Finding HopeContinuing Bonds (National Grief Awareness Week 2023)
Posted on December 5, 2023
This week, from 2nd to 8th December, is National Grief Awareness Week 2023, run by The Good Grief Trust. The goal of the week is to create opportunities for people to discuss the loved ones they’ve lost and their experiences with grief in safe spaces and with people who’ve gone through similar events and emotions. After all, it is often easier to talk about difficult things with people who can relate. The organisation encourages people to put on events and arrange group meet ups during the week – online or in person – providing that safe space to talk.
For my part, I thought I’d share something that had a really big impact on my experience of grief, a line of thinking known as the Continuing Bonds Theory of Grief…
When I was thirteen, my Dad died very suddenly. He’d lived with a chronic illness for years but he developed pneumonia and quickly deteriorated (there’s a lot more to this story but I don’t think the post is big enough for all of it and it would distract from the point I want to make – maybe I’ll come back to that another time). Initially I scrambled for ways to remember him, still in a haze of shock and disbelief: I kept candles lit; I wrote letters to him; I bought the CDs of the music we listened to in the car. But after a while, that just hurt too much and I pushed all of those things away. And it was a combination of that, the lack of casual reminders (since I didn’t live with him and therefore didn’t have anything of his around me), and the fact that my family didn’t really know how to talk about what had happened, that resulted in a strange strange period of my life where… it wasn’t that we pretended he never existed; we just seemed to move around the metaphorical empty space with such focus that we didn’t even think about what we were dancing around. And that’s just how things were, from my perspective at least.
For a long time – for years – I didn’t talk about any of it: how much I missed him, how much it hurt, how disconnected I felt. I didn’t know how. I also avoided anything that reminded me of him. It wasn’t until I was in my early-to-mid twenties that I started to willingly – if cautiously – engage with the things that reminded me of him. I rewatched Hot Fuzz, a film we watched together (interesting choice, Dad); I reached out to a friend of his in the hope of getting answers to some of my long held questions; I even started to explore with the world of superheroes that he loved so much. I rewatched the Fantastic Four movies, the second of which we saw in the cinema together (plus there’s definitely a resemblance between Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Reed Richards, and my Dad so I do sometimes see Dad in some of the other characters he’s played, like Daniel Harrow in Harrow). I also watched Teen Titans from the beginning, an animated TV show that we had watched together on Saturdays and spent hours discussing, from the characters and their powers, to the storylines, to the silliest of jokes. All of those have remained special to me and after revisiting them, I moved further into that world. I watched films and TV shows that we most likely would’ve watched together and then endlessly discussed: I watched Supergirl (and I feel certain that he would’ve agreed with me that Season 1 was the strongest, when it was on CBS); we would’ve watched the new Fantastic Four movie and discussed the differences between it and the earlier ones; I would’ve nagged him until he watched Sanctuary with me and, when I inevitably adored Amanda Tapping (and he did too), we would’ve watched the entirety of Stargate SG-1 as well and he would’ve been the one to come to conventions with me (and I can absolutely imagine us dressing up); we would’ve gone to see Wonder Woman as soon as it came out in cinemas, her being my favourite DC character as a kid; we would’ve seen each of the Marvel movies and afterwards we would’ve compared favourite scenes before ultimately complaining how complicated the franchise was getting with every new film; and, most importantly to me, we would’ve watched Agents of SHIELD and Dad would’ve watched as the show, and specifically Daisy Johnson, became a new special interest that changed my life. I’ve always felt that superheroes, and the messages in their stories, are his legacy to me and that means a lot to me, even more so since it led me to Daisy. That’s something I will always be beyond grateful for.
Left collage: Teen Titans (top left), Hot Fuzz (top right), Fantastic Four (bottom left), and Justice League (bottom right).
Right collage: Sanctuary (top left), Black Widow (top right), Supergirl (bottom left), and Agents of SHIELD (bottom right).
Alongside this, I’d also started to write songs about what had happened, songs where I talked to him, songs where we had new experiences together. It took a long time to get to that place – I’d been writing songs for about five years before I felt able to do it – but once I did, writing those songs felt almost sacred, regardless of whether or not they were any good when I finished them. It is, of course, my job to put out music and, while there are multiple songs about my Dad that I’m very keen to release when the time is right, that’s never been something I even thought about when writing these songs: they have always been solely for me and my heart and my voice. That is true, to an extent of all my songwriting – I wouldn’t be writing the song in the first place if it wasn’t an expression of something I felt deeply – but there’s a… I’m hesitant to call it this because it’s such a hard feeling to define… a healing element to writing these songs that is just different to anything else I’ve experienced.
