My love of the soundtracks of The Lord of the Rings films—my incessant need to have all of the Complete Recordings in my possession—comes from more than one place. It's not purely about the music, and it's not purely about the movies. It's about something in the middle of those things, about my appreciation for exactly what Howard Shore managed to create in his compositions combined with what those soundtracks mean to me in the broader context of Middle Earth, about this thing that takes me back to something else.
What's much less of a secret than my love of Howard Shore is my love of The Princess Bride. I've seen that movie so many times that I know it by heart and can recite most of the lines along with the characters. If you ask me what my favorite movie is, The Princess Bride will probably be my answer. I saw it for the first time when I was about five years old, my father bought me the DVD for my eighth birthday, and the rest is history.
I don't know if it's entirely honest to say that it's really my favorite movie, though. It's a wonderful film and it never fails to make me happy, but at the end of the day—at the end of every stressful period in my life, mixed in there once or twice or six times a year—I wind up watching The Lord of the Rings (the extended editions, no less, because once you've seen them it's impossible to go back to the theatrical versions without feeling like you're missing something).
I'm not always good at restraining myself from watching those films. Sometimes I wind up doing it when I should be doing other things (oops), but this time I did manage to keep myself from doing that. I've been pretty sick for the last week with what was the worst cold I've had in a long time, and I spent a good bit of it laid up in bed. Obviously, I had to find something to do with myself, and after the mess that was this past semester, there was an easy answer to my problem: The Lord of the Rings.
I don't remember when I saw the first two movies, but I'm pretty sure it was actually after we saw The Return of the King. We saw it in theaters, and I don't actually remember all that much of it other than how terrified I was of Shelob (I'm terrified of spiders) because I was only seven at the time, but somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the movies. It's not surprising, because I have a deep love for good fantasy, and Tolkien sort of founded modern fantasy, so it's really quite logical, but the fact remains: The Lord of the Rings have become my comfort movies.
In April of my senior year of high school—three years ago, now, which is an utterly terrifying thought—I gave a speech at assembly. Giving a Senior Sage was an opportunity that was awarded to all the seniors, should they choose to pursue it, and I felt like I had to. I felt like there was something that I needed to say (and there still is, hence the blog), and I didn't know what that something was, but I knew it was present. I started writing my senior sage in August, before I'd even officially started classes that year, but that wasn't the speech I gave. I wrote thirty drafts before I was happy, before I'd settled on what felt right, but that final draft didn't include everything.
No, that final draft left out a lot of things, including this: "There's this thing about instrumental music that just calls to you, this feeling that you get when you're listening to the soundtrack of Return of the King at night on a Thursday, this strange emotion that just slips into your heart and gives you chills and leaves you breathless and sometimes on the verge of tears, because when you listen to this music you feel like you're capable of doing anything. You sit there and stare at nothing and remember what it felt like to watch those movies when you were five and six and seven and think about how nobody really believed in Eowyn, but I am no man and you can slay a dragon (or a Nazgûl) if you believe in it enough. You can survive this if you believe in something, anything."
I wrote that on December 26th, 2013, because I'd asked for the Complete Recordings for Christmas and my mother gifted me the soundtrack of The Return of the King. It's something that I've listened to countless times since then, something that I've put on when I was stressed out or upset, or even just as the soundtrack for a nap (or several). I think I sort of knew that I was never going to wind up sharing that specific draft in its entirety—it was one of those things that I'd written just because I needed to write it, not because I wanted someone else to read it—but that doesn't make it any less true.
So why, then? Why did I reach for these movies this past week? I'm not at the same mental point as I was then, almost three and a half years ago, so what is it about my life right now that made me feel the need to watch all of them in their entirety, and then follow them up with the appendices as well? Why did I do that, knowing that Return of the King makes me cry every single time? Why?
This semester was not an easy one. Between the amount of work that I had to do, for both my honor society and my classes, and my other commitments, and the things that happened which completely blindsided me emotionally, I've spent most of the last four months with constant stress. It wasn't massive amounts of stress—at least, not most of the time—but I actually cope better with short-term, high-pressure environments than I do with long-term, low- to medium-pressure environments. I find it much easier to push through things when I know they'll be over soon.
As a result, I've been feeling very, very drained. It wasn't like it was in high school, where I was falling apart emotionally left and right, but I've just been tired. I've been tired all the time, no matter how much sleep I've gotten, and even the last few days haven't been enough to get that back on track (which probably has something to do with how sick I've been, since my body is pretty exhausted right now). The time off before my internship starts is primarily going to be a period for me to get back to a place where I'm not constantly exhausted even when I'm getting eight hours of sleep in a night.
To top it off, I'm feeling restless. Part of it's about riding, as I wrote about in my last post, and there's not much I can do about that other than hold on to my dream and wait it out, but the other part of it is about the fact that my junior year of college is over and I don't really know how I got here or how it went so fast. I don't know how it's been three years since I stood up on that stage my senior year of high school and gave that speech, how I went from that to facing down my last year of school before I have to go be a real adult. I don't know when I grew up.
I'm scared, but I'm also ready. I'm ready to move on and do something with myself. I've been older than my years for a long time—trauma will do that to you—but it's manifesting itself again in something other than the age of most of my friends. It's manifesting itself in this need to go forward, in this need to be better, in this need to try to make a change in my own small way, no matter how scared I am of the process.
