mental health

Setback

So here’s one of those things that happens that makes me wonder whether my responses to reality are inappropriate or not. Am I crazy?

They like my workshops, but they tell me I can’t continue unless I get cleared by the FBI.

Cleared by the FBI???

WTF?

I’m trying to volunteer. I’m not getting paid. I’m taking my own time and resources to drive all over the city to help people have fun improvising music, and in order to that I have to get FBI clearance? Get my fingerprints taken and put into that vast black box that our justice system uses to blackball anyone they don’t like for any reason they want?

When I grew up, the cops were being used to suppress opposition. They thought nothing of shooting at young people who were merely protesting a war that seemed to have no purpose and was killing so many of their fellow youngsters. When I was young, the feds were killing students everywhere from Kent State to Philadelphia Mississippi. It was so clear to me that the police thought like bullies and had little compassion.

Have things changed that much since then? How many people have been killed by cops in the last few months just because of the color of their skin? They were totally cooperating but it didn’t matter. They were killed because the cops couldn’t control their own fear.

My first job after college was canvassing for the equal rights amendment. We were trying to engage in political speech, going door to door, asking people for financial support, and the cops were always trying to stop us. They didn’t care about speech. They just wanted to keep strangers from knocking on their neighbors’ door. I never got arrested, but I’ve spent more time than I cared to sitting in police lobbies while they try to sort out whether we have a right to speak or not.

Nowadays, the “justice” department and the security departments have vast advances in technology that they can use to bully and intimidate people into behaving like normal people. Unfortunately, I can’t behave like a normal person even if I wanted to. I’ve got a diagnosis. I’m certifiably different from most people. Supposedly, there’s something wrong with my brain that makes me behave in ways that are against my own best interest, as other people see it. Who knows? Perhaps I am doing that now, writing this.

I’ve been a data librarian. I’ve dealt with large data bases. I know how much one can learn from seemingly innocuous data. Do I want to give away information to vast bureaucracies that engage in group think and are afraid of their own shadows? Do I want to let people have an easier time punishing me and forcing me to conform if they should ever have a desire to do so?

I can’t imagine that they would ever have such a desire. I’m a good person. But then, people have weird ideas about the mentally ill. They want to take away our right to own guns. Personally, I don’t think anyone should have a right to own a gun. I don’t think the cops should carry them around. So many people would still be alive if we didn’t have such easy access to guns. So many people would have had to find another way to kill themselves if we didn’t have such easy access to guns and guns weren’t so easy to use.

I don’t want to make it any easier for cops to make me change the way I live. Even if the chances are very low that this will happen, I don’t want to make it any easier.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that doing background checks actually make us any safer. I think using vast databases to make decisions is the lazy person’s way to evaluate others. So many people get caught up and punished forever for doing silly things. Getting drunk and getting caught urinating in public can get you banned from working with children, forever. It’s a sex offense that can get you on public lists. That’s just plain stupid.

The best way to evaluate people is to pay attention to them; to work with them; to see how they interact with the people they work for or with or who they serve. Bureaucracy is supposed to make it possible for vast organizations to control the workforce and this is supposed to be more efficient.

It isn’t. It discourages creativity and innovation. I don’t want to get caught up in these kinds of supposedly benign but secretly destructive social mechanisms.

So I don’t want to get my background checked, even though there’s nothing there to worry about. Or maybe something could show up, simply because these systems make a lot of mistakes. How many times have bill collectors harassed me on the phone because my name is so common. Never mind these other David Fords have completely different addresses. They can’t even be bothered to use the data easily available to them to figure that out. Laziness, venality and bullying seems so much easier than doing a good job, and doing a good job means nothing if you don’t fit inside the regulations that don’t accomplish what they want to accomplish. All they do is allow people to act as if they conform, thus covering their asses, while not actually improving security one whit.

Am I cutting off my nose to spite my face? Is there some kind of fear of success thing going on here? Am I letting this bureaucracy become an excuse to not try, and not take on responsibility?

I don’t know. I can’t tell. Maybe others would make those judgments, and then I could succumb to those judgments and make myself into a horrible person again, and get depressed and all that comes along with that.

All I know is that this really bothers me. It feels so wrong. If I have to do something that feels so wrong just to volunteer, then maybe I’m not really going to be able to help either myself or others this way. So maybe I just need to find some other way to do music with people. Maybe I can’t help in psychiatric rehabilitation facilities. Maybe I have to start my own operation, and try to run classes where people can choose to come to me, instead of being forced into attendance because that’s what they have to do to get their meals and SEPTA passes. I want people to do this work who want to do the work, not because they have to satisfy the unthinking rules of big bureaucracy. Maybe that’s not the place for me.

