The melodrama of it all
April is a weird month - more reflections on life in London, my ever-changing feelings for it, American Psycho, and thoughts on TTPD
And I’m just mad as hell you let me give you all that youth for free
Because dedicating several years to something you thought was the right thing and once envisioned as the best thing that could ever happen to you, especially at a crucial period in your life and when you thought you already knew yourself well enough to be sure of what you want, only for it to slowly drift away and the life to drain from it completely is a cruel scenario to find yourself in.
I hear her singing in my ears as I am struggling to push my bike through the bumpy streets of the City, rain falling down and attacking the reddened skin on my face, the unyielding wind now turned my sworn enemy is fighting to knock me down, the skies above painted shades of grey forever imprinted on my heart. It’s barely midday and I’ve already had a shitty day, the third one in a row this week. It’s the most fitting setting I could ask for to be listening to this song for the first time. I do find it funny how we instinctively apply our own lived experiences when listening to songs about other people’s lives but I do it anyway and let it easily turn words not written about me be exactly about me.
My heart is shattering alongside hers and my soul is healing alongside hers. She’s saying a goodbye I’ve contemplated saying for a while and I am hearing her say words that I suppressed in my mind when they have tried forming into thoughts in the past. I have always felt conflicted on how I feel about living in this city, and I think about it a lot. I often say I love it and I hate it at the same time and as this song is blasting in my ears, both of those feelings are deepening in me. The most consistent feeling I carry for it I can best describe as a weird fusion of appreciation, sentimentality, and the deceiving promise of reinvention that drugs most people who come here. It has all the space I often need, the opportunity for change of scenery at my fingertips that I desperately seek whenever I start feeling a little too lost inside my head. It’s a stupidly large place to call home, you can never really know more than a couple of corners of it well enough to call them your part of town. And thus it will never have you feeling fully at ease.
And I have a list of favourite spots dotted all around, some that I have shared with people whose presence in my life has marked me forever, and other which have become hiding spots I will never show anyone because I want to have them all to myself forever. I regularly pass by park benches and street corners where I bared pieces of my soul to people who didn’t handle it with the care I hoped they would, and hills I cycled up with friends on spring weekends post-pandemic when the world still had little else to offer that I could look forward to. A delicate but vital collection of moments that will go down in the history book of my life as the shaky beginning of my adulthood. For the last few years I have been building habits around things and places in this city - some that have benefited my life in many ways and others fuelled by pure struggle for survival as a twenty-something year-old. I often trick myself into thinking I have given away too much time to this place to just pack it all up one day and leave, my tendency to over-sentimentalise leaving grip marks all over me.
Through wandering half blindly around the city’s streets and taking its punches as they came I somehow, over the last four years, laid down a messy foundation that’s more like something out of a primary school art class rather than a serious promise for a solid future. But it’s a foundation nonetheless, and I look at it with the same naive gushing pride that a little kid looks at their chaotic art project because they built something real out of a vague idea in their head and learned something valuable in the process. Even if it will most likely end up in forgotten and dusty in the garage one day but I’m making my peace with that. I’ve given a lot of my youth to London with questionable return of investment yet I can’t get mad at it when I try.
~
April, as it turns out, is a very melodramatic month in my life. It’s filled with thoughts I stretch out beyond the zone of safety just for the thrill of seeing where that gets me which is often nowhere good, of letting myself be scalded by things I would at other times of the year only feel the effects of when I have little else to focus on. When I trace back the events that have taken place during the Aprils of the past few years, much to my discomfort, I find a pattern a little startling for its dreary undertones. It’s a month I always look forward to for its promise of longer and warmer days yet what it tends to bring around is fierce melancholy and a drizzle of rain still a little too cold for comfort. But as they say, hope dies last.
Fortunately, or maybe the exact opposite if I think about it long enough, I seem to easily come across pieces of art that perfectly reflect the emotions that dominate my Aprils. Some universal force hard at work maybe, helping me satisfy the need to hear someone else say what I am thinking but don’t want to admit. Whenever I get in a bad mood, stumbling somewhere between anger or despair, I turn to either books or music (mostly) to help me by either distracting me or validating my feelings.
