The Fabulous Organist

I don’t recommend doing that the way that I did. I was entirely alone the whole time for the most part, and I shouldn’t have had to do that, but I survived and now I’m writing about how.

And then I ended up having a dissociative fugue state and treated it like a military training exercise combined with an extended aviation emergency.

Turns out my pandemic hobby of aviation accident podcasts and gallows sense of humor came in clutch to keep me oriented to some sense of reality when the buildings melted and I didn’t even know my name to be able to still make that 911 call somewhere in Long Island City last September.

After months of wandering around the eastern US, I had finally been able to bring myself to do the hardest thing in my life: ask for help. At 17 after my second suicide attempt, I had made a vow that I’d kept for decades.

“Not by my own hand”

If despair was going to take me out, the lazy bastard would have to grow legs to take me out himself, I wouldn’t do his job for him. That had carried me through many years and too many moments of the lure of a permanent solution to the temporary pains of life (as terrible as my suffering was) to stay around long enough to see how the next movement would sound.

Once I began to compose later on, I started writing my own music. Sometimes it was a musical joke, a counterpoint exercise titled For Fux’s Sake!. Another time, a repeated dies irae in the middle of an eating disorder relapse for piano and clarinet for composition titled Day of Beseeching for a professor who’d taught compositional restriction as chosen constraints to strip away inherited and expected voices to find the truth underneath.

Let’s see, quick update. I’m not longer a church organist, I left the Catholic Church and became orthodox for a few years, then an atheist, and after a major mental health crisis last year where traumatic childhood memories broke out after 35 years of being buried, ended up with a dissociative fugue state that I barely survived. It was only a shit ton of training that I fell back on during a scary situation that I was unable to rise to the occasion in, and these days, I’m now writing my memoir and looking to share my story with others who are in the middle of navigating their own storms.