You Shouldn’t Talk To Yourself…

… Well I pictured somebody else.

I’ve been listening and relistening to Elliott Smith’s second posthumous album, “New Moon“, paying close attention to one song in particular – “Half Right“. I’ve been pressing play over and over, and getting sucked into all these memories from when I first got stuck on this song while packing up and bringing down from the walls a puzzling, confusing year into boxes to be crammed into a car headed for New York City on a cold Ithaca morning.

I’m still amazed at how much my life can change from one year to the next, or even one month to the next, and I sometimes miss all the old me’s that exist in pinpoints in my history, echoes that make me who I am today that are, at the same time buried and lost. The more I try to turn around to see them or seek them out, the more they seem to dissolve in the timeline.

As C. and I sat talking about our experiences with therapy and antidepressants at dinner this evening, I confessed that I somehow regret having taken drugs to deal with my depression. I flip through old journals I kept when I was a teenager, and wonder where that girl went. While I recognize I’m probably much more healthy than I was before, I also mourn the loss of that voice that trembled to a whisper when I decided to take antidepressants. It’s been a few years since I stopped taking them, but I’ve never quite mustered up the same confidence and creativity I had before, even though I still write and doodle in notebooks. I haven’t completed a journal in years – I start and stop and keep multiple books open at the same time, each one storing blurbs and bits, nothing really substantial.

It’s not like I want to be deep in that hole ever again, and exploit my entrapment to prime the creativity pump. But I wonder what it would be like to sit that girl down in a chair and offer her one of my notebooks, and just watch her draw or write, doodle or sketch, color outside the lines. I’d like to get inside her head again if only for another day, and another, and then another, just so I can really remember what it was like. Maybe it wasn’t all bad to be that way, and maybe it was half-right.

Would you say that one of your dreams
Got in you and ripped out the seams?
Thats what I’d say
Thats what I’d say