I distinctly remember all of last April, as one does with the happiest and the most dire episodes of their life, feeling so angry and overwhelmed with having people invading my personal space on a daily basis, way more acutely felt than usual hence those burst of blinding rage that would bubble up inside me. Day after day for weeks, people would always be too close to me in public, and there was a handful of men who wouldn’t leave me alone when I went for my public swim sessions. So, I began wishing they could disappear from the face of Earth in not so nice ways. Ignoring them did nothing and realising I have little power in making them go away, I decided to indulge that daydream by slipping into a fictional story where the main character is a neurotic sociopath and does in fact find ways to perform the inhumanity he gets possessed by. I needed to read from the point of view of a madman to scratch that itch to forsake my sanity and become one without actually doing so. So, I bought American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and for the first 100 pages was slightly disappointed by the lack of graphic violence I had imagined would infuse every page. Then, as the savage, animalistic behaviours of Patrick Bateman got progressively more detailed and horrifying, I found myself in such an unnerving headspace that had to put the book down for a couple of weeks. I felt myself at my last straw. Then one day one of those men at the swimming pool got even more persistent and I had a near meltdown, simultaneously wishing I could write him into American Psycho so that he could meet the fate of all the characters there, and being absolutely petrified that my mind had ended up at such a dark alley.
The day after that incident, as I was in the middle of a long evening walk, I got a FaceTime call from a few of my closest friends who at the time lived together back in Bulgaria. They had had a few drinks and had decided to give me a call to basically just tell me they loved me, the words coming out slightly slanted in between bursts of drunken laughter, anything else they tried to share making little sense. Which initially had me grinning in the middle of the sidewalk, we rarely ever talk on the phone and the fact that they had thought of me at this state I found wholesome, heartwarming. But that was quickly replaced by undiluted sadness that came from the realisation that I had chosen to live thousands of miles from the people closest in my life and was missing out on all the possible nights of slightly-inebriated fun that I had once envisioned for my early and mid twenties. A chance at fulfilling the desire to share my life with people who understand all my impulses and mistakes that would never come to. I remember ending the call, picturing them going back to their fun night of fun and top-ups I wished I was there for, and crying my eyes out as I walked on. I never got to tell them the story with the guy from the day before because it felt out of place in the conversation and I had convinced myself it was the price to pay for choosing to be far away.
~
April this year has not been much different in its hard-hitting punches to the soul. A string of things going wrong day after day, the weather growing colder and grimmer by the hour after a period of afternoons soaking in the sun, and my listening to the saddest songs on repeat for months during winter caught up with me with such force that I woke up one day and was Down Bad1. Then, at the end of that already horrid week I dubbed as “another series of unfortunate events“, Taylor Swift2 released her new (surprise double) album which I impatiently put on barely a minute after waking up, unknowingly digging myself an emotional grave much deeper than what is appropriate for a random Friday in April. I listened to it as I brushed my teeth, made my breakfast and got ready for the day, sleep still lingering on my eyes but my heart already breaking at the seams. I went through my day carefully combing through what she was saying, all two hours worth of new songs in which she fully indulges her hunger to lay out all the things she went through in the last few years for the world to know. There really is so much emotion in that album that I was mostly overwhelmed by it, and taken by surprise that some of the lyrics tapped on and opened doors in my mind I had previously thought were bolted shut. Suddenly I was standing face to face with a huge rotting pile of feelings that felt incredibly overwhelming, a moment I had been hoping to postpone as long as possible and even avoid altogether, thinking time would erase the power out of them.
I find a funny coincidence, looking through the visual evidence of those last couple of Aprils on my camera roll - I bought American Psycho on April 19th and exactly a year later, to the day, Taylor released her album, several songs from which hit where it hurts the most and just like AP sent me down a spiral.
