The Album: Disintegration The Cure
The Story: So in Poteau during the 80s and early 90s, we didn't have MTV. One of the cable stations would play videos all Friday and Saturday night. Nathan and I would stay up and watch those, talking about them over the phone. That's where I first saw "Love Song."
The Cure had been around for a while by then, but what finally caught my attention was a second of imperfection. Smith mangles the note on one of his 'with's. It's completely offkey. The thing is, it's also so perfect. That offkey note conveys so much emotion, it's like he couldn't even contain the love he was feeling at that moment. Glorious.
If I remember correctly, this was actually another Walmart purchase. Walmart's music section was a lifesaver for kids who lived in small towns. I bought this (still, despite the Banshee's back catalog in my house, unaware of my goth tendencies) and wore my first cassette of it out. It was brilliant.
I like the first part of the album too, but from "Love Song" to the very last lines of "Disintegration" is some of the strongest, most beautiful/painful/perfect things ever made. Love, loss, failure, madness, obsession, fear, being broken, all of that and so much more can be found on this album.
I still listen to Disintegration a lot. It informs a great deal of how I perceive myself. The line "swimming in the same deep water as you is hard" is how I always describe what it's like to deal with the chaos and cacophony of thoughts going on in my head when my mental health isn't great.
Some albums rewrite your marrow, sometimes they do it more than once. Realistically, I could put this album in three places on my list because there are three parts of my life that are deeply impacted by it. High school is the first time. The second is in college when I found myself pulling apart some aspects of my thinking. The third was in my late 30s when my best friend's synchronic connection to The Cure began and I found even new and deeper ways to love the album. If I die hearing Smith sing "I will kiss you, I will kiss you...." I will die a happy woman.
Thank you to: Gail. Sometimes the best thing about loving an album is finding someone who comes to love it in new and different ways. It's like discovering it all over again.
The Lesson Learned: I could put a lot of things here, but I'm going to go with the one that has come along recently. Robert Smith is a genius at writing about what it feels like to fail someone else, to hurt someone else.
I'm no angel. I've hurt a lot of people. Sometimes it was intentional and I instantly regretted it because I knew it was wrong. Other times, it was just carelessness. Often I was focused on ONE THING and missed all the other things going on around me.
There have been nights when I thought about this stuff and stayed up just hating myself for it. This didn't feel like low self-esteem to me. I'd always believed low self-esteem was rooted in hating things about yourself that you couldn't help, like having a wonky earlobe or weird feet. If it was something caused by your actions, well, you should just hate yourself for being such a bitch and try to do better.
My recent listening of Disintegration has made me really think about how self-love has to stem from recognizing your own complex and flawed humanity. I have been hateful, selfish, petty, jealous, lazy, neglectful, spiteful, greedy . . . I need to work on being less of these things, but also remember that, again, this is not all I am.
Loving yourself means just that, loving yourself. All of it. The weird stray hairs, the broken eyesight, the awkward laugh, the inability to put down a bag of chips, all of it. You can't work on the flaws until you're healed and you can't be healed until you love yourself. Sadly, most of us will never get there.
After Robin Williams killed himself, a lot of people were confused about it. I remember writing at the time about how people never see us at our most agonizing moments. I think a lot of people kill themselves when those moments become too much to handle when they just can't seem to find a way out of them and they stretch on and on until it feels like there can be nothing else.
The last time I was in one of those moments, instead of just focusing on trying to find a way out of the pain, I let myself move deeper into it. I let the guilt and doubt and criticism just play out and I reminded myself how this kind of intensity, too, was part of being alive. To have a moment this dark could serve as a potent contrast for the next time I had joy. It helped, agony slowly faded away, and I could sleep.
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