasting energy trying to make the past different.

There was still a lot in the fire. Some of it I didn't want. Some of it hurt too much to look at. Some of it had been damaged beyond repair.

But there were things in there that I still wanted; my wife, my children, my family, myself, the life I'd built, even if it wasn't going to look exactly the same anymore. And I think that became the meaning of the title for me.

Not saving everything. I couldn't. It was accepting what had happened and then deciding what I wanted to take from it and carry forward. That was a very different thing from trying to put everything back the way it was. I couldn't change anything. I couldn't undo anything. But I could decide what was still important to me.

And that included myself, which I think I had almost forgotten somewhere along the way.

There was pain that wasn't going to disappear because I'd decided to keep going, there was a loss of confidence that couldn't be wished away, and there were conversations and consequences and a lot of things that would still have to be worked through.

But I didn't need to solve all of that in that moment.

I needed to get through it and then work out what I wanted to carry with me.

Somewhere towards the end of the session, something changed.

I remember the feeling more than I remember exactly what was happening in the arrangement. It wasn't relief, it was quieter than that. There was just this lift, almost like something had opened up in the space around me. It's weird because I can only really describe it as feeling like a hug. Something just lifted me up somehow.

It felt warm.

That sounds almost absurd considering where my head had been, but it did. I remember feeling my daughters in that thought, my wife, the life I'd built, and suddenly those things weren't just the things I was terrified of losing. They were right there with me.

And I was still there too.

I don't know if that was the moment I decided to keep going. Maybe the decision had already been forming, and I just finally had enough space to see it. Maybe the music didn't cause that decision at all. Maybe it just gave me somewhere quiet enough to hear something that was already inside me.

But I know that I stayed.

I'm glad I did.

I don't say that because everything suddenly became OK. It didn't. Nothing erased anything, it didn't make the fear disappear and it didn't make the work of rebuilding any easier.

It just meant I hadn't walked away from something I still loved while I was at my lowest point.

And perhaps more importantly, I eventually stopped emotionally trying to rebuild the exact life I thought I'd lost. Things had changed – Ok. I had changed  - OK.

Some of the things I thought I needed before all of this weren't necessarily the things I needed afterwards. That was difficult to accept, but it also gave me somewhere to go.

I could take what mattered and leave what didn't.

When I listen to this chapter now, I can hear how much pain is in it, but I also hear the way I was working through that pain without really knowing that I was. I hear the uncertainty and the exhaustion, and I hear how close I was to believing there was no way forward. But I also hear the music changing as I changed, sometimes because I deliberately took it somewhere and sometimes because a track did something I wasn't expecting and I followed it.

That's probably the thing I understand most clearly about the chapter now.

The music didn't give me an answer.

I wasn't sitting there making a soundtrack to my recovery.

I was in it, arranging it, building it, feeling it, listening to it, getting things wrong, finding things that worked, staying with a feeling for longer than I probably wanted to, and then eventually finding myself somewhere in it too.

And there was still something there that wanted to keep trying.

I don't know whether that's what saved me. I only know that it was still there.

And when I listen to the music now, I don't just hear the fire.

I hear what I chose to take with me.