I keep this whiteboard propped up underneath the hutch of my desk where I can see it when I'm working on things, and usually it's got a song lyric or some quote that I saw on Tumblr that I really liked on it, but right now it's got something else—"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." It's a reminder for me, something that I need to see on a daily basis, something to remind me that even when we're thrust into situations that we don't want to be a part of—situations like the current state of the world—we aren't stuck. We can't control those things specifically, but we can control ourselves. We can control the choices we make. We can control what we make of our lives.
Three years ago, I stood up on that stage, and I made a choice. I made a choice to get up in front of my classmates, in front of all of these people who probably wouldn't remember most or any of what I said, and admit that I have PTSD. I made a choice to stop hiding it from everyone, to stand up there and own up to it and acknowledge that it had changed me. It was about me, not everyone else. It was about me owning who I was, even if I wasn't always especially thrilled with her. It was about saying "I know I can be prickly, I know I can be standoffish, I know I've been cynical and all of these other things, but I'm still here. I'm still going forward. I'm not by myself. I still have things that matter."
I'm so far past who I was then. I'm so far past being afraid of myself. I'm so far past not being satisfied with who I am as a person. There are always things I'm working on, and I'm always going to do things that I'm not completely happy with, but I'm no longer trying to remind myself daily that "even darkness must pass"—at least, I'm not trying to remind myself of that on a personal level. In the context of the wider world, sure, but not for me. I slayed my own Witch King of Angmar, but I didn't do it by myself. I had my Merry there, stabbing him in the back to help me along.
A lot of people stepped into those shoes and filled that role, but at this point in my life, as I look at my (small) circle of friends, at the people I talk to on a regular basis and feel comfortable with, there's really only one who's been there for it all. I usually call her my best friend when I'm talking to other people, but that's not the right label for her. She and I talked about that this past week, about the fact that we've been through so much together that we're past the point of "best friend" being an adequate description for our relationship to one another. The label we seem to have settled on is each other's "person."
I can't give you a description for what that means, exactly, because we don't really have a definition for it. It's more about the fact that we've known each other since we were in middle school, thanks to our forays into online horse forums, about how we reconnected in high school and became close along the way, about how we met each other in person for the first time last year and have seen each other several times since and can talk until we lose our voices without ever running out of things to say, about the fact that no matter what's happening, no matter how bad things are, we've always got each other.
We've always got someone in our corner. We always know that it might take a second and it might take a day, but there will always be a response to that message. There will always been a sympathetic ear. There will always be honest advice, and there will never be useless platitudes expressed in difficult situations. We tell each other what the other person needs to hear, and sometimes that means acknowledging that the pain and the heartbreak and the sadness and the anger don't just magically go away, that you might have to live with them for a while.
You might have to live with them, but you won't be doing it alone, and I'm not. I haven't.
We aren't separated by more than about a year in age, but there's a couple of years between us at school. I'll be walking out into adulthood when she's just reaching the halfway point of college, but that doesn't mean that we aren't going to be there for one another. To quote Samwise Gamgee, "I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you." We can't go through life for each other, but we can pick one another up when it gets a little too hard. There's always someone there willing to do the heavy lifting for a while when we can't quite manage it on our own.
That's what The Lord of the Rings is to me, I guess. That's why I settled on it all those years ago, why it's the thing that I choose to lose myself in more than anything else when I need an escape from everything in my life. It's my reminder that no matter how dark things seem, we can always fight to make them brighter. It's my reminder that no matter how alone we may feel, there's always someone there to help carry us along for a while.
It's my reminder of where I was, of where I've come from, of where I'm going, because I've been reaching for those movies and those soundtracks for so long that they've intertwined themselves into so many different aspects of my life. They're part of those periods of stress, of the relief when they're over, of the days that I spent shut up in my friend's home theater watching the films the summer after senior year because she'd never seen them and myself and two of our friends felt that we had to rectify that situation immediately (complete with a handy "who's who" guide made by yours truly), and they're tied up in all of the emotions associated with those things, even as those moments are long gone.
It's my reminder of where I was, of where I've come from, of where I'm going, because I've been reaching for those movies and those soundtracks for so long that they've intertwined themselves into so many different aspects of my life. They're part of those periods of stress, of the relief when they're over, of the days that I spent shut up in my friend's home theater watching the films the summer after senior year because she'd never seen them and myself and two of our friends felt that we had to rectify that situation immediately (complete with a handy "who's who" guide made by yours truly), and they're tied up in all of the emotions associated with those things, even as those moments are long gone.
Really, The Lord of the Rings is my reminder that sometimes we say goodbye, but that doesn't mean that it's the end. That doesn't mean that it's over. There's always room for another story, even if it's not ours to tell.
My story isn't over, but it's separating. I'm getting ready to get on that ship and leave, and I don't know where I'm going to wind up. I don't know what will happen to me in the end, what I'll do, who I'll be, but we're getting there. Things are changing. Nothing is ever going to be the same.
Well, nothing except for my incessant love of the motifs associated with Rohan and Edoras. I don't think that's going anywhere anytime soon. It's Howard Shore, after all. He is my favorite composer for a reason.
Until next time x
Until next time x
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