It wasn’t until a friend mentioned the theory of Continuing Bonds to me, a passing comment in the thick of university research projects, that I realised that that was exactly what I was doing. Both in engaging with superheroes and in writing songs about him, but especially the latter. From the first song I wrote, a song about feeling frozen by grief, my relationship with him actively continued, a new chapter in our story.
The Continuing Bonds Theory of Grief was developed by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman and laid out in their book, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, in 1996. They questioned the existing models of grief that generally considered the process of grieving to be one where you eventually ‘let go’ of the person who has died, where any behaviour that encourages holding on is viewed as unhealthy and potentially harmful; they disagreed with this and proposed a new model where it’s normal and healthy for a person to hold on to and continue their bond with the person who has died, having observed many cases in their research where a continued bond had helped an individual to cope with loss.
Ask anyone who has any experience of grief and they’ll likely tell you that grief doesn’t just end. That’s a simplistic and frankly silly idea; just because a person is no longer physically there doesn’t mean that they no longer matter to you, that your relationship with them no longer impacts your life. Their death doesn’t cut your life into chapters of ‘with them’ and ‘without them.’ Many people consider grief to be a permanent entity but one that evolves, becoming more than just the pain of losing the person. We carry them with us and find ways to bring them into our present; the relationship – the bond – continues.
In my personal experience, it has been far healthier to engage with my memories of him and make art about my feelings than to try and ‘move on,’ to think of my Dad as belonging only to the first thirteen years of my life; I suffered more in the years when I didn’t think about him compared to the years since I started writing about him and to him. Before, there was only grief but now, even though the loss and the grief are still painful, that isn’t all there is. He might not be physically present in my life but he does have a presence: engaging with the things he loved, as well as the things I feel sure he would’ve loved, and writing the songs that keep him alive and here are, in general, really special experiences. As I said, I’d love to release these songs as a project at some point; I think that would be a really lovely way to honour him and could potentially – hopefully – also help other people to cope with their experiences of grief. Maybe it could inspire and encourage others to nurture that continuing bond rather than suppress it. I wonder what amazing, moving art could be made in the process…
Other than making art to connect with a lost loved one, there are many ways to honour that bond between you…
- Talking to your loved one as if they’re still there (Amanda Tapping has talked about how, before her Mum died, they’d have a catch up over the phone as she drove home from work and how, after she died, she continued talking to her Mum as she drove home even though her Mum wasn’t on the phone).
- Writing them a letter or keeping a diary of letters updating them about your life.
- Keeping a little alter dedicated to them with, for example, a photo and candle.
- Choosing a day, such as their birthday, to celebrate their life every year.
- Continue to share memories of them as you meet new people and make new friends.
- Listen to their favourite music, read their favourite books, and/or watch their favourite movies (or any of the former that you shared).
- Going to their favourite places or places you visited together.
- Research and write their memoir.
- Pick up one of their hobbies.
- Have a piece of personalised jewellery made to wear and keep them close.
- Make a memory box or jar.
- Keep something that belonged to them.
- Plant a tree or flowers in their memory.
- Reach out to their friends or family (if appropriate).
- Do something that they would’ve enjoyed had they still been here (like seeing a film they would’ve liked or an event they would’ve enjoyed).
I hope that this week hasn’t stirred up too much distress, not that grief only exists during one week of the year of course. For some people, it can be validating to see so many people talking about grief but I know that it can also be very upsetting to suddenly have your social media feeds flooded with such stark reminders. I hope that, as hard as it may be to think about, that this post has been helpful in some way. The theory of Continuing Bonds – including the practical aspects of it before I knew what I was doing – has had such a big impact on me and I hope that, if it’s something you want, this has given you some ideas for how you might stay connected to your loved one.
An Unexpected Trigger
Posted on December 5, 2021
NOTE: Spoilers for Unforgotten Series 4.
Back in March, I watched the final episode of Unforgotten Series 4 and if you haven’t seen it – spoiler alert – Cassie, the main character (played by Nicola Walker), dies from injuries sustained in a car accident. It was incredibly shocking and upsetting. It’s something that’s been in my head on and off all year and I would really like to leave it in this year. I guess that’s why I’m writing about it now.
