Discussion Is anyone else no longer able to listen to music?

[_Gollum_]

Every time I listen to music I just want to die. I can't explain it, but I just get overwhelmed with this whole-body feeling that I'm not supposed to be here right now, that I was supposed to have died long ago, that I've passed my expiration date. It's downright unsettling because the feeling is so visceral.

 

[ignorableaurochs]

I really resonate with this. I used to be such a huge music enthusiast and was constantly on YouTube searching for new songs. During episodes of illness, either depressive or ocd or psychotic, I often can't listen - I don't have the energy, I feel like I'm 'not allowed', or I'm simply not in my own head enough to do it. After so many episodes, I feel like it burned me out and sucked all the enjoyment out of it. I started a music recommendation spreadsheet to try and encourage myself to listen to things others told me I should hear, but after a while I got so overwhelmed by documenting everything that it just felt like another chore. Pretty much everything feels like too much right now. I should be doing work but I just cannot face it. I cannot face anything. Sitting in a silent room staring at the wall wishing I could sleep and have this all be over.

 

[Michi_Violeta]

Yes, but in a different way. It reminds me of the huuuuuge distance between my current self and who I used to be. All I can listen right now are sad songs, stuff that reminds me of her or makes me feel like I'm not the only idiot waiting for an ex to come back. High energy stuff? The sort of "I'm a badass and it's me against the world, loud bass, awesome synths" kind of stuff I used to love? Gone. It's like it belongs to another person, feels like the top rung of a ladder I've fallen from.

 

[Alias Pluto]

There are thousands of records, symphony books, guitars, piano, saxophone, clarinet lying around my home. I feel like I've wasted time with music when I could have done something else with my time. I thought it was the right thing to do, learn music and listen to music, but I'm just lonely now and music is just a sound really. It's not going to help me in this world anymore.
How many times have I heard "That's cool you like music man, you're so good. Wish I was talented."
I say, "it's not talent, it was millions of wasted hours. I wish I was like you and was useful to the world, stable, and found true love." Music will always be in my heart but I don't listen to music much these days.

 

[22yearsbroken]

Music is my only survival tool these days.. it gets my emotions goi g and dies make relax ... but also gets me ready to stay and to go at the same time.. .. i can put a day in which I ctb.. i play piano not in a perfect way but im ok.. ..the i finish a piece ive been working on is tge day i go.. to coplete a piiece if music thet is just right... just ...well just perfect for me.. there is nothing left fkr me to do in life.. tbe piece im writing is a gift.. thast gift i have for this dire rock we live on ..

 

[ignorableaurochs]

I will say, one thing I felt able to listen to a while ago was The Head Hurts But The Heart Knows The Truth by Headache. It is not so much music as spoken-word poetry over minimal beats. It tells a story - from an unreliable narrator - of someone mentally unwell, who tried jumping from a building and survived but experiences the jarring and disorienting results of head trauma, and (imo - it's ambiguous) chooses to jump again in the end. I have rarely felt so understood by an album. The jumbled mess of thought represents psychosis so well, and the lucid reflections on one's broken life really got to me. (Something went wrong, something went really wrong a long way back.)

I don't know. I don't think I can handle it right now. But maybe someone else will also resonate with this. The fact it is musically quite 'bare' also makes it easier to engage with when overstimulated.

 

[ramon]

Got involved in one of those on-line "Red Pill" cults, drank the Kool-Aid, and (among many other things) I lost interest in love songs forever.

So many songs, in so many rhythms that approached love in so many ways, were once the songs that made me smile. Now, they make me cry bitterly.