Tag Archives: depression

IF ANYBODY COULD HAVE SAVED ME, episode 3: A Dream

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”

― Stephen King, The Body

As a kid, I lived in a rural neighborhood a few miles outside of our town proper. I spent most of my childhood there—first with my grandparents after most schooldays while my parents worked, and then when my parents, my brother, and I moved into a house down the street from my grandparents’ old one. Over all those years, I made the best bunch of friends I’ve ever had.

Like most groups of young friends, our relationships ran the full gamut, from genuine romantic love and deep loyalty to fistfights, breakups, gossip, and pretty much any other assholish behavior you can imagine. And yet, no matter what petty crap splintered us on any given day, we always gravitated back to each other. In one of my ongoing projects, I’m writing a series of essays about us. One has been published. A couple of others are in progress; more currently idle in the “here’s an idea to write about” gear, their engines thrumming with the energy of the untold. To get a sense of our closeness and our escapades, you might want to check out this piece. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you’re still with me, I should confess that, when I write nonfiction about people I know, I usually change their names. These people have families that might not want to read about their parents’ misspent youth. The girls in the above essay, who have been women now for a long time, figure prominently in today’s piece. Though every member of our neighborhood gang always seemed equally valued, excepting those melodramatic moments when we fought or argued, many of my most vivid memories from that time involve Kelly, Heather, and a couple of guys simply because we lived really close to each other. We never had to seek each other out. Walk outside of my house, and there stood Kelly. Amble down to my friend Gene’s place, and you might find Heather and Kelly in his yard.

I have revealed in other writings that I have long felt at odds with the world, out of place, without a tribe. My point here is to tell you that if I’ve ever truly felt like I belonged with a decent-sized group, it was with the kids of Rolling Acres outside Crossett, Arkansas. Now long removed from any romantic entanglements with any of them, I don’t feel the least bit weird in telling you that I still consider them all family. Even the ones who grew up and devoted themselves to the Far Right. Even the Second-Amendment-torturing gun-lovers. I would do just about anything for those people. And I know—know—that at least some of them would still do just about anything for me, including overlooking my unapologetically loud Left-wing mouth.

But still.

Ever since I moved out of that neighborhood when I got married the first time (that would be the summer before my senior year) and gradually began to lose touch with my friends, I have never felt at home in the world. I don’t belong among artists, because I feel like nobody reads/shares/likes my work, and when I go to AWP, I often have to search far and wide for someone who cares enough to say hi. No one offers a recommendation to their editor or agent. No one tells me how much they loved my piece in Journal X and how they’d like me to submit something to their publication. I don’t say this in a self-pitying way, though I know that’s how it sounds. I say it as an observation I’ve made about my own life. Despite my publications and online presence, most writers/editors/agents/readers don’t think about me.

I don’t feel at home among my extended family. My positionality as a pansexual, non-traditional Christian Leftist means I have little in common with most of them. I also don’t hunt or fish, and my college football loyalty lies with LSU, not the Arkansas Razorbacks, given that I actually went to and graduated from LSU. These are only a few reasons I am an outlier from my family—whom, I should clarify, I still love very much and who still love me.

I don’t feel at home among large groups of academics, as I have little patience for the politics of the academy, or its bureaucracy, or how some members always believe they are one hundred percent right all the time. I greatly value my academic friends, but I have no desire to attend MLA or write an article that will be trashed by a peacocking, territorial assclown.

Plus, I’m an introvert, meaning, in part, that I value my alone time. That may mean that I am literally alone, writing in my office, or that I’m home with my wife and kids and pets, or that I’m at an intimate gathering of a very few friends. It may mean I’m an anonymous part of an enormous crowd, doing wild shit that I probably shouldn’t do anymore. I am perfectly at home in big cities, in downtown Las Vegas, on the Strip, in the French Quarter at one AM on a Saturday night. I would be perfectly at home in Times Square, alone or in a small group. Just don’t stick me at a cocktail party and ask me to chit-chat. I don’t know how.