That’s my case for myself. That’s my case against myself. I really have no idea whether I’m fooling myself or this is just the way I feel. I’m so used to not being able to honor my feelings that this throws me. Should I contort myself to be good and be liked or will that send me back to place that made me depressed?

The irony, is that these organizations are trying to help people with mental issues such as anxiety and depression. I need therapy, too. This work is my therapy. But do I have to submit to their rules, and thus shove myself down again, in order to be allowed to be helpful to others and to myself? Would that even work? Or would it all be counterproductive?

I don’t know. My therapist says “I don’t know” is a part of myself that I use to avoid my feelings. I’m pissed off. Does it matter if my anger is justified or not? I’m angry and that comes from fear that these systems will squash me yet again. I don’t trust these huge bureaucratic systems. The individuals in them are surely well-meaning, but the systems they develop take on a life of their own, and that’s dangerous, particularly to marginalized people like the mentally ill, or people who aren’t white or especially, people who are both.

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“Who’s they?” He wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
“Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.
Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Anyone not paranoid in this world must be crazy. . . . Speaking of paranoia, it’s true that I do not know exactly who my enemies are. But that of course is exactly why I’m paranoid.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Edit: I went to a meeting of the West Philly Icarus Project tonight and told this story.

The Icarus Project is a support network and education project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness. We advance social justice by fostering mutual aid practices that reconnect healing and collective liberation. We transform ourselves through transforming the world around us.

There were fifteen people there and three of them came up to me afterwards to tell me that they had been required to give their fingerprints in order to work in the mental health field. One of them had been fingerprinted seven times. None of them felt that the process was anything other than busy work. They didn’t seem to believe that anyone was safer because of it. I’m not sure they shared my indignation about big brother, but in any case, it was nice to know I’m not the only one who has problems with this.

Maybe it is worth trying to fight this senseless and worthless bit of do-nothing, feel good legislation. In any case, I’m sorry I won’t be able to work with people who could probably really benefit from what I’m doing. Maybe there’s a way around this. If anyone has any ideas, please add a comment.

The Music Workshop Live!

It works!

I’m kind of high right now because the response to the first two workshops I gave was so enthusiastic. I’m so excited right now, that I did a bunch of research and correspondence in the last few hours. I really, really don’t like passive engagement, just interacting with a screen and my imaginary ideas about the people I’m writing to. I’ve done too much of that in my life and it leads me far away from the kind of human connection I really want.

Leaving these workshops, I’m feeling so open, I can talk to anyone. After each one, I had a pretty intense conversation with people on the street! Yesterday, right after I crossed the street from a support center on Germantown Ave, I looked into the eyes of a man, something I would ordinarily never do. He looked so interesting, though, that I felt like I knew him, and weirdly, he thought he knew me, as well. Maybe it’s that we were both feeling open to the world at the time.

He was about my height. Skin the color of light chocolate. A big, almost Muslim beard, but a bit bushier. His brown eyes were intense, and he engaged my gaze directly, but without threat, nor urgency. He was present. He had that aura of a street person, but his clothes were clean, and he didn’t ask for money — not right away, anyway.

“Don’t I know you?” He asked.

“I don’t think so.” It was a strange feeling, feeling like you know someone, but not recalling ever having seen them before.

“Do you drive a red Cadillac,” he asked?

“No. That must be someone else. You’re the second person today who thought he knew me. I just gave a music workshop across the street,” I pointed down the street to the entrance to The Wedge.

“I did an improvisational music workshop,” I said. Then, volunteering, “It’s for people with…” I jabbed my finger towards my head. “I have bipolar disorder.”

“I have bipolar disorder, too. I’ve got a lot of problems. I need some help — finding some place to live. Could you help me out?”

Oh the struggle in my head. I dearly wanted this to be one of those cool encounters where you just meet a kind of kindred spirit. Giving him money would make me feel like I was paying him to talk to me. I fished out my wallet, anyway, and gave him a dollar.

“The music helps with the depression and the self-hatred. It’s like a mini-vacation from all the crap that goes on in my head.”

“I play the guitar.”

“Do you know about the center across the street?”

“No.”

They have a lot of services there. They help you get a place to live. They get you medical care. They’ve got a bunch of things for people to do. Like the music thing I’m doing.”

We talked a little bit more, and then said goodbye with a handshake and a little “bro” hug.

Today, the workshop at another location of the support center was a lot more energetic. I tell my story about how this workshop came to be, and then I enter into the first exercise, which is a short meditation designed to ease people’s fear of what others might think of the sounds they make. Even before I asked people to start making sounds, some of the people were. It made me relax, because I knew I wouldn’t have to do much coaxing.

