When we think of the term “connected,” we generally think of our relationships to other people. We want to feel “connected” to others – like are somehow banded together and joined as a unit. There is a comfort and security in feeling connected to others. It cultivates a sense that we are not alone, that we won’t somehow be left behind in life’s journey. We are validated as being included and acceptable.
Conversely, feeling “disconnected” can be a horrible feeling. We can feel alone and isolated – like we are floating in the ether. And it’s not a good kind of enjoyable floating. It can feel more like we have all of the weight of rejection by the world, and none of the lightness of freedom. We aren’t securely fastened to our independence. Rather, we are bound by our separateness from others.
The thing is that in our zeal to connect with others, we often forget a crucial step – to connect with ourselves first. We don’t usually do the things with ourselves that we would customarily do to “get to know” someone else. We don’t check in with ourselves and ask how we are doing. We don’t always take care to be kind to ourselves and we can sometimes forget to do nice things for ourselves. And we often ignore ourselves when we are struggling. We may be in pain, but no one would know it by how we treat ourselves.
The irony is that often we ignore connecting with ourselves in an effort to connect with others. We tend to prioritize the needs of others over our own. We treat ourselves like the understanding friend who we choose to offend in favor of others who we fear will disconnect from us more easily. But just as this behavior is damaging to our relationship with our understanding friend, it is also harmful to how we relate to ourselves. And by doing so, we risk becoming disconnected from ourselves.
Disconnecting from ourselves is harmful on many levels. First and foremost, if we don’t connect to ourselves, we will not understand our own experience. We will more likely feel confused and bewildered by our feelings and reactions. And when we are confused by our own experience, we are much more likely to suppress and avoid how we think or feel, which can harm us physically and mentally. And finally – and perhaps ironically – it is much more difficult to connect with others if we are not connected with ourselves.
On his new album Trauma Factory, Joe Mulherin — aka musician nothing, nowhere — has shared how he has made it a priority to connect with himself. I spoke with Mulherin for the Hardcore Humanism Podcast and part of his commitment to this concept is that he feels that in the modern world, so much of our emotional and social life is designed to take us away from that connection to ourselves. “Connecting with yourself is inherently something — at least in the Western world — that we try to avoid at all costs,” Mulherin told me. “It’s more about distracting yourself and keeping yourself busy. So, you don’t have to face the harsh realities sometimes of what lingers in your mind.”
One of the reasons that Mulherin feels that it is particularly important that he personally connects with himself is the sheer volume of thoughts he discovers when he checks in with himself. “So, I think connection to oneself is huge because if you sit down to meditate, or you take a moment for yourself, you realize that your subconscious mind is screaming at you…,” he explained. “I guess in Buddhism, they call it monkey mind, sort of your neurons are just firing constantly … If I sit down in contemplation and practice mindfulness, just a minute in I’ll realize the overwhelming amount of thoughts, critiques – there’s just a tornado of things happening in my mind subconsciously.”
One of the greatest strengths of creative or innovative people is their ability to mine that “tornado” to develop novel and original ideas that can form the basis of artistic and business ventures. But Mulherin recognizes that tornados can be destructive. And that same active mind that may help him create a great song can also turn on him in the form of anxiety and worry. If it becomes intense enough, that worry can turn into self-criticism and even self-hatred. “I just think that if I don’t check in with myself, I’m going to sort of harbor a lot of negative energy. I’ll probably fall into like self-loathing,” Mulherin described. “And I feel like my default sort of condition is to be anxious, and worry. So, if I don’t check these boxes off, and I don’t check in with myself, I’m not operating in an optimal way. And I’m not being my best version of myself.”
Mulherin recognized early on how these same powerful thoughts and feelings that drove him to make music could turn on him. He explained how his experience of panic attacks as a child impressed upon him the risk of not connecting with and understanding one’s own emotional experience. “I think I’ve had a sort of successful music career because I’m always worrying and thinking about so many different things. And as a result of that I needed a place to put all these worries and these thoughts. And that just so happened to be writing lyrics for songs,” Mulherin recalled. “I started having really bad panic attacks when I was in third grade. And I really didn’t know why, or how. And I remember the school nurse not knowing what was going on with me. And I was too young to even know.”
In retrospect, Mulherin recognized that one of the main pathways to his panic was his natural curiosity. He would find himself pondering existential questions. But if he did not come up with clear answers, the questions soon turned into worry and ultimately panic. “I just was always thinking. I would think, think myself into a panic…,” he said. “I used to think about the universe and the galaxies and the stars. And then I would just my mind would start to cannibalize itself because I would overthink it and be like, well, ‘What is life? Is this all meaningless?’”
Overall, Mulherin would prefer to have an active mind that can be both creative and anxious, rather than one that is numbed out to the world. Ultimately, he chooses music as his main coping mechanism with the anxiety. “I think I would rather have a mind that dissects the world around me and overthinks than… a mind that is sort of blissfully unaware and uninterested,” Mulherin explained. “And I turned to playing guitar, because it’s not like I was trying to silence that part of me. I just needed to take a break from it sometimes.”
“Being disconnected from yourself is really scary … I have this mind that really wants to dive deep and really wants to question but I also have a tendency to overdo it and when I overdo it, I start to have anxiety, I start to panic,” Mulherin said. “So, it’s always this sort of, like game that I’m playing with myself where I have to sort of walk a tightrope, and just stay on course going forward. Because if I’m not connected with myself, I’m going to be sad, I’m going to be depressed. If I’m connecting too much, I might get myself a little anxious.”
At times his anxiety has gotten so bad that he considered a career change. “I think sometimes when I overdo it, like, with my own life, where I’ll be like, ‘Okay, I have to release this song,’ Mulherin explained. “And then I listen to, and I’d be like, ‘Well, what if this song isn’t very good?’ And then I’m like, ‘Maybe this song is really bad.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I got to release it anyways. People are gonna hate it.’ And then it’ll keep going and going and I’m just like, ‘Why am I even still playing music? I should probably just become a farmer.’”
But ultimately, Mulherin is committed to his music because it is in fact the place he most connects to himself. “Yeah, that’s the beautiful thing about music … It’s like a celebration of suffering. The reason why so many musicians start making music is because they just needed something to make themselves feel better,” Mulherin said. “And then the amazing result of that is that you’re somehow helping some random kid, anywhere in the world feel better about themselves.”
“And music, especially emo music taught me that it was okay to not be okay.”
Photo credit: Dan Brown