In short, except with my immediate family and a handful of friends, I feel alone, isolated, marginalized most of the time. Even when it’s just a matter of my depression and anxiety causing my perceptions to misfire, it still feels real. And so I look back fondly at that time of my life when I was one of a couple dozen kids who are close enough to feel like family after thirty-plus years apart.

My depression and anxiety whisper in my ear a lot, even when I’m asleep. Sometimes they tell me that my second family, the one I chose all those years ago, doesn’t want me, either. Hence the dream.

It happened around a week from the time of this writing, bleeding out of another dream I don’t remember and into another I would also later forget. But this one—it stuck with me. It hurt. It still does, even though it was only a dream.

In it, I traveled back to Crossett for some kind of reunion. My wife, Kalene, came with me, as did my son, Brendan, and my younger daughter, Maya. We rode into town with my Mom and Dad, the latter of whom was driving, even though we rode in a muscle car I had rented at the airport—a Winchesters-worthy Impala, an old Challenger, something like that. It was black, with black interior. It should not have been large enough to seat six people comfortably and hold all our luggage, but such is the logic of dreams.

After we piled our bags onto the ground, I shut the trunk.

“Where are the keys?” my Dad asked.

I patted myself down. “I don’t have them. Didn’t you take them out of the ignition?”

“Yeah, but I handed them to you.”

We turned to the car. Somehow—the logic of dreams—we could see into the shut trunk, and there lay the keys.

My father turned to me and scowled. “Great.”

“But I didn’t do it.”

“You never take responsibility for anything.”

That stung. I take pride in my responsibility. I am not, by nature, responsible. I have had to work at it, for my wife’s and kids’ sake, for self-preservation. Same with discipline, not rebelling against every kind of authority all the time, keeping my temper. It was like he said one of the most hurtful, untrue things he could imagine, this dream version of my Dad.

He called a locksmith. Apparently, he had fastened his housekey onto the rental’s ring, and so we were doubly locked out.

“I guess I’m sorry,” I said, still hurt.

He hung up. “They’re on their way. It’s going to cost seven hundred dollars.”

“What? Why that much?”

“Because that’s what it costs. You don’t get to decide everything.”

“Look, I’ll just put it on my credit card, okay? You don’t have to pay a cent.”

“That fixes everything, right?”

I didn’t know what he meant. Dad and Mom stalked off, leaving our bags beside the car.

The neighborhood we returned to was not the one I grew up in—or, rather, it was, but a dream version, where our square-shaped rural geography had morphed into an inside-town geometric grid of streets and cross-streets, much smaller squares and rectangles, houses with yards governed by HOAs.

My parents, our bags, Kalene, and Maya disappeared from the dream. My son had wandered off somewhere when the reunion party started at a nearby restaurant with a large outdoor space, round tables and straightback chairs and porch swings hanging from the building’s outcropped roof. I recognized almost no one.

Whose reunion is this? I wondered. Why am I here? Who invited me?

And then I saw Kelly.

If you followed the link above, you know that she was my sometime-girlfriend, the first human being I felt a kind of romantic love for. Maybe the first person I ever truly loved, period. In real life, she is now married, and when I saw her in my dream, the joy swelling in my heart had nothing to do with two kids’ past relationship. It was just seeing her, my old friend. For the first time since arriving, I felt at home.

I had been drinking. I don’t know what, or where it came from, just that I always had a highball glass in my hand. Knowing me, it was Jack Daniels and Coke or straight Jameson. Ice cube clinked against each other. I can still feel the glass’s cold roundness in my waking hand.

Kelly was drunk, too. Some kind of music played at high volume, and people danced, and when Kelly stumbled, four guys caught her so that she lay in their arms as if in a human hammock. It seemed choreographed. She saw me as the men began to spin, twirling her. She smiled.