A lot of people were making a low, guttural sound, like an idling motor boat. It felt like it was coming from deep inside, without any filters. There were a few self-conscious laughs here and there, but there were just as many people who were already lost in the sound.

The next exercise generated most of the high. It’s the name game, where we each take a turn singing our names together with a movement. Later on, I recall the movement and I can recall people’s names. Normally, I would forget their names right away — maybe even before they said them.

The person on my right was a staff person. Maybe a ringer, but she was so genuinely enthusiastic about this exercise that she was free in making up her song and movement, as well as improvising later on when we repeated her name. The group developed a rhythm and even the reluctant people were encouraged to step up and after that, everyone was on board. I got back so much energy from their enthusiasm that I’m still buzzing hours later.

Out on the sidewalk after the workshop, I struck up a conversation with one of the people from the workshop. He ended up telling me about how tough his life had been. How dangerous it was; how many people had died; how he’d spent time in jail; in the shoe, and so on.

It was like the music totally opened him up. He started telling me about his brother.

“He was in the hospital with a stroke. When I went to pick him up, I had to carry him to the car. His legs were paralyzed.” He was choking up as he remembered this scene, and as he struggled to hold back his tears, he turned away from me a little. I stood there, letting him be. Remembering my therapist telling me to feel my feelings. You feel them, and they start to dissipate. They’re no longer something you run away from and do all kinds of stuff to keep from feeling them.

“Will you be coming back?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Those people,” he said, pointing back inside, “They don’t get it. They hear what I’m telling you and they’ll use it against me.”

I think he was expecting me to judge him for the things he’d done. I just wanted him to be able to tell his story, and I’m a little bit amazed at how powerful music can be to help people have fun and open up the things they’ve kept hidden, if they feel safe enough to do so. I respect that as a sacred trust. I’m not going to name names or share too many details about what happens. Just enough to give an idea of how powerful this work can be.

I am gaining confidence about it. I’m a bit in awe. I know that people are lonely and isolated and desperately want to be their true selves and share the real stuff with others. I know that because I know how isolated I’ve been. I know where that has led me.

By sharing that with others, and by teaching them a way to create the safety they need, perhaps this can help them heal. At the least, it can help them cope, as it has helped me. I can’t guarantee that anyone will be safe. But I hope that I can teach folks methods to create that safety for themselves. Perhaps they will learn how to build trust with each other.

How I will use this Blog

From time to time, I will post my thoughts about playing in the Sonic Sandbox. The charter membership is made up of three or four of us. We all met in the “recovery rooms,” which is jargon for the rooms where people meet at twelve step meetings. Because we met that way, we may or may not actually know each other’s names. The key to twelve step recovery is anonymity. Most of us only feel safe enough to talk about what is really going on inside when we have some measure of protection about our deepest shames becoming public knowledge.

For that reason, I only know the first names of the people I play with in the Sonic Sandbox. I will also not be able to provide any more details about what kind of twelve step group it is, nor what troubles we are dealing with that brought us together. I hope that won’t matter. What is important is that playing in the Sonic Sandbox has become a part of our recoveries. It is a coping technique that helps us learn to change our habits from ones that are destructive to both us and the people we love to ones that, we hope, will be a lot healthier.

The idea of making music together, I believe, was first discussed by Bob and Kurt. Bob plays electric violin and Kurt plays electric guitar. Bob also told me that Kurt was a singer. When I heard they were going to do some music together, I decided that I wanted to crash that party. I wanted to play with other people, because I had stopped playing for over a year, as a punishment to myself for harming people I loved. This was an opportunity to get together in a way that wouldn’t contribute to my problems. In the past, music had opened the door for me to get into trouble.

I knew I needed music because of what it does to my brain. I helps me access my sense of connection to others. As such, it directly counteracts the feeling of loneliness and isolation I was living in. It gave me respite from despair and hopelessness. It provided a few moments of relief from what felt like a black hole in the pit of my stomach, that was slowing down light as well as weighing me down. My life, for a time, felt slow and miserable and impossible — except for those moments when I was connected to others, primarily through music.

Then, I decided I was such a bad person, that I didn’t even deserve any relief at all. I stopped playing music. I stopped dancing. I stopped socializing. I stopped talking to friends and family members. I stopped working. I stopped using the phone. I simply couldn’t.

Finding people I felt safe to be with and to make music with was a miracle for me. It started at my house. Kurt and Bob and Ralph started coming over on Tuesday evenings to play together. Not all of them every single time. Sometimes it was only two of us.

I used my background in improvisational music to come up with games that would help us develop a practice. At first, we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We thought about writing music or songs. We thought about being a rock band. We’re still open to any ideas that anyone wants to bring to our practice, but mostly we started playing together using these improvisational games I either borrowed from others I have learned from, or that I made up myself.

