Releasing the Notes

In an older Fall Out Boy song they use the phrase “poets are just kids who didn’t make it.”

Of course, the assumption there is that “making it” is becoming a rockstar, but if you fall short of that, you can always change from writing songs to writing poetry, since they are so similar.

The thing is, I love music and musicians, and I also love poets and poetry. I love spoken word poetry (also known as slam poetry), and can spend hours watching videos of good poets online. I have written my own slam poetry, and have performed it for some college classes, but I have always felt a little self-conscious about it.

I have been soft-spoken because so many people who I have talked to about it have talked about how dumb it is. Not my poetry specifically, because I have always tried to feel people out before sharing that I write my own, but just poetry in general. The most common response is a reference to Mike Myers in “So You Married an Axe Murderer,” a movie that I have never seen and never will because of my association of the slam poetry scene with rejection.

The rejection wasn’t intentional, but part of my ADHD is rejection sensitivity, and I take rejection of my creative pursuits very personally.

Now, so much time has passed that I feel that I am too old for the genre, as it is mostly a college student thing. So, a lot of my poems will remain unheard, for now at least.

When I want to listen to some good poets I turn to two different people: Rudy Francisco, who is my favorite, and George Watsky, for his intensity.

In this post I am going to write about George Watsky, but you should look up some Rudy Francisco. He is a master of personification and metaphor, and if you like creative writing at all, you should find something you enjoy from him.

George Watsky wrote most of his poetry when he was younger. He won competitions with his poems, and even gave a TedX talk about his poetry. His writing led to him writing rap music, but with a very different feel than most of the rap in the genre because it grew from slam poetry, the opposite direction of Fall Out Boy’s statement.

He then went on to write a book, which was fun, and I think about his story about smuggling a narwhal horn across the Canadian border fairly often. I am going to like the book here, as well as my favorite book from Rudy Francisco, just because I think you should look into him. As a reminder, I make a small commission on any purchase you make through a link in this page.

Now, both slam poetry and rap music are known for many things, and one of them is the use of profane language. That being said, if you are sensitive to cussing, skip Watsky. You can find clean poems, but it will take a lot of searching.

Watsky has a song that always struck a chord with me, because it is so relatable to the self-talk that I have developed over the years. The song “Hey Asshole” not only mirrors my personal self-talk, he describes the way depression feels for me when I am in the darker times. Again, if you don’t like foul language, don’t listen.

Unfortunately, I have been really struggling lately. I am in what I would call a relapse, a moment when all the supports I have built for myself are not quite enough, and I have fallen back into being depressed. I am doing my best to exist as little as possible so as not to be a downer for everyone else. I am in a moment of going through the motions to make it to another day when I will go through the motions again. And, in the space behind the motions, as I am talking to myself, I sound a lot like this song.

Part of the first verse says:

I know I’m often told
That there’s a pot of gold
But I don’t see a ******* rainbow and my coffee’s cold
I know I should be grateful
I know I’m good and able
But I don’t have the strength to get up from the kitchen table

The first time I heard that stanza I felt understood. It was in the first year of my attempt to get better, and he said what I was feeling.

I was still in the stage where I felt that I could “get better”, that if I tried hard enough, I wouldn’t be depressed anymore. The flip side to that is that a belief that my depression was the result of the person I was.

That it was my fault.

So there was still this belief that there would be an end. In essence, I felt like there should be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cruelty of that belief is that, just like the end of any rainbow, the end is always elusive, dancing just out of reach. There may be a pot of gold at the end, but what good does that do to anyone who has figured out that there is no end.

That should be a sad thing, but it has been freeing for me. I no longer have a need to chase after an unachievable goal, one that I didn’t choose for myself, but had given to me by the hand life dealt. I wasn’t “behind” on some imagined journey toward the way I could be made right.

I realized that, in searching for the elusive moment where my depression would be healed, I was missing the little moments of joy, or the coffee in Watsky’s verse, that were right in front of me. It took me a long time to finally embrace that, to embrace that there might not be an end to this struggle before death. So, instead of trying to chase that ending, which I have done both in chasing healing and chasing death, I should learn to find the little pockets of happiness while they are present.

The second part of the verse, the part about being grateful and good-and-able, then followed by an inability to move, is similarly poignant to me. It was akin to things I have been told throughout my life, the classic “somebody has it worse” idea that discounts any emotions I have ever had. I subscribed to it for far too long; the idea that because I am not the worst off that I can’t feel anything but happiness. I was told that serving others helps you see that you don’t have it that bad.

The first time I ever told a trusted adult that I felt suicidal, I was told that they had it worse when they were younger.

I know that I have a relatively good life. I have so many blessings, growing up in a home with both of my parents, having food security, freedom, and opportunities to succeed.

I also know that none of those blessings should be used to discount my depression. That is not the way life works. In fact, that can be a really problematic view on life, because it promotes the idea that my happiness somehow is dependent upon somebody else’s suffering. It is a system entirely based on comparing myself to others in order to determine how I am allowed to feel, it gives away any power that I had over my mood to begin with.

But the part of the song that spoke to me the most was the second half of the chorus, where Kate Nash sings “I’m an assh*le, because the sun is shining, but I am not smiling, and I don’t know why.”

Another symptom of ADHD is that I will listen to a particular song over and over and over until I have drained it of all the dopamine it had available for me. During that stage of listening to this song, there were times when I would hear that line and feel so understood that I would get emotional.

Because that explains my experience with depression so well. The sun is shining, but I am not smiling.

I am fortunate.

I have so much support.

I have been able to afford therapy and medication, and I understand that there are many who can’t afford the help they desperately need. That is a conversation for a different time, but probably not one I will write.

There is so much to be grateful for.

Yes the sun is shining.

But I am not smiling.

And I don’t know why.