I walked to them and held out my hand. As she spun by me, she held out hers, and our fingers brushed each other. Over the music, the crowd said, “Awwwwww.”

Then I was sitting in one of the swings, next to Heather, who patted me on the knee and said, “Good to see you.” Then, drink in hand, she turned to someone standing near the swing and started a conversation. I sat there for a long time, only inches from my good friend of thirty-something years, but we never spoke again. Soon, she was gone.

So was everyone else. It was daylight, and the street was empty. No one worked in their yard. A party might never have occurred, or else someone had cleaned the area until it was unnaturally pristine. I could only see one person—my son, who sat at one of the restaurant’s tables, eating a sandwich and looking at the still houses. The sun shone on him, bathing him in sparkling light, as if God had put a finger on his shoulder. Love and loneliness swelled within me in equal measure, my chest nearly bursting under their pressure, as when you hold your breath too long.

I got up and went to Brendan’s table. I sat across from him and watched him eat. Nothing around us made a sound.

Finally, he said, “So. How was the reunion?”

I gestured, taking in the empty restaurant, the uniform yards, the still houses.

“These are my friends,” I said. “This is my family.”

“Huh,” he said.

And then I woke up.

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If Anybody Could Have Saved Me: Battling Depression at Mid-Life–Part II–Revision of an Existing Sadness

With apologies to Stephen Crane:

A man said to the Universe,

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the Universe,

“the fact is that nobody

gives a fuck. So why are

you still here?”

Publication Announcement related to If Anybody Could Have Saved Me

The essay originally written as part 1 of If Anybody Could Have Saved Me: Battling Depression at Mid-Life has been traditionally published on rolereboot.org. Please take some time and read it here.

If Anybody Could Have Saved Me: Battling Depression at Mid-Life– Preface

Depression sometimes feels like drowning. You’re wading in a river, and the bank drops from under your feet, and you realize that someone filled your pockets with stones. Perhaps it was you. You fight with all your might, trying to surface, but your lungs burn and your muscles ache and the light gets dimmer until darkness seems like an old friend.

Another take: David Foster Wallace, the great writer and suicide, once said that depression is narcissistic. Though I doubt he meant it as a universal truism, and I certainly don’t take it that way, I understand his point. When you feel emotionally crippled and physically ill because of your life, your career, how people perceive you, and so forth, it’s easy to dismiss your reactions, your very emotional health, as navel-gazing. Admitting that there is a certain amount of narcissism inherent in depression, though, I think such a blanket dismissal of its legitimacy would be a mistake.

If you’re not going to dismiss it or just try to “suck it up” and ignore it, though, what do you do?

I’m a writer, so my first instinct is to write about it.

Going DFW one better, I think there must be an element of narcissism in any personal essay or memoir. It’s far from the only or most representative element in those genres, but it’s there. To believe that some story from my own life might be entertaining or enlightening to others is to assign myself value. The same is true when I “write for myself,” at least when I subsequently publish those works.

I suppose that this project therefore represents a double-dose of narcissism, but those who know me can tell you that, like much of my work, it also originates in a deep and well-earned sense of self-loathing. I am not doing this to make myself look good or sympathetic, nor am I doing it to punish myself. I am writing it to understand and deal with my depression. At the very least, I hope my doing so can help remind other depressed people that they are not alone.

I first proposed this project as a kind of dark joke on Facebook. “I am thinking of honest-blogging about my struggle with depression,” I wrote, “but my depression tells me nobody would read it or care.” I expected to get a few “ha-ha” reactions and, perhaps, a couple of well-wishes. The status update hardly went viral, but it produced more responses than I imagined. Between comments, which are still appearing as of now, and personal messages, at least two dozen people have encouraged me to share. “Perhaps,” I thought, “there’s a space for something like this, maybe even a need.” More specifically, since the depression blog/memoir could well constitute its own sub-genre, maybe there is a space for my contribution.

