Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

905 COME AS YOU ARE

COME AS YOU ARE

I felt like my hand exercises, unlike my vocal exercises, were too easy.

I would sit at the dining table at one end of the living room with my rubber bands in front of me and my feet flat on the floor, and do them. I had learned to have several rubber bands there in case I broke one or accidentally shot it across the room. I would do the exercises but I would wonder if I was doing them wrong because they were too easy.

You can laugh about this now–after all, I can–but at the time, since the exercises were easy, I got this wacky notion that I should try to speed up my mental rehabilitation by thinking about my crap while doing them. As if multitasking was better for me somehow. And I decided that one way to make sure I did the mental work I needed to do to put my head back together was to do it at the same time.

This did not work. I found that while doing my hand exercises I couldn't think about anything except my hand. It bordered on obsessive, or so I thought.

I asked my therapist about it. Did I tell you her name yet? I don't think I did. You're going to laugh at this. Her name was Lynne. L-Y-N-N-E. She didn't bear much resemblance to Aesthetician Linn, L-I-N-N, other than being short and tough as nails.

Okay, maybe they resembled each other a teensy bit.

Anyway. Lynne just looked at me as I obsessed over whether I was being too obsessive and said, "Daron, I'm not a physical therapist, but that sounds like what you're supposed to do."

"What?"

"Being totally aware of each finger, each muscle, staying focused on the exercise... That's what you're supposed to do. That's called mindfulness, and it increases the effectiveness of exercises."

"Oh."

"Go with that. That's your body telling you to pay attention. I bet the hand therapist will say the same thing."

She was right, of course. I started doing my hand exercises twice a day. It had become like meditating. Never mind that the therapist had told me to do them every other day if I felt tired. I didn't feel tired, and when she tested me again she was happy with the results. I wasn't, not yet, but it was better than it had been.

Since my multitasking plan didn't work, though, outside of Lynne's office I wasn't really thinking about my mental crap much at all. I let myself settle into the healing routine. It took four or five visits for me to feel like Lynne knew even a fraction of the shit I had going on in my head, some more recent, some much older. Between Digger, Remo, career stuff, Ziggy, Colin, my mother, Mills... I had a lot to untangle.

What was weird was that I thought I knew how I felt about each one of the people I just named, but Lynne challenged me to evaluate whether that was true. "Is that really how I feel?" Which wasn't what I was expecting from therapy, but it boiled down to something like this: how do you know who you are if you don't know how you actually relate to the people around you? There's a difference between what you feel, deep down in your heart, and what other people or society expect you to feel—and that's different again from the feelings you're allowed to express.

There was a lot to chew on. But while I was obsessive about my hand exercises, I wasn't about my mind. My mind didn't really want to think about all that most of the time.

Part of that was because Ziggy and I were getting along so well. And part of me wanted to say fuck it, if me and Zig are right as rain, then everything else can go hang.

Except I knew I needed to get my head straightened out. After all, I still wasn't writing. I still wasn't getting ideas, but on top of that I'd started to wonder what the point was in writing music that it felt like no one wanted.