(x)
As I said, I was very upset when the series ended with Cassie’s death. That’s not exactly surprising since I do get very attached to my favourite characters. Upset isn’t really a big enough word: there was shock, distress, grief, anger… it was overwhelming. And in an attempt to process some of these emotions, I wrote a song about grief called ‘Incomplete,’ a snippet of which I posted on Instagram…
And while that helped a bit (coincidentally, it’s the second TV show featuring Nicola Walker that I’ve written a song about), I could feel it all hanging over me. It felt so shocking and so brutal and I felt oddly fragile in the wake of it. It was later that I learned about ‘the alienation effect’ after a researching rabbit hole that ended in me reading about the film, Psycho (a film I’ve never seen by the way – I’m looking at you, ADHD). In his essay about Psycho, film theorist Robin Wood wrote: “[The murder of the main character, Marion] also constitutes an alienation effect so shattering that (at a first viewing of the film) we scarcely recover from it. Never – not even in Vertigo – has identification been broken off so brutally. At the time, so engrossed are we in Marion, so secure in her potential salvation, that we can scarcely believe it is happening; when it is over, and she is dead, we are left shocked, with nothing to cling to, the apparent center of the film entirely dissolved.” I could be wrong – I’m not a film expert by any measure – but I think that’s what’s happened here; this quote certainly describes how I felt about that final episode. Cassie was the focal character, the audience surrogate almost, and she was the glue that held together a show that regularly changes almost the entire cast (along with Sunny and the rest of the team, of course) and her death was incredibly shocking. I’ve always felt things deeply but I haven’t spoken to one person who wasn’t upset by it.
While there were, of course, other factors impacting on my mental health, it was the trigger of that particular period of depression. But months later, even after my depression lifted a bit, I still couldn’t shake it. I still found it very upsetting and I was still having nightmares involving car crashes; as deeply as I feel things, this seemed to be sitting differently. Eventually, it occurred to me that it was potentially more than straightforward upset over the loss of a favourite character and the loss of a favourite show (maybe – I’m still not sure how I feel) and that the storyline – a sudden, completely unexpected, shocking death – had triggered me as a result of the trauma around my Dad’s death, trauma that is still relatively undealt with. It completely blindsided me. I’m still relatively in the dark on my triggers in this area, given that my coping mechanism for most of the last thirteen years has been to, essentially, bury it: facing it just felt insurmountable. But now that I’m starting to unearth it again, it appears that that earth is packed with landmines. The metaphor wears thin, but hopefully you get my point.
I don’t know how I feel about all of this but putting my thoughts into words has helped. This year has been so busy and so emotionally chaotic that I feel like I haven’t had the time or brain space to even start processing it all. In regards to the show, I don’t know whether I’ll watch the next series. Right now just the thought of it is upsetting. Nicola Walker said in an interview that “Cassie’s death wasn’t for effect; [Chris Lang, writer of Unforgotten] is going somewhere with that conversation about grief,” and while I think these are important conversations to have, I’m not sure if I have the emotional bandwidth for a fictional one when I’m already trying to manage my own very real one. I don’t know. But I really don’t want to go through this again if I can avoid it.
“Cassie’s fate may have caught viewers by surprise, but it was something Walker had discussed with the show’s creator and writer, Chris Lang. ‘We were talking from the beginning, really, about what he was doing with this character and this story he wanted to tell,’ Walker told TV Insider. ‘Chris and I were always interested in looking at the cost of being involved with these sorts of cases that we all love watching on television. Cassie does not have superpowers. She’s an ordinary person who’s really good at her job, and it took her to the place of having an emotional breakdown… We talked a lot after Season 3 about where it was going to go, and it was a joint decision,’ she adds. ‘I think the clues were there in Season 3. The title of the show is Unforgotten and I think there’s a great deal of narrative beauty to this woman. She’s not going to be forgotten. I felt like she was quietly very unusual on television because she was a real person.'” (x)
I keep coming back to this quote. I agree with it, with what she says about Cassie, but I still don’t understand why Cassie had to die, why she had to die in a shocking, brutal way. Maybe I never will. Most of all, I’m sad. I’m sad that a show I loved will forever be entwined with distress and painful memories.
The Fifth Semester of My Masters
Posted on September 19, 2021
The time has come to sum up the final semester of my Masters. I am done. That’s sort of unbelievable. Given everything that’s happened since I started the course in September 2019, the end of the Masters always felt so far away and although I have lots of plans, I do feel a bit lost now that all of the work is done. Maybe it’s because I haven’t received my final grade or because I haven’t actually graduated yet; maybe once those things happen, the experience will feel a bit more… finished. It was always going to be weird – I’ve been going to this uni on and off for the last seven years – but knowing something and actually feeling it are so different.