As for what that contribution will be, it’s anybody’s guess. I don’t have a specific structure or form in mind. I would imagine that some entries will be long and detailed, like book chapters or personal essays. Others will probably read like journaling. Sometimes I may tell you about what I’ve fought through on a given day; sometimes I may recount an experience or a hope/fear for the future. Some posts may be only one or two sentences long, or contain only a single image, or read more like a prose poem. If I solidify my own conception of what this project is over time, I’ll let you know.

What I can tell you at this point is that it’s not my only focus. I teach five English classes a semester. I am working on several writing projects besides this one: several stories and essays, a potential novel, and a script I’m tinkering with. I’ve got a wife, three kids, a son-in-law, a granddaughter, a cat, and a dog. And as a narrative junkie, I read and watch movies and television all the time. If some time passes between entries, keep checking back, or join my mailing list. I’m probably just buried in work. I’ll be back eventually, God willing.

I can also predict that, like most of what I call my “freebies”—works I post on my site, rather than trying to publish them traditionally—these entries will be rawer, not as exhaustively drafted and edited, less organized. I’m trying to do something that’s very difficult for me—share intimate details about my life and emotions—and if I think about it too much, I may well dilute or even ruin the work.

Now, a warning. Some of my content may be disturbing. You might find descriptions of live-wire nerves, rock-bottom anguish, poor behavior, harsh language, violent acts, sex, and more. I hope you’ll also find humor and love and light. Life is, after all, good, and I am quite lucky and blessed. That’s one reason my depression is so maddening. That’s one reason I need to understand it.

Join me, won’t you? The waters are choppy and filled with jagged rocks, but if we work together, you and I, we might just find our way back to shore.

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Songs for Divorce

Back in the early 1990s, my life pretty much imploded. I had gotten married just before my senior year in high school. The bride was the person I would point to as my “high school sweetheart,” whatever that means. Without delving too far into the details—a soul-wrenching undertaking that I shall save for other columns, or my memoirs, should there ever be any interest in my writing them—I can safely tell you here that our divorce knocked my world off its orbit. I have often said that we loved each other deeply but didn’t like each other very much. I still think that’s accurate, at least from my perspective. She was the first person I ever truly loved, and though our lives together turned almost unspeakably ugly, the death of our marriage destroyed my concept of “forever” and my faith in relationships in general. It took a long time and much trial and error for me to recover in substantive ways.

When I think about that time period, my memories are inextricably linked to my life’s soundtrack. I don’t remember exactly which books I was reading, what films I was watching, or what TV shows I followed, but I remember the music.

Often, after the latest kick in the teeth, I would get in my car and just drive. My piece of junk had no air conditioning, so I would roll down the windows, crank up the volume, and hit the road, the wind whipping my hair as I banged my head and sang along, not caring who heard. Some of the songs appealed to me because of their lyrics. Others fit my mood perfectly through their tones, their tempos. Some did both.

When I think of that time period, these songs play on a loop in my head. It’s always in stereo, always loud. If you’re going through your own personal hell, you’ll probably find your own soundtrack, much of which might well be more contemporary or, possibly, more historically widespread. You might, though, want to consider the music that follows. Much of it will probably mirror how you feel. Some of it might help uplift you just when you need it most. In any case, for those who want to join me, here’s a little window into my past—my own personal songs for divorce, in no particular order.

The Singles:

1.         “What’s Up,” 4 Non Blondes.

“Twenty-five years and my life is still / Trying to get up that great big hill of hope / For a destination…”

I was not yet twenty-five, but with all my plans dashed to pieces, I identified with the struggle to reach one’s goals. I no longer had any destination in mind. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that the only possible destinations were jail or a cemetery. That sounds melodramatic, I know, and it was, but to my younger self, it was real.

