Using Music To Express Anger and Rage

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been studying Music Performance at a local tertiary college, and the experience has made me more convinced than ever that social isolation and repressed anger are, at the very least, perpetuating factors in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Dragging myself to college every day when I don’t feel great has been a challenge, and it’s been a constant balancing act between participating in class when I have the energy and resting when I need a recharge. The interactions with other students have also brought a lot of my unresolved adolescent insecurities to the surface: in some ways, going to college is like going back to high school. My fears about whether I would fit in brought up a lot of anxiety for me, coupled with a very strong desire to try hard to make other students like me. I often had to take a deep breath and remind myself to focus on what I was learning and just have fun participating instead.

Fortunately “full time” at the college I’m attending is only 2.5 days per week; although I spend pretty much all the rest of the week doing homework of various forms: learning to play new instruments, practising songs for our performance night, writing my own songs and getting them recorded.

In the process I’ve found music an excellent way to express anger and rage, and I now feel significantly better than I did at the beginning of the year. A lot of the songs I’ve been writing have a great deal of anger in them, inspired by life circumstances or other other people’s behaviour. Writing, performing, recording and releasing these songs has been extremely cathartic for me and the feedback from the other students has been extremely positive and accepting. Over half my fellow students are straight out of high school and also have a lot of anger and rage to express. Although I’m more than twice their age, they get where I’m coming from. Finally, my inner teenager is beginning to feel accepted.

After six months hard work, I’ve even released my first single: a song titled Everything Is Fucked that I wrote in a yin yoga class in North Bondi at 6:37pm on 17^th February 2017 while in Frog pose for seven agonising minutes.

At the time, I had been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for nine years and after five months pushing myself through three excruciating yoga sessions a week, wasn’t getting the results that I had hoped for: I had totally failed to pick-up at a yoga studio full of gorgeous young women, I was rapidly going broke because my Life Coaching business had failed to take off (who wants a sick Life Coach?!?), both my elderly parents had been diagnosed with cancer, a sweet hot girl I met online and completely fell for had started going out with a musician who lived 12,000 km closer to her than me; and I was still chronically ill. When the dishwasher in my apartment appeared to have stopped working properly, that was the last straw for me.

I went home, voice-recorded the lyrics and melody I’d heard in my head at yoga, found the chords on my guitar, cancelled my yoga studio membership, and enrolled in a full-time music course to learn how to play and record it. I have not been back to yoga since.

The song was a turning point for me because it allowed me to get the repressed rage out of my system. Now I’m sharing it with you so that you can get the repressed rage out of your system too.

It’s a song about anger really: an emotion we’re often not taught how to deal with well. Be angry by all means, get it out of your system and let it go; but just don’t hurt anybody in the process, OK?

Hit the play button below to hear the song.

Namaste, assholes!

If you like it, please buy and share it!