#UNCENSORED: YOU ARE THE MUSIC YOU CHOOSE: Why Toni Braxton, Heather Headley, etc. are bad for you

By CaCaDoo DeviantArt

There is something incredibly powerful about music. To say music is spiritual is stating the obvious. I have come to believe, truly believe, that music is a magic humanity was taught by the great God, to enable us tap into her power whenever we felt the need to get close to her. But with music, as is with everything powerful, it can be used for good or for bad. 

Your music-scape, so to speak, defines the experiences you attract to yourself, both good and bad. The magic of music works this way: The selection of tone, rhythm, lyrics, beat of the piece create an atmosphere your brain (both conscious and subconscious areas) taps into. The atmosphere at first lasts for just in that moment. But constancy, repetition of that kind of music creates this very tangible atmosphere, a presence in your life. It becomes what your mind begins to draw from to formulate and form thoughts in your mind that are similar to the mood and thoughts of the music piece. When thoughts become dominant they manifest in your actions. Your choices and your choices of experience begin to be defined by the constant state of your mind, which is currently being dictated to by the music-sphere you created around yourself. You draw to yourself what is constantly in your mind. 

So imagine a young susceptible girl of 13 years old whose musicsphere was heartbreak love songs. I listened to all versions of Karyn White, Heather Headley, Toni Braxton, - and these were quite  depressing women most of the time. A lot of the time, the music-sphere they began to create in my subconscious drummed in the message that my love relationships would always be fraught with heartbreak, betrayal and disappointment. Long before I began my very first love relationship, I’d subconsciously created a script for myself, drawn from the invisible scripts of my music-sphere, and whoever I was yet to have love relationships already had the role they were going to play without even having the freedom to choose. In retrospect, I realised I attracted to me all the heartbreak scripts in the universe without ever knowing that I attracted them to myself.

So this was the script: I was the good, very loving girl who fell in love with an incredibly remarkable man. But he would not love me the same. His feelings would always be up for question. He would cheat and cheat and come running back to me each time. And I would always accept him back because I loved him with all the truth and completeness of unconditional love. But it would break me. I would be depressed. And would remain in this state of depression for the rest of my life under the umbrella of a synthetic hope that he would realize one day that ‘I was the woman he truly loved’. 

You see what I did there? All from the music sphere I had created for myself? I was the creator, writer and director, and I cheated myself out of any of the good roles. I made myself the doormat. I won’t lie, there was this guilty pleasure in being the wronged but honourable one. And guess what? That’s how much of my love life played out. Word for word. I blamed the guys, I was in a constant state of depression for much of my teenage years and it continued because, hey, that was what I told the universe I wanted without realizing it! I went through relationship after relationship with 98% of the guys treating me like the doormat. Many times, in retrospect, they probably didn’t even mean to! I gave them their roles before they even had the chance to decide for themselves. And I went through the motions of the 'honourable wronged one' faithfully. 

I did this till I sunk so deep in my depression, I stopped caring about the script anymore. And of course, the human spirit always finds a way to defend itself, recuperate so to speak. I did it in a more damaging way. I reversed the roles. And I put myself in the only power position I knew, the power position I had created according to my script: the one who did the ‘doormatting’, who had little regard, loved less, took what was wanted then vanished, and made the other feel used. So this was the role I took on for myself, playing yet another script, a script borne out of reaction, not reason. Not that anything before was reasonable. And of course, all I did being the ‘User’ was hurt others and myself.

 

[Note: all of this was probably all happening in my mind. I was probably introduced to Mr. Right over and over again but I didn’t have the capacity to see him and recognize him for what he truly was. 

And about the musicians that created this depressing music-sphere in the first place, I find that they were usually women who sang these songs and created this depressing atmosphere in their songs. Artistes like Toni Braxton, Heather Headley and songs like ‘One last cry’, ‘Unbreak my heart’, ‘How could an Angel break my heart’, ‘Ain’t it funny’, ‘Superwoman’ were a few of what dominated my music-sphere.  I only hope that the way it affected mine, they being the creators didn’t get a double dose. (Musicians draw from their own ‘atmospheres’ to create right?). A very interesting truth is that any heartbreak song I heard by a male artiste in those times had a completely reverse but fitting script: They accepted they did the cheating, they did the heartbreaking and 'doormatting', and were at the point where they realized they were wrong and truly loved the woman they had used but she had gotten fed up and left. So the crooning was a more like a moan for losing something really good they could have had. For example, Tank’s ‘Maybe I Deserve’ and She’s Gone’ by Brutha, ‘Put that Woman first’ by Jaheim.

Who teaches us to think and say these things and create these gory scripts for ourselves, already defined male and female roles even in unhappiness?]

Anyway, you might be wondering what happened to my musicsphere around the time of me playing the reverse script? Playing the unfeeling, uncaring rebel who’d ‘been through it all’, I didn’t listen to any of the music that had gotten me on this trip anyway. See, I had become a very different person from the guileless, starry-eyed teenager looking for True Love with a lot of heartbreak. I was a bruised, fallen angel of sorts, the resentful devil’s angel who had too many painful experiences to remain in that innocence. And in a reverse way, that helped in the sense that, the music that used to appeal to me didn’t anymore. 

Then slowly, ever so slowly, the musicsphere I had created for myself for years, began to fade. It began to slowly lose the power it had over my subconscious and subsequently my choices and experiences.

Then as if the blinkers had been knocked off my eyes, I began to see the ridiculousness of my life, and choices, for what it really was. The good change did not happen suddenly because I had created such a backlog of consequences but it's happening .

A script of self-empowerment instead of self-deprecation began to be formed in my subconscious. By what music would you ask? The music of life and nature. A sweet silence that hums a tune of power in your mind and you hear it only if you are willing to listen.  

Thought this was a more appropriate picture!

 This is the beginning of an #Uncensored  series I'm running, so please keep watching this space!