“And so I cry sometimes / When I’m lying in bed / Just to get it all out / What’s in my head / And I am feeling a little peculiar / And so I wake in the morning / And I step outside / And I take a deep breath and I get real high / And I scream at the top of my lungs / What’s going on?”These lines eerily nail what I was going through at the time. In my life, I have almost never cried, not even when I should have. But during this period, I would often awake to find tears on my pillow. I sometimes cried while watching sitcoms. Sometimes the tears echoed the aching sadness I was feeling; sometimes they were expressions of a dangerous rage. But that need to get out of your own head, to scream, to hit something or someone—I could relate to all that. And for me, the words “What’s going on?” took on a special importance, because I honestly had no idea what had happened, how life had come to that point.

A lot of people dismiss this song, and the band that produced it, as an early-90s lark. As for me, I still remember how I felt back in those days, and when I hear this song now, I feel grateful that I can understand it in a different context.

2.         “Jet Airliner,” The Steve Miller Band.

“Goodbye to all my friends at home / Goodbye to people I’ve trusted / I’ve got to go out and make my way / I might get rich you know I might get busted / But my heart keeps calling me backwards / As I get on the 707 / Ridin’ high I got tears in my eyes / You know you got to go through hell / Before you get to heaven…”

A song with multiple personality disorder, “Jet Airliner” combines the desire to get the hell away from your current situation with the knowledge that wherever you go, there you are. The above verse of the song says goodbye to important people in one’s life and suggests that the speaker desperately needs a change, even one for the worse (rich or busted). I especially identified with the idea of going through hell to get to heaven; I desperately wanted to believe that something better lay in my future (spoiler alert: it did).

If this verse was all about leaving, though, the chorus reminds us that we can never truly get away from ourselves: “Big ol’ jet airliner / Don’t carry me too far away / Oh, Oh big ol’ jet airliner / Cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay.” Take me away, but not forever. Let me leave and find myself again, but know that I want to come back. With my family, my friends, my daughter, and my work, I had too much in my life that I could never leave. Too much that I would never want to give up.

The need to go, the need to stay, pulling you in opposite directions, ripping you in two—I heard all of that whenever I listened to this song.

3.         “Already Gone,” The Eagles.

Every single lyric in this song—as well as its up-tempo, celebratory nature—appealed to me back then. It’s really a “screw you” song, and I needed a few of those. A couple of examples:

“Just remember this, my girl, when you look up in the sky / You can see the stars and still not see the light (that’s right).” The image of a woman seeing but not understanding really got my blood pumping in those days. Not “woman” as in “women in general,” of course—I always pictured my ex. I believed that she did not understand me. I believed that one day, she would realize what she had given up and would look to the heavens for some answer to the question, “Now what do I do?” It was the same question I was asking so often, and the petty, revenge-seeking part of me really wanted to be there when the epiphany happened.

The verse that appealed to me most, though, went like this: “Well I know it wasn’t you who held me down / Heaven knows it wasn’t you who set me free / So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains / And we never even know we have the key.” Those lines were so prophetic that they sent chills down my spine. I knew that I had not been happy in our marriage, but I also knew that the decision to stay—or to leave—had been mine. I had been the key to my own liberation for all that time. Even though leaving cost me a great deal, it was still the right thing to do for everyone involved.

In my more upbeat moods, I listened to this song until the cassette broke. Then I bought a new one. I would repeat that pattern for most of the works on this list.

4.         “Black” and “Jeremy,” Pearl Jam.

“Jeremy” tells the story of an angry young man who erupts one day in school. It’s a great song, but it had little to do with me. I listened to it more during my divorce than I ever did before or since, though, mostly because of its ominous, angry tone. It fit my dark mood on most days.

“Black” was different. “Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin round my head, I’m spinning, oh, I’m spinning, how quick the sun can drop away” could have been written about what was going on inside my head on most days. But the lyrics that really drew me in were, “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life / I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky / But why, why, why can’t it be, can’t it be mine?” There were, you see, many days when I missed my wife. When I wanted to go back, even though I knew it would be the death of me, or her, or both. When I wanted to scream at life or fate or God and ask why my path had led me to feeling so lousy about myself.

