FINDING POSITIVITY IN THE DARKEST OF TIMES
By Melanie Jimenez
Reflections Head
I’ve always been a writer. An author. A poet. I rely on the things around me in order to develop my music, my words. Does the phrase “art imitates life” ring a bell? In the face of bleak circumstances, I write about the things that make me feel sad. The things that touch my heart. The reasons I have trouble sleeping at night.
I thought that, during this quarantine, my songs would be sad. Lonely. Full of the longing that I shared with my friends. I thought that I would write poetry that sang to the emptiness I felt when seeing the pixelated images of my friends’ faces. That they would be as bleak as the situation in the streets, and as hopeless as the riots must seem. I thought, for sure, that my journals would be filled with smudged ink and dried tear stains. After all, art imitates life, and right now my life was looking quite desolate.
But something quite peculiar happened. I was feeling overwhelmingly lonely. So I did what I always do, I picked up a pen and a journal, and I started to write. But instead of a sad song, I wrote one of hope.
I wrote about the joy I would one day feel when I finally got to see my friends again. I wrote about the memories I shared with them before the quarantine started, and about the fun times when we laughed and talked for hours on end. When I put them to music, it was to bright chords and beautiful melodies that reminded me of birds singing.
It was perplexing to me.
I consider myself a positive person, but not to this extent. I can usually find the light in dark situations, but I still sometimes find it difficult to completely change my mindset. My mind works in terms of cause-and-effect: although I’m exhausted and overwhelmed right now, completing this assignment means I’ll have more time to myself tomorrow. Things like that.
But making something positive out of a completely negative situation was new to me. Why was I now writing about things that seem so impossible, so far away and distant? Why was my music no longer a reflection of how I felt, but of the things I hoped for?
When had my music become a portal to the future, and not a mirror of the present?
These past few weeks, I’ve had lots of time to think. Not about anything in particular, just plain old brainstorming and contemplating about myself and my future and my life. I think that positivity is often something very difficult to come across, especially when we are left alone in our thoughts, with only a TV screen showing us the worst our country has to offer. But at the same time, it is something we cannot let go of.
Positivity carries us forward. It lifts us up when we are down. It is the light at the end of the tunnel, showing us the hope that lies ahead. I think that in my darkest hours, positivity allowed me to reach for better dreams.
And although positivity cannot solve all the problems that we are faced with during these times, it surely can give us a reason to keep fighting and moving forward.
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