How to celebrate a life: The Musical

I've told you the story of how I grew up in a home where each day was welcomed with a song, where a mother who was so full of love and light, would wake me with a smile on her face and a song quite literally in her heart as she warbled out some little song so delightfully sweet she could have been mistaken for a Disney princess... on happy pills!

Days were filled with old black and white films starring the beautiful Marilyn Monroe singing her little heart out about diamonds, or the colourful and tropical South Pacific, or her favourite The Sound of Music! This love of a world where stories were told with a song was shared and encouraged in me and as I grew up during the great Disney renaissance where they once again returned to their roots and started making and releasing new films based on the old traditions and styles of the classics like Snow White and Cinderella, I was thrown into a world where musicals were once again relevant to the younger generations like myself.

I didn't grow up in a wealthy family so I wasn't one of those kids who had every single Disney movie on VHS, in part because back then they did that annoying retail trick of "buy it now before it goes back in the Disney vault" all so they could re-release it every now and then at full price instead of ever having to sell it for a low price! So being from a lower income family my Mum never fell for their annoying marketing ploy, but she did always buy me a plentiful supply of blank VHS tapes as part of birthdays or christmas so that I could record my own from the television, and as the early stage geek that I was... I actually preferred that, it was fun to record them and label them myself!

So being actively encouraged to enjoy all things musical it's little wonder that now as an adult, I never grew out of it, I still watch Disney movies and sing along with the songs, at least a third if not more of my iTunes music library is made up of original cast recordings from stage musicals, Disney films, movie adaptations of stage musicals and yes... far too many songs by the cast of Glee! and I'm not even remotely ashamed of that.

I was given a gift growing up, the ability to see the world as she did, a world where heartache and despair often drowns out the important things in life, a world where people don't always share their feelings with each other, a world where people don't always have the words to share how they feel even if they want to. What's the gift in that? I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but these are all things that musicals excel at sharing or explaining with the world! If everyone lived life like a musical, things would be a lot simpler, a lot more honest and things would probably get done faster and more happy endings might even happen!

This is why I start the day with music, or use music to share my feelings when I need help doing so, this is why I celebrate my Mum's memory and life with music on every day that was a part of her life, the day she died, the day she gave birth to me, the day she was married, and most importantly today, the day she was born.

11th November, a day where I could easily be heartbroken and mourn, but I choose to smile through my sadness and let music bring us closer together just like it would in a musical.

So today, I ask of you one little favour, live, dance, sing and share your favourite songs from any and all musicals with the world, with strangers and with people that you love. Maybe even leave little post it notes with lines from your favourite songs in strange places for people to find. Use your imagination and let the world be just that little bit brighter today, because that's what she would do!

I love you Mum, thank you for letting me be a part of your world.

How a VHS Tape made the world a better place today!

Before my Mum died I happened to buy my first digital camera and I happened to record a short 13 second video of her sitting on the couch and waving her arms around as she did a little dance for the camera. She doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t look very well either as she’s just started a second round of chemotherapy to try to fight of the cancer which had come back, but I treasure that video with all of my heart as it was the only thing I had to remember her by that showed her alive and moving. Photographs are wonderful, but you get so much more of a person from even a tiny little short 13 second video clip.

As I’ve spoken about before, my Dad died a little more than a year later and in that time I had gotten a much better camera because I realised how important it was to take photos of things you wanted to remember. Unfortunately my Dad was the kind of person who would just make a silly face or hide behind a newspaper the minute you pointed a camera at him, so I never got a video of him before he died and that upset me.  But I figured there was nothing I could do about it, just like I couldn’t change the fact that Mum never said a word in the one I was so very lucky to have of her, so I spent the last 7 years only ever seeing them move about or talk to me in my dreams, and getting upset by the fact that the sound of their voices had started to fade from my waking memory.

That all changed today.

I have been working on clearing out the attic for a while now, getting rid of all sorts of clutter that has been saved for one overly sentimental reason or another. Mum was always the one who could take a Zen like frame of mind and periodically decluttered the whole house when I was out at school or university. She took charge of the problem that was my Dad’s hoarding tendencies, the fact he couldn’t throw away anything that might be useful some day, and that problem doubled when I came along and inherited his hoarding gene filling the house up with even more knick knacks and trinkets with sentimental value, assorted geekery collectables or craft supplies. Things squirreled away from holidays over the years, things that whilst dreadful or tacky I just couldn’t bring myself to part with. Especially true after their deaths and I was left as the heir and protector of all that remained of the lives of these two people who were no longer here to protect it themselves.

For seven years so many boxes have lain unopened, their contents a mystery and now that I am at a place in my life where I am less dependent on the past and able to begin to move forwards, letting go of many of these boxes and their once precious contents.

Today I got to a box which contained a few stray VHS tapes, one an old cartoon compilation tape I got for Christmas when I was probably only 6 or 7 and a video we bought on holiday in Gran Canaria when I was about 13 or 14 years old.  I took one look at the tapes and very nearly just threw them both into the bin, there was nothing of value there, just some childish cartoons and a video which triggered one thought “oh god not that awful video".