So, here is my final semester review.
The final semester of my Masters course involves a largely independent project called the Major Repertoire Project and as long as you’re developing your songwriting skills and knowledge in some way, you can pretty much do whatever you want. People have done projects exploring identity, exploring their heritage, writing song cycles or musicals, digging deeper into their own songwriting and pursuing an artist project like an album, experimenting with newer applications of songwriting (such as in various therapies), and so on. It’s a fascinating module because everyone ends up doing something so different and so interesting. And after a spending a year or two focussing on their craft, the songwriting is so incredible; the final works that I’ve heard are amazing. It would probably take a month but I would happily listen through everyone’s projects.
For my project, I chose to explore my experiences as an autistic woman through songwriting, attempting to translate those experiences both through the lyrics and storytelling and the execution of the song, from the structure to the arrangement to the production and so on. I wanted to write songs that autistic individuals would hopefully relate to and that neurotypical individuals would hopefully gain some insight from. But while the overall goal was to create a body of work, a large part of the project involved researching our chosen area – Autism, in my case – responding to the research (sometimes that was through practice and sometimes it inspired specific songs), and reflecting on my songwriting process and how it was evolving during the project.
The module officially began in the second week of May but I’d already started working on it: I’ve been thinking about this project ever since I applied for the Masters so I was super excited to finally start doing it. But I’d barely begun when I started getting debilitating migraines that lasted for days at a time and resulted in several ambulance visits because the pain was so bad. We eventually traced the source back to one of my teeth: the emergency dentist thought the nerve was dying and diagnosed an abscess. I was top priority for an extraction and given antibiotics (which I had to have a second round of when it flared up again midway through the semester). Fortunately my university granted me an extension – giving me back the time that I’d lost – but it was a flexible extension in case I suddenly got pulled in to have the tooth taken out and needed some recovery time. Due to the long waiting list (and bear in mind that this was the waiting list for emergencies), I still haven’t had the tooth taken out and while the antibiotics and some good painkillers have prevented any more similar episodes, I’ve still been dealing with some tooth pain and migraines. So that hasn’t been ideal.
We only had four classes over the semester but since everyone was researching something different, they weren’t exactly classes. They were more group discussions where we’d talk about how our research and writing was going, whether we were struggling in a particular area, what we could do if we felt like we weren’t fulfilling one or more of the overall objectives, and so on. We had individual supervisors for the more specific guidance and problems whereas this was more general and we were able to share with each other what we’d found helpful, etc. These classes were online but we were finally able to come into the building. With most of the other courses finished for the summer, it was pretty empty and I felt safe there; you had to test negative just to get in the building and with no one around (pre-COVID, it could be a bit of a crush at times), my pandemic anxiety was a lot lower than it usually is when I’m out in the world. Being there after so much time and getting to see some of my friends again made me positively giddy! And there were some friends that I was actually meeting in person for the first time, which was just wonderful! I’m really going to miss it; I mean, I’ll pop in now and then for events and stuff but I’m really going to miss it being part of my day-to-day, week-to-week life.
Anyway. My supervisor was truly awesome. We had fortnightly and then weekly sessions and she was fantastic, not only with the academic stuff but with helping me to manage my anxiety, the things that tripped up my neurodivergent brain, and so on. And while we worked together well, we also had a lot of fun: we went on some epic tangents and there were multiple conversations that we had to mentally bookmark for later in order to actually get our work done. We got on really well and our sessions were always fun and thought-provoking, as well as helpful. I hope that this isn’t the last time we get to work together.
I obviously know a lot about Autism already so, after finding sources for that information, I started writing songs about my experiences and researching Autism further. Having the foundation of knowledge that I did, I think allowed me to research both more deeply and down different avenues since I didn’t have to spend so much time on the basic knowledge. And some of that research, from academic papers to anecdotal stories to art made by autistic individuals, sparked some really interesting song ideas (for example, I ended up writing a love song after watching Love on the Spectrum, which I found both upsetting and deeply depressing as an autistic person).
