🌻Positive Result ~ The Eulogy of Someone Still Alive (TW: discussions of death, physical and mental illness)
HEY!! It's been a bit since I wrote one of these. I kind of wanted to do one for Neuron Explosion Show, but I feel like I don't have much good to say about it. At any rate, NES is a bit of a successor to Positive Result despite having been released first. I wrote Positive Result first and in a far longer amount of time and put a lot more thought into it, that's for sure.
This song has been a long time coming for me. I'm not super open about my own mental state online as a safety measure since I am still young, but my music has always been a way for me to... unleash what I feel without guilt, if that makes sense. I'm quite a reserved person despite wearing my heart on my sleeve, but the lack of pressure with music really draws me to the craft as a whole. After all, most of my listeners do not know me on a personal level (nor should they). Those who do know me, however, are able to get a better insight on me through listening to what I have to say in a way that doesn't put as much direct burden on them as talking face to face would. Perhaps my mindset isn't the healthiest, I am aware that it's cowardly. But it's one of the only ways I am able to process my own emotions, trauma, and regrets while I navigate my young adulthood as of now.
That being said, I'd like to talk as openly as I can about the meaning of Positive Result here. This song features a feeling that I know all too well: pure, unfiltered panic. Powerlessness. An extreme sense of mortality.
I was officially diagnosed with OCD when I was around thirteen, but my symptoms started at a very young age, manifesting mostly in the form of health anxiety. The first instance of this I can recall was how at six years old I would check my lung capacity over and over again, convinced that my breathing was constrained and there was something wrong with me. Checking myself mentally and physically for symptoms of something arbitrary and untrue was routine for so long, for so many years, that I thought it to be normal until I discovered the nature of OCD. The disorder is ravenous. It's time consuming. At times, it is inescapable. It is scary. It is completely irrational. And it's shaped me and my personality in many ways.
(Now I am contorting wildly, feelings clashing, overwhelming)
what's controlling me and
living while I'm dying every day
(Understanding math so vague, I graph a picture of a morbid day)"
Positive Result features my struggle with the part of my OCD that makes me fear contracting and dying of a physical illness. A lot of the lyrics allude to cancer specifically, ("Even though I cannot sense it, I can tell that my cells are revolting/Turning paradigms to sickness"). The imagery of physical cells "revolting" is something I wanted to portray sickeningly straightforward. I considered using the word "turning" as well, like rotting, or like a multiplying cancer, but "revolting" felt more akin to the betrayal I feel when my mind tries to convince me that my "paradigms" are turning to sickness. In this case, "paradigms" also refers to cell mitosis and the multiplication of cancer cells. "Felt only by these hands of mine" refers to the sense of feeling something or seeing something, a symptom, an imperfection, anything, that isn't actually there.
My episodes of panic with my OCD have lasted me months at a time before. At times, they leave me feeling that my fear will last an eternity.
"With a fear that lasts an eternity, counting one, two, three, to the metronome of destiny
In love with earthly frequencies, the ripping sound of frantic waves
It's growing, flowers exploding, round and round, they're breathing, eating me alive"
Now, the visceral earthly imagery in the chorus is more evocative than meaningful. The thought of a flower exploding, wrapping around you, breathing and eating you alive is an uncanny enough thought. But it's the way mortality feels to me. It's the way I imagine slowly dying. Even though I have never been close to that state physically (knock on wood) getting a very scary phone call from a doctor some years ago got me well acquainted with the proximity that we as animals have to the dirt beneath us. ("Letting go and letting blood can never be rehearsed/Oh, you know I'm gonna claim that I'm only getting worse!") That last line in the yelling section in particular refers to the endless requests for reassurance about my own potential, unreal conditions and my inability to believe the people that told me I would be okay.
I'm also really proud of the next little section where the lines, "This survival rate, forever it is plummeting/these statistics aren't re-re-reassuring me," pop up. This refers specifically to checking compulsions via looking up symptoms on the internet/checking survival rates for various illnesses (I used to do that a lot.) This section also alludes to the loss of control, which, in reality, might be the scariest part of the fear of illness for me.
Also, notice the repeated rhyming of "me" with itself. ("Can't you answer me/those looking down on me"... "These statistics aren't re-re-reassuring me"..."Heal me"). When you're stuck in your head, it's quite impossible to live outside of yourself.
"'Cause the world never pauses for the cowardly
It pushes past the plagued and pageless poet’s elegies
But after all, the only person that's without disease
This section refers to the world seeming to move on without you when you're trapped in panic, along with a slight reassuring thought that 'everyone goes through some sort of illness.' Also this interpolates Glass Pen hey guys ahahahahha, I also reference Cryin' Cryin' with the background line "Don't try to fight what you can't see," interpolate an unreleased song with [ REDACTED ], and reference Neuron Explosion Show with "I don't think I'm gonna make it out/with an ardent voice I scream it." I may or may not be going through an inspiration phase of someone I look up to who motifs a lot ahahahhahahahahah
"BRACING FOR IMPACT, WHAT’S REAL IS PLAIN TO SEE
'THESE THOUGHTS ARE JUST PROTECTING ME'
The line "'These thoughts are just protecting me'" being in quotes specifically refers to something I learned in therapy about the nature of OCD brains and anxiety. How your brain is constantly trying to protect you despite there being no immediate threats to speak of, sometimes none at all. Also I'm really proud of the line "The biblioclast to my own story"!!! I'm a sucker for a good big word.
And that's really the core of Positive Result as a song. I hope it resonates with y'all however you decide to interpret it! In the scope of MACHINA MORI (which you should check out RIGHT NOW BTW) I see it as staring your mortal self in the face and being afraid of what you see. There's nothing comforting about being mortal. At the same time, there's everything comforting about being mortal. But, yeah. It's scary, it is. However, for me at least, even as I live side by side with this disorder, I'm a certified Lover Of Life and no amount of fear will ever change that for me. Despite how hopeless my music has been sounding lately, I hope you are aware that I, as a person, am not one to let go of hope.
Be prepared for what I have in store for this year. Big things coming!
Thank you: Mage, Io, Tomi, Olay, absolutely every one of my friends, MM TEAM
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