You see, that second video was part of a tour my parents and I did, where we went out to a banana plantation, followed by a local alcohol distillery of some sort out on a ranch in the islands sand dunes where the tour ended with a trek through the sand dunes on camels. The tour promoters filmed the whole camel trek and then charged us extra money for their poorly shot and incredibly poorly edited video of the whole thing. Both my parents and I thought this video was dreadful and watched it only the once and yet it ended up being protected all this time thanks to my Dad and I hoarding away things with even the slightest bit of sentimental value.

I have never been so grateful for this shared trait and that dreadful video until today, because seconds before I put the tape into the bin I realised that this awful thing had been hiding a wonderful gift all these years.

Video footage of both my parents

I jumped down from the attic faster than I have ever moved in my life, and for the next 30 minutes I sat in front of my television crying catching little fleeting glimpses of my parents here and there.  5 seconds here, 10 seconds there, another 5 here but this time they were smiling, 5 more and I was watching them laughing… all the while listening to the cheesiest music playing over the footage with no other sounds.

I hadn’t been so happy or grateful for such a long time, I had cried so many tears of joy I didn’t know how I still had any tears left to come out.

Then as the video was nearing the end, the most unexpected thing happened. The cameraman walked right up to my Mum as she was getting off the camel and she was suddenly right there in the middle of the frame, practically looking right into the camera and started to talk.

Just three little words, that’s all, nothing spectacular, but way more than I could have ever dreamed of hearing again in my lifetime.

It has been 7 years and 25 days since I lost my Mum, probably another week or more on top of that since I last heard her beautiful voice and today, when I had long since given up hope of ever hearing her voice again she spoke to me and told me…

“That was brilliant”

and it was.

Depression, friends and coping mechanisms

Depression and anxiety are a large part of my life and have been since I lost my parents, but this blog isn't about the cause, this is about living with it and what it means for me in what I do and say or just general coping mechanisms I use that you may or may not have noticed me doing if you know me in real life.

I think this might turn into a blog of multiple parts, so I'm only going focus on a few areas here in this first one. How depression effects me, my friendships and social life, and some of my coping mechanisms which may or may not interfere with that. Hopefully it will help others with depression understand their own feelings too.

Having a depression that has a cause, my loss and subsequent problems caused by both the loss and the depression itself. I am constantly in a state of flux, never quite sure how I'll feel when I wake up or what song playing on a shop radio might set me off. Some days I'm good and feel like I can do anything, these are the days where you might see me being creative or going on an adventure with friends. But some days everything will have gone to hell before I even wake up, my dreams have always been very vivid and for the most part quite lucid leaving me feeling very intense emotions as I wake from them. Sometimes I'm lucky and I wake with a sense of peace from the dream, where I'll have maybe seen my parents in a happy situation, but more often than not it'll be a distressing situation, a bad memory or I'll have started with a nice happy dream and have lost them again by the end of it – or sometimes the worse option is it'll feel so real that it's waking that steals them away from me all over again and the day is just left feeling empty.

So the day can start any number of ways, and it can change swiftly throughout the day too – and whilst that is true for everyone it's especially true for people like me who have problems with depression. But what do you do with the days that are bad, I hide, I distract myself to keep the negative thoughts at a distance. I deliberately lose myself in a fantasy world, doing things I cannot avoid on auto pilot. I welcome outside influences that can take me away from my world for even a little while, I long for them, but they don't always come because in hiding myself away from the world to avoid my own pain I have alienated myself from friends. I have unintentionally distanced myself from the very people who keep me afloat in a sea of negativity. I have lost lifelines and lights of hope and I feel like an outsider staring in at a life fading away. In hiding myself away from pain, I’ve inadvertently caused myself and others more and I'm hoping that realising this is a step towards fixing things and towards healing myself too.

Some days I'm very defensive, take every little thing to heart and end up saying things I regret. I say things I regret a lot, my emotions are very near the surface at the best of times, but when I'm having a down day they are completely on the surface and friends and family often take the brunt of those emotions, then the anxiety kicks in and I stress out about whether they were really offended or if they understood why it happened. 

I've always had trouble meeting new people and coping with new situations, anxiety has always been a part of my life, but more so since the depression first hit. I started getting panic attacks and some of my friends have witnessed some of them, but not the worst ones. I try not to talk about them, maybe out of embarrassment maybe just because thinking about them makes that horrible tight feeling rise up in my chest again. Thankfully I haven't had any really bad ones for a long time now, but they still happen and even writing about them just now is making my chest feel tight. It's almost a conditioned response now, it makes me run and hide from whatever makes those feelings kick in. This is one reason I make excuses about not being able to do things or go places, fear. Not the there's a dinosaur chasing me and I really don't want to get eaten kind of fear, but just as powerful because it's not a dinosaur, but it is a monster. For me the anxiety and depression have become intertwined, each causing the other to be stronger or scarier and that itself is enough to cause the fear without any other outside influence.

Depression isn't something that you can just cure and it's gone like a disease, it's like that analogy of bullying with the crumpled up piece of paper, you can unroll the paper and flatten it out but it'll never be the same again, it'll always be damaged. Alcoholism is a pretty close analogy too, you can stop drinking but you'll never stop being an alcoholic.

So to my friends reading this, please don't think that just because I haven't seen you for a while or tried to make plans with you that I don't care, or that I've forgotten about you, I’m still here and I still care, I might just be stuck in a dark place hoping someone will help me find my way out again, hoping that you might know where to look.