Taking Play Seriously: Depressive Adventures in Writing and Music

I started playing the piano when I was eight. Because I didn’t practice, I dreaded lessons, and because I dreaded lessons, I didn’t practice. I only learned to play classical music (what my parents wanted me to learn), and I didn’t find the exercise (nor the very idea of ‘being good at the piano’) super exciting. My feelings towards the instrument only got worse as I got older and started feeling guilty about how much my parents were paying for lessons when they could hardly afford to. The guilt didn’t motivate me to practice more, it only made me feel worse and so the piano became an object of enmity and dread.

I preferred writing, an activity I could do privately with no expectations for progress from anyone. It was an escape where I could work through thoughts and build worlds on the fly. Words could be made to fit this way or that way, and I loved how there were rules for writing but if you knew them well enough, you were allowed to—even supposed to—break them. None of this had seemed possible to me in the realm of the piano,so I wrote poems and stories and fantasised about being a writer instead. Maybe I could be a novelist, living in a cabin in a remote forest, with a typewriter on a big desk at a big window. Or perhaps a journalist living in New York City (which wasn’t far from where I grew up), in a small but bright apartment filled with books. I’d work weird hours and be a regular at the local cafe, bar, bodega. I’d have other writer friends and we’d stay up late drinking wine and discussing writerly gossip. These fantasies of course have nothing to do with the actual practice of writing, but they excited me enough to actually do the thing.

***

I did become a professional writer eventually—but not the kind I’d fantasised about. I ended up working in marketing, i.e. convincing people to do things using language and design. My first job after university was at an agency in New York where I wrote blog posts about things like how corporate social responsibility programs can improve a company’s image or how to retain employees by telling a better brand story. In short: meaningless garbage for search engines to index and not for humans to actually read. I didn’t stay at that particular job very long though; just over a year later, I quit because I was moving to Australia—I’d met someone. He was from Melbourne, and by the time we’d met he had only two months left in New York. Although we’d agreed to keep it casual, within those two months we fell out of our minds in love—and so, after he left, within half a year I broke my tenancy agreement, quit my job, and left the city I’d been dreaming of living my entire life to be with him.

I never regretted moving to Melbourne… but, the first years of living here were enveloped by a confusing, exhausting depression. On the one hand, I was happy: I was living with the lover of my dreams, a person so perfect to me that I was sometimes convinced that I’d made him up. He was a lawyer but he hated the law. He was also a musician, and he had a band, and songwriting to him was what writing was to me. He made (and still makes) my heart skip.

And yet.

Every day, I’d wake up with Dan, euphoric to see his face. I’d walk him to work. Then I’d come home and wait for lunchtime. We’d meet up and eat in the park, and I’d go home and… what did I do? For a year? Or was it a year and a half?

I looked for work, but my visa status was complicated and made it difficult to get a foothold in a new place. I freelanced here and there. I didn’t know anyone besides my partner at first, and I didn’t have the edifice of school or work to make me seem productive. Adding fuel to the fire, the timezones were impossibly out-of-whack with home. I felt alone most of the time, but worse, I also felt that—in video calls, in emails, and, of course, on social media— I had to seem like I was thriving. I’d moved to Melbourne on a pretty big whim, and back home many people held a vague assumption that I would sooner or later move back, and single. Worse, my visa didn’t allow me to visit the States for several years. Traveling home was out of the question, unless it was going to be a permanent move back.

We lived in a cheap sharehouse and Dan for the most part was able to support us until I found something stable—in the meantime, he encouraged me to take advantage of not working, to treat unemployment not as a stressor but as a rare period of truly free time where I could do what I wanted do most. This could be it: I could use my unemployed time to write, to become the kind of writer I’d wanted to be. I could write a novel, or the family history epic I’d started working on in New York, or a collection of short stories, or even just keep a blog.

I didn’t do any of it.

And I felt that I couldn’t tell Dan that I spent every day not writing. It was the guilt again: I was being supported to do something, but I wasn’t doing it, and instead of that guilt pushing me to do anything, it made me do more nothing. But the most embarrassing thing for me to admit is the fact that the moments when I felt at my absolute worst were when Dan was songwriting before or after work, or when he had band practice, i.e. the times he was doing what he loved doing most. 

I hated that I felt this way at the time, and I continue to feel disgust at it today. But I can also understand where the feeling was coming from: Dan got so much pleasure and fulfilment from music, and I no longer got those things from writing.

At a time when I hardly knew anyone in Melbourne and I was desperate for meaningful friendship, I was jealous of musicians. The band worked on cool things together—I heard them do it for five or six hours every week, on top of all of the time Dan spent practicing and writing on his own. They endured the hard parts together and they got to enjoy the pleasure together; it was a social act of shared creativity. But, because depression removes all the joy from the things you love most and then proceeds to convince you that the world has been set up to be uniquely terrible for only you, I thought I’d been tricked into wanting to be a writer my entire life. The fantasies had been lies to lure me in, and there was never any enjoyment to be experienced or benefit to be attained. I saw it as a selfish and private act, an experience that was rarely joyful and could never truly be shared.Of course writers write for readers, but the reader usually experiences the work alone. Music, on the other hand, can be produced with others and shared with others, who are active and present with you. I hated that I never enjoyed playing the piano, I hated that I’d wasted nearly a decade of lessons, that I hadn’t explored playing things I’d wanted to play. I started to hate music as much as I hated the piano. And at the same time, I was also convinced that I had to keep writing, that it was my thing and that thing could never be anything else. 

If you’d have told me at that time that I didn’t have to be a writer—that nothing was stopping me from playing music if that’s what I wanted to try, and if I ended up not enjoying it I didn’t have to do that either—I’d have told you to get f*****.

***

Dan tried and suggested a lot of things: he encouraged me to start a writer’s group so that I could meet other writers, and when I couldn’t bring myself to do it, we started one together. He taught me to play the guitar with weekly lessons that he was determined to make enjoyable, writing an entire workbook that described the techniques and chords we were learning and included tabs he’d worked out of all of my favourite songs. We reserved every Sunday to work on a show script together, exploring collaborative writing instead of doing it solo. And one day, Dan bought a small synth, a secondhand MicroKorg—he wanted to see if it could work for the band. Although it looked suspiciously like a piano, when Dan wasn’t home I played around on it. Almost immediately, I was surprised to find, I fell in love with the synthesiser. A synth doesn’t need to be played with a keyboard, although many (like the MicroKorg) come with keyboards built-in. I already knew how to play the keys—and the rest was just… playing around.

None of these things were the thing that finally kicked out the depression brain but together all of them did, along with the passage of time, as Melbourne became more familiar to me, as I met more people and made close friends, and when my visa status eventually changed so I could visit home again. Creativity and art-making tend to be associated with the idea that the good stuff requires some sort of psychological suffering. But depression for the most part hardly produces anything at all, let alone anything good. I just had to relearn what children know so well: creativity isn’t anything serious, it’s taking play seriously.