Although I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it then, as a child I felt that I was surrounded by chaos.  I was pathologically disorganized, myself, without established protocols for personal hygiene.  My room was always a mess.  Piles of things.  My own body, even, seemed beyond my control.  My skin, my hair, my stomach, frequent headaches.  

My family was loving, but you wouldn't say routinized.  Even though I deeply craved order, creating it seemed beyond me and that caused me so much anxiety.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about this in light of having worked with autistic children for so long.  I realize now, that, as a result of feeling so at sea, I did what I have seen many of my students do, developed the same coping mechanisms.  

There are people who develop eating disorders as a result of their longing for a control they can't seem to get over their surroundings.  I have heard people say this: I couldn't control anything but what went into my mouth and so I became compulsive about that. Compulsive to the point of obsession and then sickness but all because of that need to have agency--to be able to determine, in a way, one's own future! 

So many of my kids with autism, when they get overwhelmed or when they are being pulled in a direction to which they object--what do they do?  We call it scripting--they repeat dialogue from a familiar movie, or lyrics from a song.  I have seen some kids repeat lines from a commercial, say, over and over and over for days.  It used to baffle me until I realized that I was sub-vocalizing lyrics to myself close to constantly.  

The repeated words can hold whatever you need them to hold and they can comfort you as your reality shifts in ways you don't understand. 

When you feel as though you are at the mercy of your environment--Joseph Conrad says, "like a kitten in a bag"--you take refuge in things that never change.  Things that are predictable, regular, with perimeters that are wholly knowable.  

That's what songs are to me.  Like mini-universes you can hold in your hand.  You can see them through completely from start to finish and all around them too, from beginning to end, side to side.  Mastering a song and being able to carry it around with you transforms you into a little God.  You can make of it whatever you want, pour anything you want inside--despair, joy, love, rage--and the skeleton of the song always remains the same.  Bones, structure, indestructible form--on that you can rely. 

Probably nobody cares, but that's why I started singing and why I was never able to stop.  As a kid I relished the chance to be alone, singing loud in the house, testing out songs I had memorized. At night, in bed, with my cat on my pillow I would sing myself softly to sleep night after night, sometimes covering my ears so I could feel the vibration of my own voice filling up my head, blotting out any intrusion from the disordered world around me.  I liked to lie in the bath tub, ears submerged and sing that way too in pitches as low as I could manage. In songs I knew I could always be safe, a little God who knew all the words, determined the rhythm, decided when to start and stop.  

Since the pandemic began I've reverted to my old musical, self-regulatory ways.  I take videos of myself singing and listen to them with strange frequency, repeating them over and over.  Doing this creates a sort of closed circuit.  No aggravating outside stimuli gets in, no surprises, no bad news--it's only me and my own voice and the little 3 minute world I created and I can live there unbothered for as many times as I hit the replay button.  

Music doesn't have to be performative, I guess that's my point.  Is it pathological or logical to use music the way I do?  Almost like a drug.  Logical, I say, far safer than any antidepressant probably, or certainly alcohol, even sex or whatever other things people employ to quell their anxiety and feelings of helplessness. 

Art is not just a consumable for others.  It's a life raft, it's something to bite down on when you're muscling your way through a crisis or trying to survive living with a brain that acts like it hates you.  Art can be the perfect cottage of your dearest imaginings.  Straight lines with perfect fourishes at regular intervals. Spic and span and gleaming. Everything in its place.  Every note polished just as you want it, every breath in time.