Commit This To Memory

I saw Motion City Soundtrack live on Monday, May 4th, 2015 and It was maybe one of the best concerts I've ever been to. I had so much fun despite going alone, and not only did they play my favourite song, but the tour t-shirt is covered in the lyrics to the same song. I was so happy the minute I saw it.

The show was part of a tour celebrating the ten year anniversary of their album Commit This To Memory, an album that came out around the same time as a few albums, although I didn't discover them all until a few years after they came out, that pretty much shaped my taste in music. A lot of who I am as a person and a writer and a music lover sprung out of these albums. This band has written a song about feeling like rain, and I knew exactly what that meant somehow which fascinated me. I wanted to think of things like that, make people feel think "how are these words describing how I feel so perfectly?"

I hadn't actually listened to the album in a while for whatever reason, so really listening to it again on the day of the show, and then hearing it live, brought back a flood of emotions and feelings. It was a heavy, hard-hitting nostalgia coupled with the happy adrenaline one gets from being at a gig. It was a mix of the emotional, visceral, achingly poetic, lyric geek fifteen-year-old me, but I could buy drinks at the bar and I wasn't terrified of the (albeit tiny) moshpit.

So I've already spoken about why being fifteen again would be terrible, for me anyway, and the past few days have only solidified my stance. The night was great, and once the feeling was dying down by the time I got home that night I started dwelling on it, rethinking it, wondering what I could have done to make it better, and wondering if maybe the night wasn't as great as I had thought. What if I could have met Justin Pierre, what if I had brought friends? What if I could have caught a pick? What if what if what if.... I was chasing the feeling away by trying to hold onto it or make it better, and for days afterward too. I've listening to the album on repeat, feeling slowly sadder and sadder about not being at the gig anymore, whilst listening to an album full of pretty sad songs.

The thing about being achingly poetic is: you have to ache. Aching isn't a good thing. I've been feeling it though, that warm, dull, painful ache in my chest that feels like being a teenager. I'm wasting a good feeling with my obsessive running and re-running of thoughts and feelings over in my head in an attempt to fix or improve them. I'm constantly trying to revise my thoughts and words and feelings, so certain that if I think hard enough I'll make everything better when all I'm really doing is spiralling.

I'm aware of it though, and actively pulling myself back from these destructive thought patterns. That shows me the therapy, the Mindfulness, and the attempts to improve my mental emotional state are working in small but noticeable ways. It's nice to have a little indicator that you've made progress, because it shuts up that annoying inner critic we all have, if only for a little while.