I read a review of TTPD which describes it as melodramatic, and I agree wholeheartedly. The 31-song album is indeed long, some argue not really an album at all but rather a self-indulgent rant in musical form that provides little new in terms of sound and production. Which I don’t see the negatives of, to be completely honest. This album is not intended for those looking for objectively exciting or groundbreaking music, it was clearly created as a body of work that helped her purge from a lot of heavy feelings she was having and kept hidden for a long time, and as such it is messy, horribly sad at times and a bit unserious at others, very much self-indulgent if we’re sticking to traditional album formats and expectations we hold for artists of her magnitude. It doesn’t break any ceilings but it is chockfull of female rage and subsequent despair which I can unfortunately very much relate to. Perhaps I like it a little too much because I understand the melodrama of it all, the need she felt to finally put an end to certain stories and in the process of that let her feelings take control instead of her controlling them. It’s not a record that needed to exist if we’re looking at enriching the landscape of the music industry but there is an undeniable level of comfort to be found in and through it, mainly from how many of these songs are about a doomed situationship that apparently went on for way longer than anyone realised and which left her feeling worthless and abandoned. And she allowed herself to write about it in detail, showed the world the receipts, to put it in internet-speak. Which from the perspective of an outsider or her own now that she’s in a different stage of her life looks a little unnecessary, inflated, something that could have easily stayed within her inner circle of friends. But I’m glad it’s here for me to experience because it’s a weirdly cathartic experience listening to someone so powerful creating a song called The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, based on an on-and-off affair with someone who eventually showed their true colours, and lettings all of us who’ve been in similar situations nod along as it plays in our ears, laughing as we cry at the ridiculousness of it all. Sometimes being a bit melodramatic is how you get over certain things in life, and I think exaggerating the impact of events and feelings is the lesser evil when compared to bottling it all up and fully denying their effect on you. You just need to know when you’ve reached the last sentence of the story and should lay the entire matter to rest.3
~
A quick recap of other Aprils in my life that confirm that weird pattern:
The April of 2022 I had just left a job I overall enjoyed but knew I was not meant for, nor did I see myself having a future in it. So there I was, absolutely lost as to what I was going to do but the world finally felt free enough for me to feel optimistic about the future. Which in hindsight was more or less delusional but I tend to let anxiety trick me into thinking many things are a waste of time if I’m not one thousand percent excited about them. So I would rather run off into the unknown with no plan than risk the guilt of “wasting time“. Unfortunately.
At the end of March 2021 I was let go of a job I hated from the bottom of my heart so it mostly a relief when it happened, and I remember feeling as light as a feather on my way home after that afternoon meeting when they told me tomorrow would be my last day at the company. A couple days later, as April rolled along and my freshly baked unemployed status settled in, I tried to enjoy my newfound freedom but found myself spending most of my time anxious about what the hell I was going to do next, with minimal savings and still very little connections in the city that could help. The only good thing that came out of that month was that I finally had enough time to explore London like I had wanted to do for the past 7 months but couldn't because that full time job was so mentally exhausting and often required unpaid overtime on weekends too. I also read A Little Life that month and many tears were shed which simply solidifies the fact that April is just not my time of year.
~
So, going forward, I shall be weary of Aprils. I know that nothing lasts forever but I also know that sometimes cycles and patterns take a long time to break so until I have a whole month of April without anything happening that makes me want to rip my hair out I will have it marked on my calendar as thirty days of having my guard on.
With that said, I know I am being dramatic, I like being dramatic when I talk about certain things. I get disillusioned with the outcome of something and in that very moment it feels like the worst thing to ever happen to me, and it stays like that in my mind for a long time. Which is often reflected in the way I think, write, or talk about it, gripped by the mark it left on me. When I look back at all of those events I talked about here, none of them were actually that horrible or terrifying, but spring is a deceiving season especially at its beginning. Suddenly you’ve got all this extra light in the day and it all feels very hopeful and exciting so when unfortunate things happen to you, it feels like an unjust, personal attack, and the reactions can be intense. I need a t—shirt with a sign on it that says I’m prone to melodrama, and that will be my April uniform. And I suppose you could stick the “melodramatic“ sticker to Patrick Bateman’s forehead too (before he rips out your lungs for messing up his meticulously cared-for skin) since he kills several of his colleagues because they have slightly nicer business cards or score last minute reservations at a restaurant he wants which in his head somehow puts them at an advantage. Or simply because he is dead inside and is wildly depressed but two things can be true at once.
Anyhow, as yet another one of these months is coming to an end, and subtle signs from fate or what have you are sneaking up on me to say that life isn’t really that exhausting all the time, I’m careful to collect those ones too instead of focusing only on my American Psycho-adjacent moments. And I’m listening and reading to more uplifting things alongside the sad ones because balance, you know.
As always,
thank you for spending your time with me <3
One of the songs on TTPD. The chorus goes “Now I’m down bad crying at the gym“. I cry while I cycle or sometimes when I swim, so I can relate pretty closely.
If you’re of the opinion that the only people who (should) listen to her are silly (teenage) girls whose entire lives revolve around dating and break ups and that her lyrics lack any meaning, clearly no research has been done. If you don’t like her music or don’t get the obsession, that’s fine with me, we all have different tastes. I understand the media’s fixation on her can be frustrating if you don’t care for her but that’s not my battle to fight.