When I wanted to revel in my own misery, “Black” was a great accompaniment.

5.         “Blew” and “School,” Nirvana.

I loved Nirvana from the first time I heard their album Bleach. That record contained several great tracks, perhaps most notably “About a Girl.” But in my time of emotional dying, these are the songs I repeated ad infinitum. There is nothing terribly thematic about either song, at least in terms of my own situation, though the refrain of “Blew” resonated with me: “Is there another reason for your stain /  Could you believe who we knew was stress or strain? / Here is another word that rhymes with shame…” I suppose it was that image of being stained, marked somehow, that I related to, though the seemingly throwaway reference to shame probably contributed to my fascination.

“School” never appears on any best-of lists, but its sheer simplicity appealed to me in a time of complex causes and effects. The lyrics are as follows: “Wouldn’t you believe it?  / Just my luck / No recess.” Later, the repeated line “You’re in high school again” give the whole track the feeling of a dark fever dream, one of those where your life doubles back on itself. There you are, back in high school (or grade school, or college, or your twenties, or whatever), doing the same things you used to do. You retain the sum total of your life’s experience, your knowledge, yet you’re covering the same ground that you never expected to see again—the road already taken.

Neither song completely adheres to Nirvana’s famous, Pixies-esque “loud-quiet-loud” aesthetic. Neither is particularly memorable compared to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the dirgelike “Something in the Way” or the eerie, nightmarish “Heart-Shaped Box” or the tinged-with-regret “All Apologies.” But both “Blew” and “School” found their way into my divorce rotation. Make of it what you will.

6.         “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away),” Motley Crue.

Look at the title. Remember that I’m talking about divorce. Do I really need to explain this one?

Let’s let the lyrics, about a good-riddance separation, speak for themselves.

“Seasons must change / Separate paths, separate ways / If we blame it on anything / Let’s blame it on the rain / I knew it all along / I’d have to write this song / Too young to fall in love / Guess we knew it all along / That’s all right, that’s okay / We were walkin’ through some youth / Smilin’ through some pain / That’s all right, that’s okay / Let’s turn the page…”

This one has an upbeat, poppy tempo—a departure from most of the Crue’s hair-metal jams, though not unheard of from them. It’s more of a kiss-off than anything else, and any divorce mix needs some of those. Plus, it references two awesome songs—the Crue’s own “Too Young to Fall in Love” (off their album Shout at the Devil, which should have been on Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 Best Albums) and Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page.”

Then there are these lines: “We were two kids in love / Trying to find our way / Thats’s all right, that’s okay / Held our dreams in our hands / Let our minds run away…” When I hear that, I can only nod and say, “Yep. That’s it.”

Of course, the song ends with, “Girl, don’t go away mad / Girl, just go away,” which is how I felt about my ex more often than not.

Incidentally, 80s hair metal is often unfairly maligned, sniggered at, dismissed by hipsters and music snobs. I don’t know why. Recently, someone giggled when my wife mentioned that we’re going to see Motley Crue in concert. I wasn’t around, but if I had been, I would have said, “Yep, they’re funny, all right. All they’ve done is sell millions of records, make tens of millions of people happy, influence thousands of young musicians, and make lots of money in the bargain. What have you done with your life?”

The Albums:

1.         Led Zeppelin, IV.

There is nothing here that lyrically spoke to me about my own life at the time. But sometimes I just wanted to be happy, and Zep always does the trick. I’m not sure I would want to live in a world where Led Zeppelin had never existed.

Why this album? Well, why not? You can’t really go wrong with Zep, but this is the one I played until the tape broke.

