I Have Nothing Left

 The title doesn't tell anything about my current state. I just had a very familiar song come across my feed and it brought up a whole lot of feels. 

The song was by Evanescence and I obsessed over their first two albums. It was such a great band and Amy Lee is a fantastic singer. Their third album, self-titled, was released when I was going through an emotional tsunami. I was coming to terms with my depression on my mission. Before then, I didn't really classify it as depression. I didn't know what it was. So I was dealing with that and finally telling Tracy about it. I didn't really say anything about my mission and Tracy respected that. 

Facebook was reintroducing me to friends I never thought I would meet / talk to again. It started creating webs of connection in my mind. Things were getting sorted out but it was still difficult. It forced me to look at some thing in my life and re-evaluate. The biggest? The church. I identified by my membership and the things I lived by. Now I felt free to question it. It was a very twisted path that got me to feel free to question it and I won't go into it here. But I was going through mental exercises and reading like crazy trying to make sense out of it all. I eventually became verbal with Tracy about my struggles and conclusions. That just fired disagreements and we had started fighting about, well, everything. I'm so conflict-averse that it was taking more of a mental toll on me than I could truly handle. 

So in this year(s) of trying to figure it all out, there came this Evanescence album. And I had finally given myself permission to feel the full range of emotions again. I hadn't done that since I was a teenager. I've always known I was highly emotional but I tried to keep it under control. I don't know if served me well or not.

I don't think it was the first time I listened to the album on the ride home one day. I feel I was quite acquainted with the songs. But this day, I couldn't keep my emotions under control. I was sitting, waiting for the light at Golf and Barrington and I started to cry. Not much at first, but it eventually led to sobbing. I felt as if my world was falling apart, and this song was playing. It spoke to me so much. I eventually had to find a spot to pull over because I couldn't drive any longer. Later, I pulled myself together and drove myself home. I still listened to this album on my drive home for the rest of 2011, I think. I needed a lot of time to cry and the privacy of my car gave me the opportunity.

So I think Amy Lee wrote the song with a TV show in mind. "Being Human", I believe. Aside from maybe the first clause, I could put my own life in the lyrics. Goll, what a mess I was that year.