I don’t want to give too much away about the songs because I hope to release them but, over the semester, I wrote eighteen songs with a handful more that still need finishing. For the most part, I wrote alone – first because it was more convenient and then because I felt like my experiences were conveyed with more clarity that way – but I did work with a few different people, when I was struggling with a concept for example. I wrote with a couple of my friends – Richard and Luce (known as LUCE) – but I also wrote with new people that I’ve met during my time on the Masters – Luke (known as leadmetoland), Phill Vidler, and Katherine Moynihan – which was fun and exciting. It was nice to do both: I love cowriting and the back and forth of ideas but doing so much writing by myself really restored my confidence; I’ve spent so much time cowriting over the last two years and really not that much solo writing so I was nervous when I started to write alone again but after a while, it started to feel really good and that was really exciting.
But while I didn’t manage to write with Richard as much as I’d originally hoped to, we had many production sessions, mostly over Zoom. While I’d never considered the production unimportant, the project evolved to a place where the production was just as key to the representation of my autistic experiences and the emotions attached to them as the lyrics conveying the story or message. So the two of us spent a lot of time working on every little detail. While I’ve always been involved in the production choices of my songs, I’ve also always been aware that Richard knows a hell of alot more than me so I was happy to defer to his judgement. But with this project, for the first time really, I was taking the lead on production decisions – on occasion, I had the whole arrangement and production planned out before the session. But I felt more like a producer than I ever have: I was coming up with ideas that actually worked from idea to execution; I was able to pick out specific instrument, arrangement, and effect details in a way I haven’t been able to do up to now; and so on. Along with the songs themselves, that’s something I’d really proud of. I really feel like I grew as a musician and as a producer.
I absolutely loved working on my project. To be researching and writing songs about something I’m so passionate about was just so creatively invigorating. That’s not to say it wasn’t hard though. There were, of course, periods of doubt, insecurity, and anxiety over the academic elements and whether I’d be able to do as good a job as I desperately wanted to. Plus, some of the experiences I was digging into were pretty raw and writing those songs did get difficult, especially since I was suddenly doing the project without the support of my therapist, something I’d put in place to help me manage that. But apart from one bad bout of depression, my mental health was – somehow – reasonably stable (apart from my day-to-day, ongoing anxiety). As I said in my previous post, I think it was the constant creating (and creating things that I’m really proud of) that did it, that kept everything on a reasonably even keel.
Having said that, my chronic pain was almost constant, worse than it’s ever been. There were periods where my knee, for example, was so painful that I could barely walk and my back so painful that I could barely move. My Mum (once a massage therapist) said that it felt like I was storing rocks in my muscles. It certainly felt like they were made of concrete. Maybe it was my anxiety around the project, I don’t know, but the pain was keeping me up at night. I also struggled on and off with my hands and wrists, presumably from all of the typing, piano, and guitar playing I was doing. God, my various health issues are like freaking buses sometimes. I’m still waiting for physiotherapy and hydrotherapy, have been for months. I’ve just started with the Pain Clinic but one appointment was never going to change anything before the Masters ended. So all I had were various painkillers that were only sporadically helpful.
But my biggest ongoing obstacle was my difficulty concentrating, which I’m assuming is due to my (still untreated) ADHD. Staying focussed on my work was very difficult; I exhausted all of my energy trying. It felt like my concentration was so delicate that the smallest distraction would shatter it and then there was no way to know when it would come back; I felt like I was clinging onto it by my fingertips. So I couldn’t stop (really not healthy, I know). I couldn’t waste a second of it. That was super stressful and I often ended up sitting at my computer for hours and hours; there were multiple fourteen hour days, some successful, some not. People kept telling me to at least take a day off now and then but I just couldn’t. I was too scared of losing my concentration when my hold on it felt so tenuous.
During the semester, I also had a few other commitments; it was awkward timing but they were all great opportunities:
- As I mentioned in my post about the previous semester, I was part of the judging panel for a songwriting competition. That ended up being a lot of work but fortunately I managed to get it all done in time for this module to start. The end was pretty stressful because our deadline was suddenly brought forward but it was a great experience and I learned a lot from it; there were so many amazing songs and so many talented songwriters and they’re all still pretty young. I hope they keep writing; some of them I’d love to see pursue songwriting as a career. The final winners weren’t the ones I personally would’ve have chosen but I guess that’s what happens when you’re judging by committee and there are so many good songs to chose from.
- I also submitted work to a competition: three songs, two already written and one that I wrote as part of this project. I was supposed to find out whether I’d made it through the first round in August, I think, but, because they’re also an organisation and not just a competition, COVID has thrown a wrench in the plan and so the whole thing has been delayed until February. So I guess I won’t know anything for a while.
