ben wakeman : : Journal

On Singing

October 12, 2004

Singing has become my own means of therapy. My depression has gotten more intense over the course of the last year and the more I experience it and study it from the inside out, the more I realize how powerful our own brains are. We have the power to make ourselves into anything we can imagine, so naturally, we also have the power to make ourselves a prisoner of our own design. It is starling how real these walls we manufacture can be. Anyone else can look at your life and see what you do not see -- cannot see.

I have been singing for the majority of my life, but I don't think I ever learned to sing in a way that is meaningful. I learned to sing as a way to imitate my heros, to impress other people, to relate some intellectual idea, but never did I sing as a means of emotional release or as an expression of the soul. It seems like a fairly obvious thing doesn't it? Most people think of emotion right off the bat when they think about singing, but I never truly connected my heart to my voice. Maybe I never had a reason to until now.

Now when I sing, it is an amazing release, like floating above the prison walls. The act of singing produces a very real sense of freedom for me. I can feel the weight lift from my heart, the knots in my stomach release, my shoulders relax and I am breathing a different kind of air that I was not moments before. I sing in the kitchen late at night and find that my voice can do things that I never thought it could. I allow myself to play- to sing in ways that I would be too self-consious to before. Experimenting with falsetto breaks and gutteral phrases that would make Tom Wait proud, I sing songs that I wrote years ago and discover meaning in some for the first time.

In some ways it's sad to realize how many years I've wasted as a songwriter and performer, never fully understanding what it means to sing, but in other ways, it is a great revelation to know that there is still so much for me to discover. It is all about the journey and always has been, even at times in my life when I have been fixated on an impossibly small point on the horizon.