Sadly Aware.
By Andrew Moore
I can still remember the first time I encountered an anxiety attack. I don’t mean general anxiety from sitting an exam or a job interview. I mean the type of anxiety that – out of nowhere and for no reason whatsoever – presses its thumbs down on the ball of your throat.
I was in Hastings, at university, smoking a joint in the park opposite my halls. It was a secluded spot, just a few old men out walking their dogs. It was a clear, crisp November morning and all was well in the world.
Two friends from my accommodation began walking towards me from opposite the park. All of a sudden my chest tightened. Now, you must remember, I had absolutely no experience of frightful anxiety out of nothing, and I didn’t even realise at the time that it was a proper thing.
By the time they reached me I was a mess. They said hi as they passed and all I could muster was something that was mildly audible and probably wasn’t even a real word. I just wanted to cry. I had absolutely no idea what was happening to me.
I won’t go into the ins and outs of my whole university experience with anxiety. To be honest, I could write a dissertation on the fucking thing. Long story short, I find myself crying uncontrollably into a camera at the top of my laptop as my two loving parents stare back with a sense of bewilderment, sympathy and fear in their eyes. This is moments after I came close to walking into the ocean. That night, a few special people saved my life.
I was told days later that I was failing university. I’d have to come back and repeat the year. To be honest, at this point, that wasn’t even an option. To stop myself spiralling into another pit of despair; I decided to start my own blog called ‘sadly aware’.
This blog started its life for purely therapeutic purposes. It was way for me to get how I was feeling. I nervously posted the articles online for the world and my peers to see. It was bloody terrifying, but what I was met with was genuinely surprising.
People loved them. More than that, people seemed genuinely concerned for my wellbeing. It was a mammoth wakeup call that there are people out there that actually care about me. Even an ex-girlfriend that I ended on bad terms with got in contact to express her hope that I would feel myself again soon.
I would do my writing in the evening and publish as soon as I was finished, using a very basic template on WordPress. This was all well and good, my evenings were filled with venting and reading feedback on my work, but the days were deafeningly lonely.
All of my friends, having not actually failed their university course months before its climax, were studying, writing their dissertations, out filming… I was alone in my basement room for hours during the day. I had stopped smoking weed as even the touch of a roach on my lips would ignite my heart to beat at a tremendous and quite frightening rate.
Instead of sitting in silence, I would put on records. They would be from absolutely any genre, ranging from alternative R&B to psychedelic rock. I had, just recently, come across an article in i-D that made me fall in love with the way a journalistic piece could be constructed. I think it was titled love and other drugs, or something like that.
This was my doorway into the journalistic world. Suddenly I was reading a vast range of features belonging to FACT, Pitchfork and The Guardian. This inspired me to start writing about music myself, using the same blog I had originally used to express my darkest and most honest thoughts.
I can still remember the first piece I wrote. I’m laughing as I write this, as it’s still my favourite piece I’ve written to date, despite features and interviews I’ve carried out for various publications.
It was a piece on Kanye West’s 2008 record 808’s & Heartbreak. My mother had bought me the album years previous, and it had remained a major influence on the way I viewed music, and still does to this day. It was an album that was not received very well by critics or by Kanye’s fans. I argued that this was because it was ahead of its time, so far ahead that many in today’s contemporary music community still could not digest it.
Yeezus had come out a year before I started university, so I argued that Kanye had a habit of doing this – putting out music that was so futuristic that it would provide the foundation for many of the alternative R&B and emotional hip hop artists that were to come, namely Drake, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd.
I was completely enthralled with the response, both good and bad. There were those that agreed with me and those that didn’t. I enjoyed the debates, each person getting their point across. An intellectual debate, far from the ones I used to have with myself regarding if I was going to get out of bed tomorrow.
I was asked to write this feature on how that little sadly aware blog has influenced me as a writer, and while it has in many ways, I think its importance and depth lies in what it did for me on a personal level. Without it I wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t have managed to get a break writing a few news pieces for a local magazine. I wouldn’t have been flown out to Portugal to review a techno festival. I wouldn’t have been able to interview Larry Heard, Carl Craig, BICEP, Or:la, Seb Wildblood, Bjorn Torske, Manga Saint Hilare, Tiny Moving Parts, or any of the other wonderful musicians and artists that have so sparingly given me their time to talk about something I’m enthused about – music.
I guess, as a writer, it’s had an emotional effect on me. I’ve always been drawn to write about emotional music, and, with how I was feeling, at the time I was even more influenced by it. Still, to this day I can’t sit through Ben Howard’s ‘Old Pine’ or Brent Faiyaz’s ‘Burn One’ interlude without shedding a tear.
I’m always going to be an emotional person, but now, through writing, I have an outlet to serve it in an artistic, creative and therapeutic way. I came from no journalistic background. I have no qualifications in writing. This was simply a case of a sad and lonely guy who wanted to make the dark thoughts go away, and it ended up with him discovering his passion.
