golden; unbroken

 Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love Holding Absence. I quite literally wear that on my sleeve. To me, there aren't many lulls in their discography at all. Each era or album is definitely good for different things; the earlier stuff is great when you're in your early 20s and suicidal and in love. The Greatest Mistake Of My Life is a fantastic commentary on life in general, healing and relapse. Today, though, I want to tell you about my greatest Holding Absence love; The Noble Art Of Self Destruction.

Let's set the scene. Your first album, and early singles, are gut-punchingly miserable. They're littered with religious themes, love, loss, suicide, everything you could possibly ask for in an emo album. Your sophomore starts off with a huge celebration of life (literally Celebration Song), and devolves into an album about death and mourning (again, literally, Mourning Song). The Noble Art, though, turns that misery on its head. It turns it into something beautiful and healing.

"You've watched me love, you've watched me lose / Now watch me writhe on the floor"

The opening line of the album lays it all out right in front of you. Recovery is painful, it's miserable in and of itself. Something is exorcised from you when you recover, and it truly does feel like... well, an exorcism. We also all know recovery has its ups and downs. That's mainly what I want to talk about when I talk about TNAOSD; its ebbs and flows.

As someone with bipolar disorder (yes, here we go again!), I love TNAOSD. It starts off almost angrily positive; you will heal, you will recover, you will discover a better version of yourself, and it will fucking hurt. You'll get through it, but only with brute force. But you will. You'll even find love - exemplified by Honey Moon. It won't, though, come without relapse.

Death Nonetheless is, to me, the first moment on the album - halfway through - where this shines. Following on from Honey Moon, a song quite simply about being in love, Death Nonetheless is a sharp drop into the very-well-known.

"I let the sickness in my mind metastasise with knife in hand" "Well, I admit that I have been fantasising about a life where I'm not there / And everyone I ever loved / Felt not a single ounce of inconvenience"

It's almost crudely depressed. But, really, that's how a drop down into depression from the highs of love and recovery feels. It's simple, it's familiar, and it's all you can think about. No time to be excessively wordy about it. The second half of the song is a building call-and-response, with the lyric "death nonetheless is constantly marching."  Regardless of how well you're doing, how much progress you've made, your death at the hand of this sickness looms always.

This is why I've often been known to call TNAOSD my bipolar album. It's not just the ebbs and flows, drops from great heights into deep depressions. It's also the song Liminal. Oh, my little bipolar anthem...

Liminal is, technically, about feeling stuck between the lows of depression and the highs of recovery. Feeling like no matter where you turn, you're stuck. Highs are what you need, but depression is comforting and wants to drag you back into bed with it. You hang in uncertainty, like a puppet, at the whims of your mind. To me, though, the lyrics speak a lot to the bipolar experience.

"I know that it doesn't help if I kick or scream / I'm not gonna wake from these nightmares or these dreams"

Wanting to wake from a dream, something nice, something enjoyable, is interesting to me re: bipolar disorder. When you're aware of your 'condition' so to speak, you know very well that (hypo)mania is damaging. It might feel great, energetic, productive, like a dream rather than a nightmare, but when you want to recover, you need to wake from it. Kicking and screaming to leave a dream is fascinating. Wanting recovery more than anything else, even when it feels way better sometimes to not recover.

"Maybe I'm stuck in the caverns of hell and / The plateaus of heaven / I hang like a puppet impaled on a coil / Just waiting to find my fate"

Do I even need to say anything about this one? I mean, come on. Get that man some lithium.

(That, for the uninitiated, is a joke.)

After Liminal, comes the final track, The Angel In The Marble. To me, Holding Absence's objectively best song to this day. I have a lot to say about this one, so strap in.

The Angel In The Marble brings in a consistent metaphor throughout the album very clearly. The album uses images of the Japanese art of Kintsugi - fixing broken things with gold, making them more valuable. I specifically want to talk about this as a metaphor for self-harm in TAITM.

The way I interpret this metaphor doesn't come from nowhere; whether it was intended originally or not, I don't know. But to me, it's right there.

"Post-sacrifice I am stemming the blood flow / Hammer in hand desperate to grow"

"Fill me with wax and then colour me gold / Look at my scars, they're beautiful / They held me together when I wanted to let go / I'm a Kintsugi sculpture and I need it to be known"

There's something really beautiful to me about your body and self being even more valuable to yourself "post-sacrifice," in recovery, having dealt with self harm. Often, broken skin is seen as a symbol of a broken person. But, by using the Kintsugi metaphor, you become, as TAITM says, "golden; unbroken."

Finally, on bipolar disorder. Yes, again, sorry. I see it everywhere. "I'll merge the man that I was hoping I could be / With the man that I know that I am." You mourn so much in recovery. This isn't just exclusive to bipolar disorder, either, I just talk about what I know. It's my blog, after all. I've watched myself change so much since my symptoms began. I had a completely different idea of my life, how my twenties would be, before I became bipolar. I mourned, and couldn't accept that my life would play out differently; that my entire self would be different. I know that I am this way - I'll forever be stuck trying to find the balance between depression and hypomania. But, the self that I was pre-diagnosis isn't dead. He just wasn't me yet. I have to break him out of this block of marble, and sculpt him, with my diagnosis on my back. It really is a noble thing to do, discover yourself and unearth yourself from the rubble, create something beautiful from something so "broken." Create a beautiful life for yourself in spite of it all. Continue to create it.