The Who’s Lyrics that Made Me Weep and Spring into Action

May is Mental Health Awareness Month

While I appreciate that Mental Health Awareness has a designated month, it’s every day for me and many others. It’s at the forefront of today’s chaos, and as we find ways to balance or live with the light and dark simultaneously, most days, we cannot hide under the blankets.

My son is doing much better now and is stable in recovery.

This essay was originally published in Illumination in 2023, and much has changed, yet it remains the same. Living with uncertainty while surrendering to it is one of the human struggles. Surrendering is not giving up. Surrendering means giving it over to a higher consciousness, even when you don’t know what is going to happen.

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

I was in kindergarten in 1973 when The Who released Quadraphenia, and its significance only hit me recently. It’s The Who’s third rock opera, written by Pete Townsend, and it follows a young man’s search for self-worth and importance. The rock opera film was released in 1979, which shaped the revival of the mod generation, weaving punk, pub, and new wave music, prominent in British culture.

The mod revival subculture that this film portrays was new to me although I was aware of it peripherally. I enjoyed the music from it growing up in the 1980s. Bands like The Jam, The Kinks, The Beatles, and The Who were on my cassette player simply because I liked the energetic beats, edgy lyrics, and rebellious questioning of society.

Why Quadraphenia? Why now?

Grief isn’t something that ends, it simply shows up like any emotion inspired by an interaction or event. One of my ways to cope when grief arises is to watch obscure shows and movies. Often I will watch in different languages so I have to read the subtitles. This way I won’t have to think of anything else. I’ll be so focused on reading and watching the screen that I can immerse myself in something else for a little while. From Japanese reality shows to period pieces from the early 20th century in Turkish and Russian, I find solace in obscurity.

I found myself with Quadraphenia and while it was in English, I needed subtitles because of the heavy accent. I needed to have the stream of subtitles at the bottom of the screen. The song I heard many times before blared — “The Real Me.”

I went back to the doctor

to get another shrink

I sit and tell him ‘bout my weekend

But he never betrays what he thinks

Can you see the real me, doctor?

Doctor

Can you see the real me, doctor?

Doctor

I went back to my mother

I said, “I’m crazy, ma, help me”

She said, “I know how it feels, son

’Cause it runs in the family”

Can you see the real me, mama?

Mama

Can you see the real me, mama?

Mama

Can you see?

Can you see the real me?

The real me, the real me

The cracks between the paving stones

Like rivers of flowing veins

Strange people who know me

Peeping from behind every window pane

Oof. I wasn’t expecting that. I can relate all too well. Tears ran down my face with a combined sense of grief and urgency to see my son in all his complexities. My son lives with a thought disorder, schizophrenia, and some days are harder than others. The challenge is getting to the place of acceptance long enough, calm enough to make the necessary calls, read the necessary books, and comb through the internet for resources. It’s not easy when the person you are trying to help doesn’t want it and is going deeper and deeper into their internal stimuli.

We all want to be seen, heard, understood, and accepted. My son is no different. He simply doesn’t want to talk about it, or anything for that matter. It’s challenging to try to help someone when they don’t want help.

I have to keep away from the fearful thoughts that if he didn’t have my husband and me, he would waste away from walking miles and forgetting to eat, engrossed by his uncontrollable wheel of stories going on in his mind. He would forget to take his medication and then get picked up by the police and put in jail instead of a recovery facility that only exists if you have resources for a loan or endless money.

Medication is only part of the recovery for this particular thought disorder and varies from person to person. And he’s on the gold star of medications, the one that finally worked after trial and error for a few years. The gold star medication, where he has to get blood drawn every month and takes a train of people to review the blood work from my son to the doctor to the pharmacist, all in precise timing, allowing two weeks ahead of the refill. Only after each person on this train does their job, then will the prescription be filled.

The path of understanding and compassion is a choice. I could cry under the blankets with a bottle of booze, making it worse and worse, but what good would that be? This is my path, and I’m choosing to do it in the best way I know how, with the highs and lows.

After the tears and sorrow comes the action. Townsend’s lyrics jolted me into remembering to see my son as he is, not as I hoped he would be. Grief with varying doses of hope is the only cocktail I can concoct in this life. A re-ignited fire to find new ways to progress, even if as slow as a snail. My timeline is not his timeline, and taking necessary breaks is vital.

My emotional regulation game has had to step up from all this numbing out. As time goes by, the numbing out and hiding out under the covers has lessened from weeks to days, and sometimes a day. The only way I can feel my feelings is with regular meditation practice. And allow me to have joy, laughter, and fun because it is a basic human right.