Something very, very strange happened on the 10th of April 2015. It’s now five years ago [please note, this is published in 2020] and I feel I need to talk about it. Maybe it’s not a miracle (my first idea for the title was something like “miracle cure”) but I didn’t know that these kinds of things can happen. This is a tiny, personal story about mental health and music.
I am a quite balanced person. I have never suffered from bad mental health problems, and if I have had a longer period of melancholy (that did take place in the end of the eighties), it was just a normal thing in a person’s life, I thought. Ups and downs. I still don’t know if it was about depression in a medical sense or not. My Mother said me that I was “gray”. She saw something that I didn’t. Basically, any kind of mental problems would never face my person, that’s what I had always thought.
Then, almost a decade ago, in the end of 2011, in 2012, something like that, I started feeling strange. I started having some physical problems, I got out of breath very easily e&. I started being worried and contacted healthcare centre to ask what’s problem with me. Because I have a medication (for rheumatoid arthritis) that could have affected on lungs, I was sent to medical examinations. The lungs, heart and my capacity of breathing was tested. Nothing was found. Two doctors said that the problem might be in my head and I was advised to go to see a psychiatrist. First I denied the whole idea but when the second doctor suggested the same thing, I finally thought that maybe I ought do that. I was anyway feeling physically (mental thing that caused physical symptoms) bad. Meeting a psychiatrist cannot make it worse.
I had regular meetings with psychologist for about two years. I was diagnosed as suffering with anxiety. I got the name for my condition: globus hystericus. The more modern name is globus pharyngeus (I prefer the old name). The psychiatrist wanted to add a mild depression to go with it and he also wanted to prescribe mild anti-depression pills for that. I refused. I didn’t feel myself depressed and the pills wouldn’t cure the basic thing behind my problems: the severe loneliness.
I have basically suffered from loneliness all my adulthood, but I always thought I was “on good terms” with The Loneliness. But the older I became the harder it has become. When my Mother died in 2014 I lost the last role I had, the role of daughter. Nowadays I am just me. I am not a sister, mother, cousin, wife, girlfriend, colleague, best friend of anybody. However, I still hope I am a friend of some people.
The psychiatrist said to me that it’s quite usual that people who had faced bullying in earlier age, start to have symptoms of anxiety, depression etc. in their fifties, just like me. And yes, I was also bullied at school, many, many years. I was a silent, gray mouse, a bit different from the other girls, so I was an easy target – you had a license to bully, so to speak. Not only the boys in my class, but also the other boys from the school. So that was my life for about seven, eight years … and then it stopped. Those boys had grown older.
The saddest thing was that when it was all over, I noticed that I was nobody, not even the girl whom you could bully. No-one noticed me anymore. I had always been thinking that it all just made me tougher. I was wrong.
The appointments with psychologist ended on summer 2014. The symptoms of anxiety didn’t vanish. The anxiety was still there. But I had been busy arranging things after my Mom’s death. So I hadn’t had too much time for grieving. That came later. I was coping quite well. And in that spring 2015 I was feeling better than for ages, I was feeling I was living again. But the physical bad feeling didn’t go away. I was feeling mentally okay, but the physical unpleasant feelings caused by the mental things were still present. I hope this makes sense as I cannot put it any better.
Music and the 10th of April 2015
Music had always been a big part of my life since my teenage years, from the latter part of the seventies. I listened to it, I collected records, I worked for a while in a second hand record store, I went to gigs, I photographed at the gigs, I wrote a bit about bands in papers, I worked as a stage hand in big events, I wrote my master’s thesis about rock concerts. But around 2005 I started drifting away from music. I had started selling my record collection already in the turn of the Millennium, but now I left music totally behind. I sold almost all my records, music related books and t-shirts… After my Father’s death in October 2005 I also lost my work as a stage hand. After 2007 I went to see only my friend’s band (The Pauki) a couple of times here in Finland and St. Petersburg, Russia.
In February 2015 I had given all my lighting designer/director interviews and many of the artist interviews I had made to music archives as well as the rest of the music magazines I still had.
In April 2015 I was repricing CD-records that had been lying for ages in the cardboard box with text “for sale” written on it. I wanted to get rid off everything. I was pricing them in alphabetic order. But then something happened, on the 10th of April 2015. That day changed everything, the three hours on that afternoon. I had reached letter K. There were a couple of CDs from Kevin K. I decided to listen a bit the records before putting the new prices on them.
And like I wrote to a friend, I couldn’t even understand why I had put them for sale in the first place. I might have been thinking that I won’t ever again listen to that kind of rock ‘n’ roll. I noticed that I still liked his music, his voice. I started recalling the days when I had bought them sometimes in the 97, 98… I had ordered some of them straight from Kevin K himself. He was one of those artists that I really loved a lot back in the nineties.
