Do you want to dance?

Click to watch Barbie & the Rockers sing Do You Want To Dance.
Obsessively watching this video as a child is why my fashion sense is stuck in the 50s...

I've always loved music. There are home videos of me, 3 years old, with huge padded headphones clamped to my head, bouncing around the living room. My parents got me a Fisher Price record player which I played so often and so loud, it was moved to the basement. I would play the same songs over and over, spinning around in the dark. Eventually, I graduated to a Fisher Price stereo. Then a portable Walkman. Then a karaoke machine.

I loved music.

I taught myself to play songs on a small Casio keyboard by listening and matching tones. And for a brief year, I had lessons in saxophone and piano. But then we moved from SuperCity and no music lessons were arranged in our new town.

I still have a deep desire to make music. When I'm near a piano, I quickly remember the songs I taught myself. When we turn on Rock Band, I'm the only one willing to take the microphone.

I participated regularly in a women's choir in high school and joined an all-female acapella group in university. I don't have a distinctive or strong or interesting voice. What I do have, however, is a virtually perfect pitch. I am a parrot, thanks to years of endless listening and singing. Strictly speaking, I cannot read sheet music, but if you give me a starting note I can follow the changes to it with increasing accuracy.

This of course makes me an expert Rock Band soloist. ;-)

The thing about music, however, is that it is fantastic. Quite literally. I would escape into the emotions of the song as though I were escaping into a book or a movie. For a few brief, potent minutes, I would be the song. Lyrics didn't matter. The emotions were real, and the older I got, the easier it became to call on those feelings.

This sort of concentration and intensity is a hallmark of giftedness. I know and understand that now, but for most of my life I thought I was crazy. No one else in my life became swept away by a song. Stories, maybe. Movies, of course. But songs?

I felt like an addict, falling into music for my emotional fix. It was safer than life. It compensated for the pathological emptiness which categorised my childhood.

But at first, it was simply me. I was simply born with a heightened emotional response to the world around me: sound, sight, taste... A massage-therapist boyfriend marvelled how the lightest of touch was all it took to turn me on. I hated food until I discovered spices and herbs. I have to make my office seem like home: surrounded by friendly, reassuring colours and objects.

I was born wanting to respond to the world, being excited about everything, and in love with the connections between it all. (Weren't you?) I became deeply attached to SuperCity as a result, and that is why leaving it was so traumatic.

My mum is gifted. I presume she felt the same. But where this depth of feeling has left her broken, I am learning to contain it with something other than avoidance, dissociation, denial, obsessions, compulsions or anxiety. That is the point of this blog. That is why I sought therapy. That is why I am processing the trauma, reflecting on my choices, and practicing mindfulness.

My authentic self is buried under, filtered by, and distorted through this mess. It is easy to get lost, especially when I don't really know what I'm looking for. How will I know when I find her? How will I know what is and isn't me? What to keep, what to throw away?

As my therapist said, it all comes down to emotions. Thoughts can be learned. Behaviours can be changed. But emotions? They need opportunities to provoke them. So I suppose the best I can do is keep listening and keep responding. Processing the trauma is only a part, a small but necessary part, of recovery. The rest involves living.