Open The Floodgates

Water has always had a way of showing up in my songwriting. So much so that people started to ask me what it meant. I didn’t feel like I knew how to speak on that until the French Broad River raged through the windows and doors of my home in Marshall, North Carolina, and crawled 12 feet up its walls, drowning all the items I had collected throughout my life and leaving them covered in a thick, smelly, toxic muck.

Water was there with me in my mother’s womb. It sculpted my muscles and bones. It kept me safe while I grew. It was moving, cradling me, replenishing every few hours to keep my temperature stable. It’s funny because when I think of the word “stable,” I think of something that does not move. A deeply rooted tree, or a tall office building. But in the womb, water was teaching me to accept change as the most reliable part of life.

Maybe in the womb I was a completely enlightened being. I had no attachment to knowing. I did not wonder what was, I just was. And then I came online in that bright white fluorescent hospital wing and began a chapter I would come to know as “Indigo De Souza.” 

I really struggled in school. I was known to have involuntary crying spells in math class because my brain just could not grasp the expansive language of numbers. I remember identifying as “bad at learning.” It took me a while to realize that learning didn’t just mean writing down the things my teachers said and memorizing them for a test. It meant absorbing my experience, both consciously and unconsciously. It meant that everywhere I went, energy would slip into my bloodstream like water down a hatch, and would meet the world again, in a silvery, almost palpably infinite feedback loop. For the longest time, I thought that reality was what the grown-ups were telling me it was. But it’s incredible, how many things it turns out they did not mention.

I’ve spent most of my life, as many humans can probably relate, struggling against change. I struggle with life itself. I have lived with mental illness for as long as I can remember. I used to have issues with incessant suicidal ideation. 

Death haunted me. It was like music that always played in my head; sometimes it was very quiet and distant, and sometimes it was blasting at full volume, but it was there. 

I was convinced that I would never experience long-lasting happiness. That I would always be hurting. I wondered if death was more forgiving than life. And at the same time, I was scared to rush the inevitable. I surrounded myself with company as often as I could to keep the thoughts at bay. In my pre-teenhood, experts told me it was a chemical imbalance. Something I could not control. 

Later, in my 20s, after switching therapists a handful of times, testing a slew of medications, and years of flailing, terrified and reckless through a vortex of pain and unhealthy dynamics, I was given a diagnosis. Borderline personality disorder. And for the first time in my life, I saw a way forward. 

All of the characteristics of BPD matched my experience in day to day life. And while that was scary at first, I was touched by hope when I discovered the power of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) and neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to re-shape and re-organize its structure, adapting to new things and recovering from damage. It means that inside my brain, I am the river, and I am shaping my own neuropathways. The brain can change, and in fact, always is changing. When I became aware of that, I was excited to embrace it. It took me 20-something years to remember what water had taught me when I was in the womb:

Water is a sculptor. It can reshape anything, even stone. It is always in motion, it never stops and it is always changing. Even as I sat on the same rock by the same creek most days for years, I never touched the same water I had touched before. 

♦

I wrote “Come To God” after catapulting through many layers of loud, undeniable grief. Post-flood upheaval, I came to Los Angeles to write and record music with my friend Elliott. Music has been a sacred source for processing my feelings since I started to learn how to play the guitar at nine years old. I noticed from a young age how special it felt to sing my inner world out loud and see it reflected in people’s faces. To see that they are feeling things too. That we are not so different, just living in realities so independent from each other that it makes us feel that way.

Elliott and I recorded a whole album’s worth of songs without realizing it. I started to feel like everything might be OK. I bathed in the LA sun and sent my songs to friends and family in North Carolina, hoping maybe some of my healing would rub off on them. Having lost all of my material possessions, I felt such immense gratitude for my community. And I had come to the grand realization that we did not need any of that stuff we lost because we had each other. I was never really alone.

And then, out of nowhere, as things so often come, my best friend of many years and my ex-partner of even more years, confessed to me (over the phone) that they had fallen in love. It’s hard to explain what kind of effect this news had on my reality at that moment. You would have to know the full history and nature of my relationships with them, both individually and as a family. You would have to understand my story from birth and why I had attached to these friends the way I did. But without giving very much context, just note that the impact was catastrophic. 

With this fresh blindside, a new message came pulsing through the void: I don’t need anyone else to be whole. I have myself, and that is enough. 

I had never lived a life that was truly mine. I had not trusted myself enough to do that. But now, the floodgates were wide open, and grief was beckoning me onward. I decided to move to LA and start over.

♦

Grief is always moving. It carves a path to healing, twisting its blade, and then flushing out the dusty remains of my last heartbreak, shocking my system into cyclical rebirth. There it is again and again, more and more familiar every time, but also in totally new form. Like a friend getting older. Grief comes to me and forces me to look inward. It challenges me to take care of myself. Tells me to dance and cry and stand out in the rain with my face tilted upwards.

Grief is not linear. Sometimes it comes from places I do not expect. From memories I had stored away and somehow scratched their way to the surface. Grief is a part of change, and change is the most reliable guy around. A real cosmic gag.

It is truly a wonderful feeling to report  that I have not thought about suicide in a while now. For the first time since I was a teenager, I am happy to be alive. And somewhere in my newfound positive mindstate, I am also miraculously not so scared of death anymore. Not afraid of dying, and not afraid of living either.

I water from my eyes, and it collects in my collar bones. I sweat through my skin, and it rises up to meet the hot sun. I am never the same as I was moments before. I am always changing. I sing songs to heal, and time changes them too. The songs don’t come from me. When I write them, I am only listening to what is already there.

I listen all the time. I push past the beeps and the honks, the voices, the boxes, the big bold drama so sensational that it has us all in a trance.

I go to the river to remember where I came from. I float in the water and listen to the current humming under the surface.

In a world that is so wildly unpredictable, I am learning to find acceptance for the way things move. I am learning to lean in instead of pushing against. I am the water, and the water is me.