“Everything You Lose is a Step You Take.”
From the Beatles to John Lennon, Taylor Swift to small bands like boygenius, and Queen to Fleetwood Mac, music has been the fundamental change my life has called for, yet the reassuring constant I’ve always yearned for. I received my first taste of loss as my angry father walked out of the door and moved out of the four walls, two doors, and several windows we had called a home. But something that my father taught me is that a house doesn’t make a home. I have always sought out a “home” to replace the spot in my heart that has been left empty in hopes that my father would come back and fill it. He came back, but not fully. He was never fully there when I was a child, constantly missing dance recitals, cheerleading parades, choir concerts, musical performances, and even birthdays. I changed myself over and over again hoping maybe if I was exactly how he wanted me to be and the perfect child he would fill the space in my heart. When I found that this no longer worked I became filled with the all too familiar raw rage that constantly seeped out of his mouth. Over the course of the next few years I would get mad at myself whenever I sang along to the Beatles in the backseat of his 2017 Kia Forte and even more enraged when I became all too familiar with the band names and song titles.
I found myself trying to take things out of my life that reminded me of him to forget him, until I found myself in March of 2022 sending him a paragraph about how much he hurt me and how I could never forgive him. Three months later he guilt-tripped me back into the same, yet new, disappointing cycle of my father hurting me emotionally and mentally over and over again. I once again found myself trying to be the perfect daughter and trying to be exactly like him in hopes that he would finally show me the unconditional love I needed from him. But I never found it.
Instead I found new men, or boys rather, to fill that space in my heart, and one finally stuck. I kept him for a year, trying to change him and force him into this person he wasn’t, the person I had been longing for for fourteen years. And one random Tuesday night in January I found that he wasn’t going to change and the only thing he and my father had in common that seemed to keep me around was the rage seeping out of his mouth and the repeating and aggressive cycle of hurting me emotionally and mentally in any way they could. There is a quote that directly describes my situation: “If you’re raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. You will find him even when he is not there. And if one day you find that there is no angry man in your house – well you will go find him and invite him in!” – Catherine Lacy, Cut. The one good thing about meeting this boy was the new music he brought into my life. Not only did I find comfort in it, but it was the music my father argued was a disgrace like Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana and 1979 – Remastered 2012 by The Smashing Pumpkins.
While I gave up on my father, I started believing in myself. I took my time going through the different types of the one thing that I had tried to constantly use against him. I took his love and my hatred for the Beatles and matured it into love for John Lennon and Paul McCartney, researching their solo careers, getting involved in the lore behind their personal lives. I took his hatred for Hip Hop and allowed myself to have a secret love for Mac Miller. I took his unwillingness to listen to other viewpoints and found the toxicity of not hearing the other side of an argument in Exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. I became the person my father never was for me. I learned to be everything he wasn’t and took the rage he poisoned the two polynucleotide pillars that coiled around one another to form my double helix and turned it into my love for music. Music turned into the two pillars supporting my development and survival.
The thing I am most grateful for is the absence of love from my father. I wouldn’t have the home I found in music without it, or with the lack of it. But once again I have a quote to describe exactly how I feel: “In another universe, my window is open and I’m laying on my floor. I am 12 years old. Nothing bad has happened to me” – anonymous, tumblr post.
