Music Doesn't Matter to Me

My mother is dying, and not in the Buddhist, Sylvia Plath "we're all dying, all the time" way.

Her body has been compromised, the messages her cells send each other got confused, and now there is rapidly developing cancer in her lung, and most horrifically, in her brain. Just typing that disgusts me enough to taste stomach acid rising, the most brutally unfair place to become ill, a desecration on the shrine to her life, her person.

I've been staying  at home a lot, obviously, and unsurprisingly, my university work has been put on the back burner while I cope emotionally and practically.

Mum has been her usual stoic self, we don't talk about it. She just wants to sleep, drink her tea, keep on smoking (as laughably distasteful that seems), listen to her radio. She doesn't want to disrupt any of our lives.

But despite her stiff upper lip, her cancer is catching up with her. First, she couldn't make it up the stairs, so she had to stay downstairs. But she still was ok. Then she had her infection, knocking her out completely over Christmas. Back then we still didn't know she had cancer, she had kept it from us. She seemed to recover a bit, she came home, she was back to normal. It wasn't until later that she began to decline.

Now, she is frailer than I could ever have imagined her to be. She moves with a tricycle/walker that we got from the NHS, which she could use by herself at first.

I stay at home as much as I can. I stay up late, listening for her needing my help. When she could move easily by herself, getting out and into bed with no problem, zooming around with her walker, going up and down the steps no bother, it wasn't such a big deal. I went to sleep without any worry.

Then she got thinner, slower, she needed more help with getting up the little step to get into the kitchen. I started staying up late, listening in my bedroom for the telltale sound of the kitchen light flickering on, coming down and making excuses, assuring my mother that I was up anyway, and that I just wanted a tea, like her.

About 3 or 4 times a night I would sit with her until she went back to bed, trying to make conversation. I still haven't talked about her cancer, or her terminal diagnosis, with her. It feels too cruel to do it, to someone I love, who is dying, who never wanted to have the difficult conversations.

I dread when people ask me how she is. She's getting worse, more confused as the tumours annex more of her brain and more of her, she's thinner, getting lighter for her final journey. The last week or two, she has had trouble getting in and out of bed. Now there is no pretense, she knows I am up for her in the night, because she calls me to come down. She knows I stay awake. Yesterday, I had the horrible thought that all of us were just waiting to be bereaved, trapped in between two points, the names of which I am too frightened to fully acknowledge with words.

Mum was adamant that I stay in university, and so I have also been thinking of all that tedious business, in the back of my mind. Now there are some deadlines coming up, and I have threadbare theories to work with, subjects that I struggle to care about. Today, I came back to my flat near the university, and headed to the university library with my laptop, intending to bulldoze my ideas and theories until I produced something. I stared into space when I tried to read, I desperately switched to Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter when I tried to write. Without realising it, my fingers seek distractions from when I try to let my brain out of its safe space.

About 20 minutes ago, I was finally pushing my thoughts forcefully onto the Word document, rough, shoddy work, but at least it gave me a mound of clay from which I could sculpt my argument. I had stopped, just for a second, to think, or to not think, just for a second.

I had Spotify on my earphones, on shuffle, my playlist including over 9000 songs. In that dead space, my brain briefly off-lining itself while I gain momentum to write again, Amanda Palmer came on, freezing me with her words.

"Love of mine, soon you will die,
And I won't be far behind,
I'll follow you into the dark."

I sat through the entire song, not sure if I should just have skipped it, as I felt that icy boulder I have in my gut thaw, a real, bitter taste to my throat.

Embarrassed to say that I cried there. I swallowed that mysterious lump that comes from crying. I think the Chinese guy to the side of me saw that I was crying, but I'm thankful he didn't say anything.

After I got myself together again, after I grew used to the wound that the song had created, or exposed, I felt....the same? Worse? Better? My life at the moment is like a kaleidoscope of brown and grey, even when it turns and changes, it's just more of the same aching dullness.

This whole thing with my mum at first made me scared about where would she go when she died. I was raised a Catholic, then I was an atheist in my teens, and now I confess that I am agnostic. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. I don't think the picture painted in the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Qua'ran, or any other holy book is the perfect, accurate story, I don't think it is the exact blueprint for how the cosmos works. Ultimately, these religions were created, I think, to act as an adhesive for communities, creating immutable laws for everyone, and explaining unknown things. Of course, the belief in the afterlife is part of that last thing. Even knowing this, in my cold, rational brain, I can't quite believe that a person ends completely.

