At some point in my life between the end of high school and becoming a mother, when I had time to ponder and plan such things, I dreamed up the perfect playlists for various moods.  I wanted to create mix-tapes (and then burned CDs) ready to roll on appropriate occasions.  When getting amped up for an evening out, high energy dance numbers.  When nursing a lonesome melancholy, low fi instrumentals and lyrics that reverberated deep in my soul.  Either way, a continuous loop of pertinent music that did not necessitate the shuffling of CD cases or channels. 

I remember especially wanting the low fi loop.  I don’t think it was so much about maintaining that mood, but that only certain sounds were tolerable during it.  If no person around me could understand how I felt, the aching melodies with which I resonated could at least reflect it.  While I wallowed, I at least had a soundtrack and a companion. 

As my own girls approached this age, my two oldest with wildly different tastes in music, the idea of emo came into being.  Outside of the scoffing my husband and I made that it had all already been done in the name of goth, there was almost a mocking attitude toward this music and lifestyle.  I got the sense that my kids and those their age who didn’t identify as emo feared turning so if they listened to the music. 

The Cure fan in me was insulted.  Why discount music based purely on the associated stereotype?  Now, I was not defending Panic! At the Disco, but I felt it was dangerous to swear off an entire category of music and its fans simply because they were misunderstood. 

And while I wore my darkness in the quiet of my teen bedroom ensconced in sound, such mocking obviously struck a chord.  What about the kids who needed a musical companion to confront or survive the darkness inside? 

That’s when I started wondering what came first: the Cure fan or the depressed teen?  Boys (and girls) about to fall out or those who already down?

Was the music a crutch or did it egg the depresso on? 

During a summer when my then three children were home on summer vacation, I discovered the book A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.  I loved it so much, I wrote extensively about it, but in describing its eponymous main character’s drastic means of dealing with his deep depression to a relative, she asked whether it was a good idea for someone dealing with her own depression to read such a novel.  Ah, I scoffed, I’ve already been so freaking low, what else can happen?  From then on, I read it with a ‘come at me’ attitude, daring the book to do its best. 

Backman’s treatment of depression and the loneliness it breeds was achingly beautiful.  He handled Ove’s character with such compassion and dignity – while also being starkly accurate.  I appreciated the unflinching reality of the illness from which I also suffered.  And yet, the realistic descriptions did bring back my own reality.  Even in memory, the feelings were difficult to relive.  Come at me, they did.

And so a few weeks ago, like a dolt, I plucked another questionable title for such a highly sensitive survivor as myself off the library shelf.  The book jacket description of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh –

“A shocking and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes”

A Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

– piqued my mental health-abstract fiction-tragic hero-loving, meaning seeking self’s interest.  Never mind that ‘ducking the world’ was high on my postpartum mother’s list.  It was like Kramer’s portrait in Seinfeld.

I wondered whether reading about a woman who obviously did not deal with her ennui by healthy means was a narrative I should entertain, but I threw it into my bag of books, alongside Clark the Shark and Elephant and Piggie. 

By the time I’d powered through the three other books I’d selected – in hopes of inspiring juvenile summer reading, but ended up reading in moments stolen between snack-getting, screeching, and screen time – I’d forgotten what the fourth book at the bottom of the bag was. 

Oh, I thought as I pulled it out. 

Reading late at night and in a bleary-eyed early morning state may not have aided my digestion of this book.  The end of the summer with kids all sick of each other and me with a new school looming over all of us may not have helped my self-esteem either.  I mentioned my possibly poor choice of books to my therapist.  She said, at the very least, you can reflect on how things could always be worse.  Which made me laugh, of course. 

Moods do tend to overcome me.  Even other people’s.  But if I pull myself out of the moment to take stock of my mood, especially in relation to everything else – the big picture as they say – I should be all right.  Even with ennui and affective moods and music.  I won’t blame my depression on Robert Smith just like I won’t become a psychotropic fiend a la the young woman having a year of rest and relaxation. 

Just as flies didn’t issue forth from mud in medieval times, moody music doesn’t cause depression.  Do people who suffer from low moods tend to gravitate toward such music?  Perhaps.  Would I be as compelled to read novels about mental illness if I didn’t suffer from a form of it myself?  Probably not. 

Everyone needs to be conscious of the media they consume – especially those who are highly sensitive.