A song about my anxiety... (before I knew I had anxiety)
Let me tell you something about songwriting… Sometimes, you can write a song, and it’s only after reflecting on it much later, do you actually realize what it was that you were writing about.
That is how I feel about my song: “Wake Me Up”.
I wrote that song long before I wrote my first blog post: “The Story of My Life” (Click here!) and it was also before I discovered that the vast majority of my physical symptoms were related to my own mental health.
The song was written while I was on a “Candida Diet”. The diet wasn’t working, and I was convinced that there was something physically wrong with me. I thought that I must have had an autoimmune disease, a parasite or something living inside me that was sucking the life out of me!
The first verse says it all…
Let’s look, let’s look inside
Deep down, deep down it hides
What can, what can you find?
That clouds, this head of mine…
I’m essentially telling a doctor: “You can completely dissect me… We need to find out what is living inside of me and destroy it… I can’t live like this anymore! I’m desperate Doc!”
Turns out… I finally found a doctor to dissect me… but it wasn’t my body that had to be dissected, it was my mind!
The demon that was living inside me was myself! My own cognitive processes, my automatic negative thoughts, my avoidant behaviors, and my damaged inner-child, were all clouding my head without me even knowing it
Which is why I’m such a huge proponent of psychotherapy now. Medication can definitely get someone who is ill out of a hole, but self-work is required to really address the deep seeded issues that lie within (deep down) in the first place!
With that information, let’s look at what I wrote again…
Let’s look, let’s look inside
Deep down, deep down it hides
What can, what can you find?
That clouds, this head of mine…
Wow! It’s so obvious now… I was talking about my soul!
I woke up every day, more tired than the last, not understanding why. It felt like I was waking up with the worst hangover ever, yet I hadn’t drunk for four months straight!
Wake me up, when I’m sober
Wake me up, when it’s over
And I will, I will fly
And I will, I will try
To live this life of mine
To give it one more try
One more try…
The next verse is even eerier!
What clouds, this head of mine?
A dark haze, so intertwined,
Don’t speak, of the divine,
Cause I feel, so sleep deprived…
For about two years… all I wanted to do was sleep… and wake up with this entire episode being merely a bad dream…
Wake me up, when I’m sober
Wake me up, when it’s over
And I will, I will fly
And I will, I will try
To live this life of mine
To give it one more try
One more try…
By now, I’m finding that day by day, I’m waking up feeling a bit more “sober”…
Sober (ˈsəʊbə): sedate and rational: a sober attitude to a problem.
Wake me up, when I’m sober
Wake me up…
Is this over?
So, in conclusion, is this (completely) over (yet)? I don’t know… But I promise you this… one day…
I will fly!
Joel.