Part of this lack of belief in disbelief is something I can't explain without sounding mildly insane.

I have always had this sense, that the pair of eyes I look out of is a complete fluke. That I could have just as easily be looking out another pair of eyes, and using a different pair of hands, being called a different name. I have never liked labels placed on my identity, or people assuming I like this or that because I am female, or because I am straight, or English.

Because I am well aware that there is a part of me, deep in my mind, which is neither female or male. It has no sex, no nationality, no race, no preference. I would stay awake for a long time as a child, thinking about this other me, that was looking out of my eyes, knowing they were only mine by chance, and knowing that these eyes are only mine for a limited time.

As a child, when I went to sleep, this is all I would think about. As I got older, as I absorbed the culture I grew up around, I did not have so much time to reflect on this opinionless, sexless, ageless edifice in my mind, thinking instead about how I could fit in with the others, whether I'd get a job, if I would fall in love.

But that thing still lives, it has always been there, it sits, unchanging in its appreciation in the randomness of this body and this life, a dark, hard, immortal rock in ever-changing currents, the mountain my house is built into and on.

I don't know what to call it, not entirely sure if I can call it part of me, and if that it is the "real me", and the personality I have developed is just a growth. I don't want to use the word "soul," as it is too value-laden, but it suits this rock within me in some ways - it is unchanging, it watches, it is nothing but itself. If I lose both my legs, this rock of me will not be chipped, it will not be scratched, it will remain as unmoved as it always has been. I could lose my eyes, and it will only increase in its heaviness, in its presence.

If the part of me that is me is my brain, what happens when it rots? Does it rots away around this rock of me? Does the rock of me stay?

I practise my conversations. Sometimes they're conversations I'm going to have, sometimes they're from my fantasy world. Sometimes they are things I'd really like to say to people from my past. I recently came up with one to people who minimise other people's grief, who try to shrug it off.

In my first year of uni, I wasn't that great at attending class. It was my first year away from home, I had come away from a school where I was monstrously unhappy, where I had been bullied in the typical "girl" way, social exclusion, constant mean remarks. I was living in a dorm with a bunch of very loud, obnoxious people, I am genetically pre-disposed to depression, I was having to fight for my anti-depressants with the doctor at the uni who didn't want me on them. In the second semester, I was barely sleeping, I was not doing any work and I was hardly ever leaving my room.

 Having depression, for those who don't know what it's like, is like living in a hall of crazy mirrors. All you can see is yourself, deformed, in the dark, alone, repeating yourself over and over again into oblivion, each copy more grotesque than the last. It's a state of nihilistic solipsism that, if you could apply it in the same way you can apply water-boarding, would swiftly become the US armies go-to torture of choice. Because it destroys YOU. Not your body, not your health. That is all left. It is YOU, your identity, which is ripped apart. Everything and anything that you liked and valued about yourself is stripped away, and because you don't have that fixed, gold standard to go through life by, reality itself becomes seriously frayed. What's real and what's not? What was it that made me ok before? Did this make a difference? Is that what is separating me from me being ok with myself again?

There is no reason to hold onto any information, you're bad anyway. There's no reason to put up any resistance, there's nothing to fight for. It's like being terrified and bored at the same time. Terrible things are going to happen, there is no joy anymore, the neural passage way to happiness has been cut off. There are only different degrees of horrible. Eventually, you hit a plateau. Whatever happens, happens. You become stoic against your will.

I know other depression havers have reported a kind of numbing of the emotions. The Dementors in Harry Potter were an analogy for JK Rowling's depression. It's an accurate analogy, but for me it doesn't grant the utter backwardsness of the illness, how you don't really live in the world, but in a cruel facsimile, every unkindness magnified, everyone else passing by you obliviously. When the Dementors strike, everyone falls. When depression strikes, the first thing it does is make you alone.

One moment in my first year university is very clear to me. It was a moment of brutal unkindness. I can't stop thinking of the girl who is responsible.

