lazulioness-blog

[lazulioness-blog]

To Justify Despair: Harry Styles' "Sign of the Times"

For me, Sign of the Times is about depression, and the only way to survive it. Depression is a thief and a liar. It steals your own voice to tell you there is nothing about you to value or admire, nothing worth offering to anyone. It comforts you as it whispers the hard truth: "If people really knew you, you would never be loved again." Depression does cause genuine physical pain, but we all deal with that. The pain depression loves most is the relentless ache you can't find or explain. It is something like loneliness in that way, the pain of separation -- but it's a separation from the world, from the people you love, from any hope of happiness. Trying to make others understand is like describing a dream -- it keeps shifting and evading until it looks like nothing at all. And people give you that look. And you shake your head. "Nevermind. It's OK. I'm good." I'm not really good. Emily Dickinson wrestles with that kind of definition in "It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up (355)". It's a poem many readers find confusing, but it immediately made perfect sense to me: she's describing my second home. It was not Death, for I stood up, (355) It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down - It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their Tongues, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on my Flesh I felt Siroccos - crawl - Nor Fire - for just my marble feet Could keep a Chancel, cool - And yet, it tasted, like them all, The Figures I have seen Set orderly, for Burial Reminded me, of mine - As if my life were shaven, And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key, And ’twas like Midnight, some - When everything that ticked - has stopped - And space stares - all around - Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns, Repeal the Beating Ground - But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool - Without a Chance, or spar - Or even a Report of Land - To justify - Despair. Depression is something like death, or darkness, or fire. A corpse, a stopped clock. The first frost, stilling the heartbeat of the living earth. All of that, but not quite. In the final stanza, Dickinson defines what depression really wants. "Chaos", for Dickinson, was the formless void before God created light. It is "stopless": eternal and relentless. It is "cool": aloof, detached. Chaos simply IS: it does not end and it does not care. The poet is adrift in this void. No other ships, no land, no reason to hope. The void is all there is: the concept of "rescue" doesn't exist. That absence of hope is the key. Despair, the sorrow of knowing you will never have what you long for, requires an object of desire. You can't justify calling a feeling "despair" if there's nothing to want. This is depression's cruelest lie: that no other state exists. It wants you to know, for certain fact, that your pain will never stop. You will be here, feeling like this, until the end of your life. And really, under those circumstances, who could blame you...? But even though depression assures you that it will never change, it does. It lifts, at least enough to show you a chance of happiness. And then it falls again, and you see how stupid you were to hope for anything else. After years of living this cycle, I have learned to recognize depression's lies. Don't get me wrong: in the moment, they're still true. But I've spent enough time on the other side to tell myself "OK, you've been here before. You know how this goes." It seems like such a little thing, I know, but I've held on by my fingernails for a long time to get here. When I heard Sign of the Times, it felt like my song. "We never learn; we've been here before. Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets?" Because, see, you can't be stuck AND running. It's a contradiction in terms. Except it's not. Not for me. Because that's where I spend too much of my time: stuck in pain that seems like forever, and trying desperately not to consider the only solution depression is willing to grant. There are so many other images in the song that remind me, every time I hear it, that my sorrow isn't real, it's a symptom of the depression -- a sign of the times. And suicide isn't a sneaky shortcut to being well. You can't bribe the door on your way to the sky. We really don't talk enough about this. But maybe, if we can be brutally honest, we can teach each other how to live with it. Before it's all too much. ---------- NB: ‪I'm writing here about how the song speaks to me in the context of my own life. I'm not saying this was Harry's intended message. That's none of my business.

[lazulioness-blog]

I think...

that might be quite enough of that.