I started recording our sessions, and then listening to the recordings, and after a while, I started thinking that maybe we had something that other people would enjoy. Maybe we were developing a process that could help others gain the benefits we were gaining. Maybe we could play for others and with others in more public situations.

To date, we’ve played for others in a formal way three times. We’ve given the workshop once in a formal setting (a twelve step group retreat). We enjoyed ourselves on each occasion, and we also got some positive feedback, which felt good. The workshop went over very well, and our last performance generated an amazing amount of energy. It got a group to get up out of their audience roles, and some played music with us, while others danced. It was a regular party!

I am beginning to see a future for this play for us. We can do the workshop at parties, or for people interested in learning how to make music together (no experience required). The workshop is also good for people in recovery, both from addictions and from mental illnesses. It provides a coping technique that gives people relief from the pain these things can bring.

Performing also brings people together, both as audience members and participants. It provides another way to connect with others, and, I hope, it helps to break down judgmental barriers that often come between us. It is great fun for us to be the spark plugs that generate the energy of connection within groups of people we do not yet know.

So, from time to time, I will post my descriptions and reactions to these events — our practices and our outreach to others. This may primarily be my thoughts, but I hope that other members of Sonic Sandbox will also want to post their thoughts, too. Until next time… I hope we can play in the sonic sandbox together one day soon.

The Rules of Play in the Sonic Sandbox

Making our Sandbox Safe

Sonic Sandbox re-imagines the playgrounds of our childhood. For many, these playgrounds were places where we played without thought, just for fun. For some, they were places where they could be ostracized or bullied. The Sonic Sandbox is dedicated to creating a safe place for playing together without feeling judged or made wrong. The rules are simple:

Listen. Find something interesting in every sound.
Support others by copying them.
Take turns riffing off what others are doing
Make sure everyone gets a chance to develop their solo voice.
Guard everyone else in the group.

The Sonic Sandbox is a place to practice acceptance. There are plenty of opportunities to beat ourselves up in the rest of the world. It is easy to feel criticized and then take that further: to join in and criticize yourself. This is what stops people from playing.

When I was in third grade, someone from the instrument rental store came in to demonstrate all the instruments. When he played the trumpet, I knew instantly that that was my instrument. My parents rented a cornet for me (because it was easier for a kid to hold) and I started taking lessons with a high school student.

Later on, I took lessons from adults, eventually studying with Walter Chestnut, the trumpet professor at the University of Massachusetts. I loved the trumpet, and Mr. Chestnut was a very jovial teacher, who rarely made me feel that bad when I hadn’t practiced.

I was studying classical music, which was the only thing I really knew about in those days. My parents listened to classical music at home. I knew little about jazz or even popular music, except that when I heard “Never on Sunday,” Herb Albert became one of my favorite trumpet players. I still own several of his albums — on vinyl.

I loved playing my horn, and I joined the junior high and high school bands, and was in the local youth symphony. It was great, except for two things: soloing and competition. It was (and still is) the practice for most students of classical music to have to perform in recitals as a part of our training. Another problematic custom for me was having to challenge others in the band for the first chair — the one who always played the melody line and who, on occasion, also took the solos.

I think that all my life I have had a love-hate relationship with wanting to be a star and hating the pressure of trying to be a star. I wanted to take the solos and be first chair because it carried some prestige and because we got to play the most interesting parts. I hated playing in recitals or taking solos in band concerts because if I screwed up, everyone would hear it and know who had made the mistake.

In classical music, most listeners are pretty familiar with the music, and so they know when performers make mistakes. When I was growing up, it became a kind of game to catch people out — especially the more famous people. I guess it might have made them seem more human and approachable. Unfortunately, when it was time to play the solos or the recitals, I imagined the audience and my fellow musicians (especially my teacher) were only listening for my mistakes.

There is a long, complicated, and amazingly common psychology behind this. I’ll simply say that in my family, making mistakes was a really bad thing that would get you a lot of scorn. Classical music just built on the neuroses I learned in my family. The culture of star worship in the United States also reinforced this message, and thus, every solo, for me, became a period of terror, as I knew I would have ample opportunity to make a glaring mistake (or more than one) that everyone would know about.

As a result, I couldn’t really enjoy the music. I was too concerned with not screwing up to enjoy myself.

I’ll tell the story of how I learned to get over this fear another time, but the main thing I learned that has lead me to try to create the Sonic Sandbox is that I need a place where there are no mistakes. A place where people will not be looking for mistakes. That means, I learned in David Darling’s Music for People workshops, that I need to learn a different way of listening.

If we listen for what there is to enjoy in music instead of listening for mistakes, both musicians and listeners will get a lot more enjoyment from it.