After a long period of insularity, of wallowing in self-loathing, I managed to get myself out the dormitory door. Miraculously I was walking outside, and even more excitingly, I was actually going to a class I had been missing for the past few weeks. I remember feeling almost mechanical in the way I did this rare and special thing, going to class, as though my brain had stopped my full registering of what was happening lest the reality of being outside, surrounded by other people, strike me and turn me into a stuttering wreck of anxiety. My feet led me autonomously to the class room, my head still in the little bubble that kept me safe.

I began to feel it when I entered the classroom, however. The desks, their proximity to each other, reminded me that there would be others there. I can't remember if I debated leaving again, because I did do that a few times for other classes, but whether I did or not, the end result was that I sat down.

No one else was there yet, so I started taking out my books, still in the protective daze my nannying brain was using to cushion any sudden interactions. I was just preparing myself mentally for how I would seem when I saw one of my fellow students or the lecturer when they arrived.

There was a boy, Alex, whose surname I don't remember, and a girl, Rebekah Benley. I don't remember if they arrived together or separately. Alex took his position in the desk in front of me, while Rebekah moved to my neighbouring desk. I smiled, asked how they were, people liked it when you smiled and asked how they were. However, they didn't smile back or ask how I was. They did look at me for moments at a time, expressionless, while they went about the business of taking out their books. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, the panic piercing my protective trance. It had been several weeks into our shared course, so they had no reason to not respond to me....unless, of course, all I suspected about myself, how I wasn't truly a person, was real.

I steadied myself as best I could, and sat there in silence for a bit. I tried to find that island within us all, the place they couldn't get me, whether they liked me or not, the island where I didn't care. But my soul crushed beneath it all, and I just wanted to cry. Go back to my room. Go back to sleep.

The silence hurt after a second or a minute, can't really remember how long it was (it was 6 years ago, after all.) I had kept as up to date with our work as was possible in my self-imposed isolation - I genuinely loved the subject, immersed myself in it as much as I could. Deciding to have another shot at human interaction, I tried to be humble, I bent the truth.

"The last few chapters were really horrible. I barely got through it."

I had no trouble with any bit of that subject, at least nothing that wasn't a natural development of the learning process. Despite my constant absences, I was pretty confident at what I was doing. Still, I lied, hoping it would make them nice to me, expecting the typical type of commiseration and sharing of viewpoints that comes from talking about a subject such as ours.

Alex said nothing, just stared silently.

Rebekah snorted derisively.

"Well if you actually came to lectures, it might help." As she spoke, she turned her head away from me, giving me the side eye. I remember the way she looked at me very vividly.

I don't remember if I said anything back. I think I just stayed silent in shock, at how unneeded her meanness was. I wish I had run out, rather than remained seated next to her. I could not understand what I had done to make her hate me; yes, I was screwing up my own degree, but to no effect on her; our lecturer never asked me if I wanted to catch up, so the lessons went at a steady pace. Why did she care if I was a bad student, as long as I was generally ok to her, which I had been trying to be?

As I'm sure you can imagine, in my then-neurotic, anxious psyche, her blasé cruelty had the effect of pushing someone over after they had just struggled to their feet. It was proof positive that the world just wasn't safe. At best people would ignore you, and yet not ignore you, staring at you with the beginning of a sneer. They will rip into you for no reason, they will crucify you for mistakes you made, because only fools not worthy to live make mistakes.

 I spent the rest of the semester and the beginning of next either in my room, or at my boyfriend's, at the other end of the country. I did well in the exam, but I dropped that module as soon as I could.

I'm nowhere near as shambolic as I used to be, my view of the world is closer to what "sane" people say it is, but I still remember how it felt to be so degenerated. My depression and anxiety have scarred over certain areas of my mind, and there are some people in this world who reopened or exacerbated these problems I had/have.

Those sort of offhand, dismissive barbs that people spit must come from a very odd place. No one who has been low could do them, empathy wouldn't let you. Thrown at unassuming, muddling people, rather than anyone of threat or repugnance, shows a pathological belief in one's own supremacy. It is easy, after all, to shoot down someone who's already struggling, easy to compare oneself to them. And, even better, the comparison is clear-cut. Removed from everything in life, literally everything that might sway you in a "who is better?" competition, friends, family, kindness, intelligence, quality of life, once you wipe all that away, and keep this one cruel observation about them, well, you win. You were mean to me, Rebekah, and you won. You may not have gave me my deeply debilitating illness, but you really helped it debilitate me.

I still have never done anything like that. So I guess I've won that.