Life gets hard sometimes. When my mind gets carried away and my thoughts fall into the deep, dark recesses of the mind, I turn to music to pull me out. I want to touch on the genre of hardcore. Although, not palatable for most ears, I urge those that have shied away from it to listen to the album that I am going to later recommend in this post. I encourage you to do so with an open mind. If you’re not feeling it, I understand. Maybe keep it in your brain’s catalog and give it a listen when you do feel the challenging aspects of life begin to creep up on you. Or don’t because who am I to tell you what to do?
Before I give you the goods, let me provide this little story. I stopped drinking alcohol over eight years ago. It was mainly sparked by my decision to train for a half-marathon. I completed the first week of my runs and had in my mind that I would reward myself over the weekend with a night out. Something in the back of my mind spoke up though, and rather than undo the week of hard training with an evening of drinking, I decided to forgo the consumption of alcohol. Prior to this, I have tried to quit drinking, many times, but the nagging and insistent voice in the back of my head always told me to just have a sip. A sip always escalated into more, followed by days of regret and waged wars against my mind. Moderation was a word I did not exercise; I was a blackout drinker. If anyone reading this knows what I am talking about, it’s not pleasant. In short, while I trained for the half-marathon, I stayed clear of all alcohol, not a single drop. I felt so good each morning that when I finished my race, I decided to stay off the stuff for good. The pull on my mind still presented itself, but my ability to push it off got stronger.
There were some damned hard times though, where my thoughts would become so compulsive–my mind does this: thinks compulsively–that I would spend most days arguing with myself as to whether I should have a drink or not. I knew if I caved into those thoughts, I would be flooded with many more, far worse than the ones that existed before the cave-in. Although I have listened to Have Heart’s 2006 album The Things We Carry many times, it was during this time specifically that I fell deep into the album, pulling from the lyrics a courage to fight these said thoughts. I thank this album for providing me with the narrative to break the chains of my darker thinking and help push me back to homeostasis. Take the lyrics from the opening track, titled Life is Hard Enough, “You got the strength inside to defeat the problems of our lives without the crutch, cause we all know life is hard enough as it is.”
This album touches on many subjects; the pull of drink, the sadness of wasted lives, depression, fear, utilizing your mind to overcome, the realization that we make mistakes and can bounce back from those mistakes. The Things We Carry breathes life into the listener by sending a reminder that everything is going to be okay. It reminds us that life is hard, but there is a positive way out. It reminds us that we are not alone. We live in a society where self-help books fly off the shelves of local bookstores in droves. Everyone wants to be saved. Hardcore music is a form of therapy. Hell, it is therapy. There is healing in it. Hardcore music was self-help before the word self-help became so frequently sought after.
The Things We Carry provides a reminder to all of us that no matter how dark life feels—brought on by internal struggles or societal annoyances—there is a way out. The way out is through the power of the mind. The way out is through positive thinking. The path through the tough times, the heavy moments of existence, is to exercise deep thought and to apply that deep thinking to the world around us. It reminds us to offer a helping hand to those in need around us. The Things We Carry is an offered hand and it has no doubt helped me pull my mind onto a track toward better thinking. The third track on the album reminds us of this, “There’s a gift inside your head, called, your mind.” Music is a powerful device. Use it as fuel to get through both the good and the bad times. There is healing in all of it. This album no doubt has become one of the things I carry with me.