Yesterday, a comment made by my husband gave me pause. He was telling me about his reaction to text alerts. That got me thinking about the power of sounds. Until recently, like him, I had a very negative reaction to hearing my phone ring or my text notification sounding. Quite honestly, the sounds would give me anxiety. My stomach would sink and I’m pretty sure my heart would start beating faster. I have a separate ringtone just for my husband, so when he calls, it is absolutely not a bad feeling. However, during the course of my one year as a school principal, my phone would frequently ring and nearly every time it was the person who was technically my mentor but was really anything but. After a solid year of having my phone ring or my phone alert me to a text, and it almost always being her on the other end, I subconsciously began associating those sounds with anxiety, dread, and fear. It wasn’t long after I escaped the environment that produced those feelings before I realized that I was still having that reaction when I would hear my phone. Easy solution for that. I changed my ringtone and also my text alert sound. Now the alert I get for texts is so simple and so quiet that I sometimes don’t even hear it.
On the flip side, music is a powerful source of emotion. For me lately, this emotion has been severe nostalgia. Since I have been reading through my old journals, I am remembering the songs I listened to and swooned over during the time period in which I was writing. As a hormone-ravaged teenager, I often wrote about the love songs that made me think of certain crushes, or even songs that weren’t necessarily love songs but that made me think of certain people. When I listen to music lately, I have been skipping through my playlist until I come across those same high school songs and I am immediately reminded of that time in my life. I can distinctly remember my bedroom at home and the stereo that I listened to those songs on. I can even remember which part of high school those songs are from. The early years or closer to the end of my time there. I use the word ‘severe’ to describe it because as I have been reminded in my journal re-reading, high school was not a good time in my life, to say the least. In fact, the journal I’m about to start reading is the one that takes up most of my senior year, the time when I received my first mental illness diagnosis. In fact, I’m almost dreading reading this particular journal because I know what’s coming. It’s still very important that I read it though.
All of this is to say that our brains are such powerful things. They can interpret sound in such a way that we immediately feel emotions, good or bad, that were once attached to the same sound, whether the conditions surrounding that sound still exist or not. It almost feels like the true definition of a blessing in disguise. I’m blessed that my brain functions well enough, but it doesn’t feel like a blessing when that emotion produced is so negative. Definitely an interesting phenomenon.
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