Getting unstuck

Recently, I listened to the album Wish by The Cure. I came to appreciate their music a bit more after my divorce last year. Let me say that Songs Of a Lost World resonated fairly well, and that the band makes some fabulous emo music (grossly oversimplified estimation), and that The Used and MCR inherited a rich legacy. I digress. Anyway.

There is a song on that album that hit me, and will make its way onto future playlists and have home amongst other songs that have influenced my outlook on life in some way. The song is called “Doing The Unstuck.” Here’s a few lines.

“And how you really should know/That it’s never to late/To get up and go/Kick out the gloom/Kick out the blues/Tear out the pages with all the bad news”

I have tried to adopt a life where I have unrelenting hope. No, not toxic positivity. That is crap, and it doesn’t help. No, but rather an almost deliriously blind optimism that ignores the reality to a certain degree, and sets my spirit free. The kind of freedom that Andy Dufrense from The Shawshank Redemption enjoyed when he locked the jailer in the bathroom, locked the warden’s office, and played a soaring opera broadcast to the entire prison. That freedom was shared with others; as Red would say about that occasion, “and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” The walls, guards, barbed wire, and cell bars are still there.

They’re still present in my life—the barbed wire of anxiety and depression, the walls of headaches and migraines that limit my abilities, and the cell bars that prohibit my desires from flourishing. Music, however, can provide a respite. It can be balm to the soul, and help replenish a downtrodden and burdened heart.

In reality, there’s never a better time that right now, to ‘do the unstuck.’