Recently I read an older article on Huffington Post about a
paper published by a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Joel Gold. The paper details a disorder called “The
Truman Show Delusion.” People afflicted
by this disorder believe that they are actual real life Trumans with their
every move being broadcast around the world.
Dr. Gold cited one patient who actually believed that the terrorist
attacks on 9/11/01 were staged to be a part of the narrative of his live
broadcast. I’ll put the link at the end
of this post.
I think everyone stops occasionally in their life and tries
to plug their life into a movie or a television program. Hopefully it’s more along the lines of a
sitcom or a romcom than CSI or National Geographic and heaven forbid someone
should liken their life to a reality show.
I think it’s natural. I think it’s
part of the way we orient ourselves in the telling of our story. Our memories of movies and television shows
get wrapped up in the memories of our own experiences. After all watching these things are memories of things we’ve
experienced.
Think of it this way.
How many times have you heard something or experienced something and
something like this falls out of your mouth:
That reminds me of the time…
Yeah, we all do it.
We are all constantly interpreting our present through our past as we
put our stories together. We draw on the
material from movies because those scenes, those characters seem to have it
together. And most of them do or at
least end up getting it together by the end of the movie. It’s how their characters were written.
One of the things that we do when we draw comparisons between
our lives and the movies we’ve seen is think about the different characters who
would play the people in our lives. Who
plays our parents? Our siblings? Our friends?
That weird bachelor uncle who makes holiday dinners especially
awkward?
I think we also have a tendency to mark time in our stories
with music. It’s like a soundtrack to a
movie. How many times do we stop
conversations to say, “This is my song!” or get nostalgic when a certain songs
comes up on our playlists?
Thinking about a soundtrack for my life is a bit touch and
go because of the layers of my life and identity. There are songs that stand out in my head
with such power because of the people involved and the things that I was doing
when the song caught my attention and settled in my brain. When I hear “Nothing Compares to You” by
Sinead O’Connor I am immediately pulled back to when my world suddenly became
larger by a simple trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba.
This was a huge deal for me. Growing
up I never went anywhere but the minute I took my first walk through Winnipeg
my perspective on the world changed. All
of a sudden there were more opportunities and possibilities in life. It helped set a course for the future, fueled
daydreams and fantasies, and even now I would love to relocate to “The Peg.”
Then there are songs that are powerful because no one was
there. For example, “Parce Mihi Domine”
by Jan Garbarek. I could not stop
playing this song over and over as the storm clouds of my mind broke loose and
torrents of tears flowed down my cheeks.
To this day if I need a good cathartic cry I’ll put it on repeat. Usually in the car, when I’m alone. It’s my “forlorn and forgotten” theme, the
saxophone’s doleful wail rising above The Hilliard Ensemble’s choral perfection
as the scenes of my life pass by in slow motion to emphasize the sense of pain
and isolation.
And then there are the songs that speak volumes to moments
in my life that very few people know about or would understand. These are the songs that Troy Comets has no
problem talking about or listening to publicly.
These are the songs that usually come at moments of epiphany, like when
I first heard “Heaven” by Troye Sivan.
When I heard this song I thought two things: This song is saying things that people wouldn’t
have dared to even think let alone sing when I was growing up and thank God we’ve
come so far that artists can sing
about being whole in the face of socio-religious doctrine which insists that
parts of us are defective and evil. This
is the song that is played when I need to draw courage to speak words that need
to be spoken. If I have second thoughts
about things I write or need to boost my resolve to commit to written words that
I could never speak out loud. It’s the
song in the background as I sit at my desk, writing furiously in front of the
computer or attacking a printed manuscript with a relentless red pen.
That leaves the victorious anthem. This is the song that plays during the feel
good moments on the bounce back from dark times. It’s the one that plays under the
montage. It’s hard to pick just one
because there are so many that help define moments in my life. It’s like the classic film “Dream a Little
Dream” in which a bulk of the movie is edited together to support the
soundtrack playlist. If I were to pick
just one, today, it would be “Affirmation” by Savage Garden for the simple
reason that it captures so much of what I actually believe and for which I try
to advocate.
This is just a visual glimpse of the soundtrack that I would
put to the movie of my life. The problem
with trying to do a list like this is that so many songs don’t come to mind
until you hear them and they stir memories or connect with experiences in your
mind. As I think about how to wrap this
post up there’s a little voice in the back of my head protesting my list and
demanding to know why I didn’t include any number of other meaningful
music. Fortunately I managed to distract
that voice by asking which actor should be cast in the starring role. Who should play me?
What about you? What
music marks moments in your life? What
songs serve as touchstones for your story?
What musical artist helps you define yourself and the themes of your
story?
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