Think about it. The nasty, hard-driving blues of “Black Dog.” The pure heart-pounding joy of “Rock and Roll.” The esoteric weirdness of “The Battle of Evermore.” What some people think is the greatest rock song ever, “Stairway to Heaven.” The best Zep song that people keep forgetting about, “When the Levee Breaks.” What’s not to love?

When I felt optimistic, you’d hear this album blasting from my car as I drove down Arkansas backroads.

Of course, there was one album that, for whatever reason, served both kinds of moods:

2.         Nirvana, Nevermind.

The album that effectively ended hair metal as a music phenomenon. The record that made Kurt Cobain a household name, in spite of his own ethics and aesthetics.

Nevermind is one of those perfect albums, and one I’ve written about before. Of all the songs on it, I have a hard time remembering what “Lounge Act” sounds like in between listens. The rest are as fresh as the day I first heard them. I suppose the best compliment I can give the album in the context of this writing is that my horrible mood did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for it.

3.         Alice in Chains, Dirt.

During my divorce, on eight nights out of ten, I was either drunk, or driving really fast and seriously considering a hard right turn into the nearest tree or bridge abutment, or both. On those days, I did not want cheering up. I did not seek happiness. Call it out-of-control romanticism, that weird death-wish that so many young people seem to have, or a pity party. Both would be accurate. But when I felt that way, I sought out music that would reflect and enhance those feelings.

Dirt by Alice in Chains fits the bill. Understand that I love this one and the last record on my list because they are great rock and roll records. I still listen to them a lot. But they had special significance during my divorce.

Tragically, two of the musicians who made this record are now dead—Mike Starr, the troubled bassist who passed away in 2011, and Layne Staley, the band’s distinctive vocalist. He died several years ago. I have never really gotten over it, to the extent that I can’t yet bring myself to listen to the band’s new album. It ain’t AiC without Layne.

How about these lyrics from the track “Rain When I Die”? “Is she ready to know my frustration? / What she slippin’ inside, slow castration / I’m a riddle so strong, you can’t break me / Did she come here to try, try to take me?”

Or these: “Will she keep on the ground, trying to ground me / Slowly forgive my lie, lying to save me / Could she love me again, or will she hate me”?

Of course, the dirge-like “Rooster” is always good for your sad, angry mood. That goes without saying. It’s also arguably the album’s best song, and that’s saying something.

“Hate to Feel” is a full-throated shout of frustration and misery, perfect for those nights when even the stars seem to be laughing at you. “Angry Chair” is great for head-banging, steering-wheel-pounding moments.

The two songs I was most drawn to back then, though, were “Would?” and “Down in a Hole.” I present some lyrics for “Would?” below:

“Into the flood again / Same old trip it was back then / So I made a big mistake / Try to see it once my way…”

These lines make up the chorus. They speak of covering the same old ground to no good end, of mistakes acknowledged, of the desire—the drive—to be understood. Of course, the chorus’s very repetition suggests that understanding never happens. Then there are these lines:

“Am I wrong? / Have I run too far to get home? / Have I gone? / And left you here alone? / If I would, could you?”

Did I make all the mistakes? Have I been wrong about everything all along? Is it too late to fix things? Is reconciliation possible? The song never answers these questions. Neither did life, at least not all at once. Sooner or later, I realized that the answers were no, no, yes, and no. And then all I had to do was figure out how to live with those answers.

“Down in a Hole” is perhaps the most appropriate song on the album for a divorce soundtrack, at least if you’re unhappy that your life has taken such a turn. Again, I’ll present the chorus, the lines that we hear more than any others:

“Down in a hole and I don’t know if I can be saved / See my heart I decorate it like a grave / Well you don’t understand who they / Thought I was supposed to be / Look at me now I’m a man / Who won’t let himself be…”

Self-explanatory, right? You can’t ask for a more fitting breakup song than this, at least if you’re a self-pitying kid who just wants to be loved.

So some songs on Dirt appeal to your self-indulgence. Others are good for moments when you’re just plain good and pissed off. But if you want darkness, you should seek out the final album on my soundtrack…

4.         Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine.