Instead of continuing listing the records I decided to see if this man is still in business. I went to YouTube and found so much stuff from him. This video clip was the very first one I saw:
I was just staring at it. I remember thinking that, wow, that’s the guy with whom I was writing more than fifteen years earlier. I was just watching a clip after another. And suddenly I realized that I was feeling great! All the symptoms that I had had a few hours before, had vanished. Just like that – within a couple of hours. I didn’t understand that. I still don’t understand that. (But I started understand these stories how people have found faith in similar way. I just re-found music!) I was sure back then that the symptoms would come back soon, but they stayed away.
I was like a Duracell Bunny when looking for stuff on YouTube. I also went through all my correspondence with Kevin K. Needless to stay that many of the records from the “for sale” box went back to my own shelves. I started digging more in the wonderful world of YouTube. The second artist I checked was Walter Lure. (Rent Party was one of those very few records that never ended up in the “for sale” box.) I didn’t know at the time, but those couple hours on that Friday five years ago changed my life totally.
It must have been very special moment as I wrote to my friend four days later that I had got the zest for life back. I was once again interested in something and not just living day in, day out without being too existed about anything (well, watching sport on television gave some excitement into my gray life). I was so excited about everything “new” that a couple of days later I couldn’t even remember what has happened. It was like a big black hole, but in a positive way. A mental turmoil. And after doing a bit of thinking I contacted Kevin himself to tell him what had happened. One of those positive sides of Facebook – you can find there people, also those that you had so unforgivable left behind.
I started to refresh some other old contacts, too. And before I noticed I was in the middle of something that I had left behind so many years ago. I was back in the world of music.
I was diving in headfirst into the world I was belonging in the nineties. As I had missed so much I wanted to experience as much as I could. When I read that Walter Lure would tour in the UK in September that year, I knew I would be there. I was planning to go to see him on two gigs, but in the end I did the whole tour! And after that tour nothing was like before.
I got new friends, friends that I really needed into my lonely life. I guess that those people have not realized how much they have meant and still mean to me: I was finally feeling I belonged somewhere. I didn’t feel anymore that I was nobody. I was somebody.
That Walter Lure tour was beginning of a journey that is still continuing. On the 20th of April on that year I had written this on Facebook about Walter Lure’s song ‘Golden Days’:
This beautiful, beautiful song is perfectly telling about my feelings. I have recently been thinking that my life has been like a book of collection of short stories. It’s not a novel, but a collection of short stories with varied themes. One of the changes happened during a short period of time 98/99. [—] I was saying good-bye to quite nice nineties I had had (only fond memories) and heading into a totally new era. Unfortunately I thought at the time that I won’t ever look back. But life doesn’t go like that. I seem to miss things from those days much more than I had thought. Life is not a collection of short stories, life is a novel and sometimes you go back to the “golden days”.
One of the greatest moments on the Walter Lure tour was when ‘Golden Days’ was played and dedicated to me. They played it in the sound check before the first gig, but it was not on the set list. After a couple of gigs I asked Walter if we hear it at all. Walter told me that there were already other slow songs in the set and people do not want to hear too many slow ones. But it was played on that night – and then again on the last gig of the tour, dedicated to me. Beautiful.
I am still lonely and alone. I have sort of realized what’s the hardest part of existing without any close people around: there is nobody to be proud of you when you do something right, there is nobody to whom you can show what you have achieved in your life. I long for that.
Whatever I do, I do it for my own well-being. I have started to accept that. Of course there are still moments, when I feel this severe loneliness too deeply. But I have learned to fight back. I don’t have a social network to invoke if I feel bad, so I try to keep myself as busy as possible.
I had a bit hard time in the beginning of the year 2020 and I was worried how long time it would take when I am okay again. The anxiety was back after five years, maybe even mild depression. I didn’t even listen to music for about two months. I just couldn’t. But then, it just vanished and I started feeling better, and I started listening to music, too.
I know that I am lucky in many ways. There are lots of people with really hard lives, with mental health problems, people who are not getting help. I was offering help, even though I was feeling back then I didn’t need it. Later I have been grateful for that. I had someone to talk to. Talking to someone is important, to have someone to listen you.
But in the end it was music that did the final job. I still don’t know what happened, but there must be some psychological explanation. In the same way as there must be an explanation for those conversion stories.
Now when I am writing this, on the week 15 of the year 2020, I am feeling very good.
Text and photos © Katriina Etholén
Cover photo is taken in Sheffield in November 2015 and the lonely cyclist photo in Brighton in December 2017.
Tales From The Brazier's Grotto 