- One of my tutors is doing a research project on the many reasons why we write songs and I volunteered to share my thoughts. In mid July, a handful of students came together for a Q&A panel about our personal songwriting intentions, processes, and experiences. It was really interesting with a pretty wide range of reviews and even a couple of debates. Hopefully some of what we said was useful for the research.
- Also in July was the Taylor Swift focussed musicology conference I mentioned in my post about the previous semester and I presented my paper on some of Swift’s lyric writing techniques: her repeated use of certain imagery and the ongoing themes throughout her discography. I loved researching it (and hope to research it further in the future) and writing the paper – so much so that it ended up being over ten thousand words long and I had to do some major editing work. Presenting the paper – I ended up recording it and presenting it in video form because I was so nervous – was very nerve-wracking: everyone was lovely and very welcoming but I was just so aware of how inexperienced I was. But it went really well and I really enjoyed the whole conference; there were so many interesting papers. I hope it’s a conference that can happen again (not just because I have so many ideas that I’d love to research but because Taylor Swift is so fascinating on so many levels; there’s a lot that can be learned from her, not just around music but in business, in the development of pop culture, and so on).
In the last month, my approach reached a new level of intensity. I was working constantly, quickly when my concentration was good and agonisingly slowly when it was bad. But I didn’t stop. I even worked while I ate. I know that’s not a healthy way of doing things but I was just so terrified of getting a grade I wasn’t happy with, that made me feel like I was letting everyone down, myself included. If I wasn’t working, I felt guilty so I just kept working.
Finally it came time to try and distill all my work down to the most important points for the final presentation. My god, that was hard. Months of research, almost twenty songs, and a lot of reflection on my creative process all into an hour… Or, as I said, the most important points. But figuring what those important points were was a real struggle. Throughout the whole Masters, I felt like the module objectives were designed to trip me up – not me specifically, of course, but anyone reading them. Reading them felt like trying to interpret another language that you barely understand so I felt like I was just waiting to discover that I had it all wrong. Maybe it was my autistic brain, I don’t know. My supervisor was great regarding this anxiety but two years of feeling that way made it a hard feeling to exorcise. So I just did what I know how to do and worked through it, hoping it would be enough. And on the 6th September, I had my final assessment. Two tutors watched my presentation and then, after a brief discussion, they asked me a couple of questions, both of which were pretty straightforward to answer. And that was it. The project and the semester was over.
According to the usual rules, the results will be released in twenty working days, although I don’t know if that will apply given that my assessment was so much later than everyone else’s and they all received their results the day after I presented. So I’m just waiting to hear. I’m trying not to stress about my grade but, as I said in my previous post, I’m finding it hard. I’ve been working relentlessly – with so many obstacles to navigate – and the idea that that still wasn’t enough to get the Distinction I want so badly does upset me. I mean, I’d get over it in time but, yeah, it would be distressing. I just really hate the idea of thinking, “I could’ve gotten a distinction if I wasn’t autistic or had ADHD, etc.” I know that that’s not a healthy way to think but the standards and expectations I have for myself are somewhat warped, something that I think is due to the late ASD diagnosis and the clash between twenty-ish years with neurotypical standards and then having to adjust those expectations in accordance with what I now know is a neurodivergent brain. It’s a mess basically. But I’m waiting for the results – they should be out on the 6th October – and hoping desperately that it went as well as I hope it did.
While the ‘project-for-assessment’ is over, I definitely want to keep working on the songs, write some more on various elements of my autistic experience that I just didn’t manage in the timeframe, and then, hopefully, release it in some form. That’s the dream. I’m so proud of so many of these songs and I really, really want people to hear them and hopefully find strength or comfort in them. We’ll have to see because these projects are just so expensive to put together, from the production work to making music videos to all of the marketing.
And while this is a topic for another post, it should be acknowledged that the semester ended on a very sad note. I found out the morning after my presentation that my Granny had died. Between that news and an intense semester’s worth of work and my brain is just at overload. I can’t tell if I’m not feeling anything or feeling everything. I don’t really want to get too deeply into all of this, partly because I’m not ready and partly because, if only on my blog, I want to keep this semester and this project separate. I really just wanted to mention it in the context of all the emotions I’m dealing (or maybe not dealing) with right now.
So that was the final semester. But there’s still a couple more chapters in this story, so to speak. Graduation will hopefully go ahead as planned – in person – in November and then who knows? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
My apologies if this post is a bit all over the place: everything’s really hitting me and I’m just exhausted but I wanted to get this out while it’s still fresh.
Finding Hope 