See, there's a quiz going around. I'm a sucker for these things. Back in the heydays of Livejournal, I used to make fun of people who would post every silly little quiz that came along. Then I'd post a good portion of them, too.
I know. If I ever get a tattoo, it should probably be the word "hypocrite". In cyrillic script, because being vaguely cryptic is cooler than stating things outright. Not that I would ever do anything because it's cool. *cough*
(Speaking of LJ... remember when you needed an invite code to join the beta? I do. And I did. And, call me a crotchety half-luddite if you like, but things were better back then. You know--when the internet was still a haven for the disaffected soulful/intellectual types on the fringes of our culture and there weren't any image search services that can look you up by your FACE.)
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| ID THIS, BITCHES |
The quiz is about songs and pretty much goes like this:
1) What's the first song you bought?
2) What song gets you dancing?
3) What song takes you back to childhood?
4) What's the perfect love song?
5) What song do you want played at your funeral?
6) What song IS you?
What fun! I'm always making playlists like this in my head.
In fact, a big part of my "recovery" (bwahaha, riiight) from Unnamed Traumatic Event(s) involved making a sort of interior musical scrapbook. I used to work on this when I would go out running, especially. It was a bit like a memory palace. For each song I chose for this project, I'd pull out associated memories and images and mentally paste them on a page of the book. Sometimes I'd make a "video" to go with the song. These weren't necessarily negative images, just relevant ones, often symbolic interpretations and stories rather than literal memories.
When I was done with the book, I mentally put the entire thing in a fire. Now I don't have it anymore. I did not forget what occurred in real life that impacted me so gravely (nor would I want to), but I did succeed in making select maladaptive aspects of the aftermath into something apart from myself and therefore less poignant. I don't mean that I made myself unfeeling, in case that's not already starkly obvious from my ongoing bloggy tales of woe and uber-sensitivity. More like... on a scale of 0-100, with zero being a cold, affectless psychopath and 100 being the extreme level of emotional pain that results in attempts at self-termination, I rappelled carefully and slowly down from level 95 to, say, 71. Not from 100 straight to zero... which--aside from being undesirable--is probably in most cases impossible.
On a side note... oddly enough, I actually have forgotten virtually all of the images that I chose for the mental scrapbook, as if my record of it really were obliterated when I "burned" it. I find this a wee bit spooky, the degree to which we can hack ourselves when we really try (or when we luck out in the way we go about it, I suppose). But it's also very useful, so I'm not complaining.
I should note that I don't necessarily recommend this technique of mine. I made it up myself and have no idea if it would be harmful to someone else.
On second thought, I have so much to say about this, it's gonna be a 6-part series. Seven, counting this intro. Brace yourself.
Linkin Park - Burn It Down
(It's a pleasure. Not a guilty. =p)
3 comments:
Mental scrap book burning, that's amazing. Cannot imagine it being for everyone. Coming to it on your own probably had a lot to do with its effectiveness but what a neat idea. It's a little scary actually, reminiscent of 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.'
Yet another much-recommended movie that I have yet to see! Netflix makes it so easy to think about seeing movies and never see them.
Oh, but you really MUST see it. It's on Netflix, you just have to take that push-play leap. As the opportunism-as-sport type might say, in full-fledged optimistic sincerity, Make it happen.
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