MIXED FEELINGS
Zine / Academic work / 2024
INTRODUCTION - Music can have a direct and indirect impact on my mental health, and certain kinds of music can help or ease living with a mental disorder. Why do certain bands or musics influence, but above all, provoke certain stimulation triggers, from happiness, pleasure, motivation, or even to rage, hate and sadness? Remember that these opposite and antagonistic feelings are searched, explored and activated by my will because it’s my free will that chooses what I want or don’t want to hear, even if it causes suffering. It’s important to say that I may seek pain through music, because I may want to relive moments of my life that are directly linked to a disturbance or trauma. So here I’m presenting some mixed feelings precipitated by certain musics. This work will not list or count songs or bands that cause such sensations, but rather an accumulation of mixtures of emotions that songs can provoke.
LOVE/ANXIETY/DREAD - Drums are beating, the guitar starts and so does the rushing of your blood. You can’t breathe, you can’t speak and you are unpleasantly fixed. Anxiety swarms, and what seems romantic, full of love and tenderness is a brutal sense of dread. In the light of the midnight full moon you’re awake, precipitated by the love for those who don’t reply, and because of that you can’t sleep, some grisly thoughts are ascending from the depths of your half-full heart. I burn till ashes and the sun's over, and with nothing left, I’ll be forever alone.
PAIN/ANGER/HATE - Pain, because you’re bruised, where the slightest touch to that purple skink makes you cry, but you don’t cry because you’re angry, you’re possessed by an angry thought, a torment that leaves you ruminating in the same feelings over and over again. Finally the hate, a black stain, it covers everything, every bit of colour, and in that dark scene, you’re stuck until you stop thinking about them, until you let it be, let it pass by. You feel like this because it goes straight down. After all, pain leads to anger and anger leads to hate.
PANIC/SPITE/DISTRESS - Repetition, grotesque and visceral, maybe reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish characteristics of my illness, because this comes from inside, dark and vile, endless and subtle, just like my humour. I laugh until I cry because my ego is so distressed, and uncomfortable with what’s blooming in my eyes. And so, with fear of retaliation, a panic room is inside, which refugees of the violence inhabit.
LONELINESS/SADNESS/DISCOMFORT - It’s a grey area, filled with bits of feelings, speckles, and even if they are a plural, you’re just one, alone and lost, but not just lost, you’re forgotten. Multiple ways of feeling sad hit you, they crush you with their different sizes and weight, because after all feeling sad has an immense variety of touch and feel. I was born with the wrong emotional luggage, just a compilation of aches, pain and soreness on the head, deep and profound, because this discomfort was built to last. It’s a boring grey, full of doll unhappiness to the brim. It's boring not because I made it boring, but because it was inflicted on my personality, and as I hear voices of known people, telling me how shit I am, I feel a heavy and sad.
PRIDE/FEAR/DENIAL - It cuts, but it doesn’t bleed, instead, it fills you with an obsessive sting, from what you don’t want to let go of, after all, it’s these feelings that feed this storm. You’re handcuffed to the briefcase, with the money to buy her friendship, because after all, she doesn’t want you anymore. Not in a million years you’ll let her go, but that’s just words, denial of what already happened. You act worthy of what left you, but what you actually feel is an unpleasant tickle, a sense that arises in response to the perceptions of danger and threat.
RESPECT/CONFUSION/CARE - I don’t know about you, but I need a little time, time to make things right, time to restart and forget, forget the pain. I need time to grieve, something I think you don’t understand what it means, because you drive through the night, jumping on whoever you appetise. After all, feeling others is easy for you. My love life seems intertwined with death, it's a kind of thing that happens in the life of those with a hunger for what doesn’t exist. After everything, and even with a missing eye, I respect what we had, but you don't care, so what’s the point, after all, you’re not thinking of me either.
HAPPINESS/GRACE/LOYALTY - Give me light because it makes me bright and full of colourful emotions, emotions that are deep, deeper than the eye can see. I’m happy, and I feel grateful for it because it's not you who’s is making me feel like that, it’s the complicated situation I’m in, this positive embroglio, where I’m hit in my feelings violently with a positive confusion. It’s ok because they are making me happy, because these people are loyal, not to necessity like you all, but to feelings and emotions. And so, with an overwhelmed will and thought, I’m starting not to need to grasp for help, but above all, seek you.
JOY/HUMILIATION/AGITATION - (Laughter). All laughing and having fun. Joy, because we are one, unity, friends. But friends break, and so does the fun. You become the joke, and that brings a new mask to your representation, but not like a clown, like an abuser, weak, fragile, but not pitiful, because they’re not sorry for you. Your agitation makes them laugh more. You see faces that are unknown laughing at you as if there was some transmission of thoughts. I shall laugh too! But not from you, because I don’t want you to feel the same persecutory delusions of damage that I feel. Instead, I will laugh at myself, because I wanna learn to be on the other side, but not in an evil or immoral way, I want to not let my mind be humiliated by joking about what’s wrong with me. But after all the reflection I have done, all I ask is “But why?”
CONCLUSION - These thoughts are moving me, in a positive and negative way, and it’s because they are inherently connected to my mental untidiness, also known as a mental disorder. This chaos is obsessive and compulsive, and that’s the main reason I follow these paths and choose to hear these sounds, sounds that are diverse, and that I grasp to, because it’s what resembles the past, that I often see as good and beautiful, but that in it's majority it affects me as degrading and toxic. And so with no other connection to those who left me, I don’t know how long I will keep searching and reactivating these emotions that are heavy and profound just like the people who recorded and exposed me to these feelings.