A lot of critics claim that The Downward Spiral is the best NIN album. Maybe they’re right. I also freely admit that NIN’s later song, “Only” (from With Teeth), provides one of the best kiss-my-ass lines in history: “You were never really real to begin with / I just made you up to hurt myself.”

But in many ways, Pretty Hate Machine kept me sane during those long, sunless months. Sometimes it didn’t make a lot of sense. The album’s opener, “Head like a Hole,” isn’t ostensibly about relationships; it seems more like an anti-capitalist rant, with its pejorative references to “god money.” But the pounding music is good for working yourself up into a lather, and the bridge and chorus fit bad breakups like a snug pair of jeans:

“head like a hole / black as your soul / I’d rather die than give you control / head like a hole / black as your soul / I’d rather die than give you control / bow down before the one you serve / you’re going to get what you deserve / bow down before the one you serve / you’re going to get what you deserve…”

If your ex is greedy, even the verses can fit.

As for the rest of the album, you can probably understand how well they work during a divorce just by reading titles: “Terrible Lie”; “Sin”; “That’s What I Get.”

How about these lines from “Down in It”? “So what what does it matter now / I was swimming in the hate now I crawl on the ground / And everything I never liked about you is kind of seeping into me / I try to laugh about it now but isn’t it funny how everything works out / I guess the jokes on me, she said…”

Trent Reznor might well have been spying on me when he wrote those lines. “I was up above it,” he wails, “now I’m down in it.” I know exactly how he feels.

“Sanctified” perfectly captures the helpless self-awareness, the bipolar tides that pull you apart: “Heaven’s just a rumor she’ll dispel / As she walks me through the nicest parts of hell (bitch) / I still dream of lips I never should have kissed / Well she knows exactly what I can’t resist / I’m still caught up in another of her spells / Well she’s turning me into someone else / Everyday I hope and pray this will end / But when I can I do it all again?”

Then, of course, there is the funereal “Something I Can Never Have,” and the line that perhaps best sums up the loathing you feel for all that you’ve let someone else make of you: “Gray would be the color if I had a heart.”

Those who knew me at the time can probably recall how well these lines fit: “You make this all go away / I’m down to just one thing / And I’m starting to scare myself.” I scared a lot of people back then.

When you have lived with someone for a long time and wake up one day to find them, or yourself, gone, you feel dislocated, as if someone picked you up and dropped you in a foreign country, the language of which you do not speak. Nothing makes sense. Nothing seems right. Yet everything still reminds you of what you’ve lost. Hence these lines: “In this place it seems like such a shame / Though it all looks different now / I know it’s still the same / Everywhere I look you’re all I see / Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be.”

Pretty Hate Machine punched all the right buttons for my darkest moods. Listen to it often, with the volume turned all the way up, during your next catastrophic breakup. Then go pet a puppy and look at a rainbow. You’ll need to cleanse your soul’s palette.

These are the songs, the albums, the artists, that saw me through what I might, in a moment of tremendous understatement, term a “rough patch.”

Now…if you have made it this far, you might feel like this essay (if that is the right word for this piece) is less developed than other things I’ve posted, other things you’ve read. Perhaps that’s true. Maybe it’s less revealing, less “important,” less eloquent. Maybe it’s thought-provoking and emotionally bare, but maybe it’s only one or the other. Perhaps it’s neither. What it will do, I hope, is lead is to these questions?

What did you listen to during your divorce, or your engagement, or that whirlwind six months between meeting the love of your life and committing to a full-blown relationship? What did you listen to after your mother died, after your first child was born, while he/she was growing in the womb? What made your playlist when you graduated medical school, got rejected from a graduate program, published your first poem? What music accompanied the ripping out of your heart or the greatest triumph you have yet experienced?

What makes up the soundtrack of your life?

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at brett@officialbrettriley.com.