Woke up still thinking about the AMY documentary.
~ In the early bit when her managers says that Amy has a knack for making you feel like the most important person and then like nothing and then important again ~ that is what people do who feel that way about themselves.
~ When she said she didn't know she was depressed, she just knew she was different. Writing helped her deal with the difference and music brought people to her, but she didn't learn how to bridge to them.
~ Telling her mother that she had a great diet; eating what ever she wanted and bringing it up in the loo. Again the behavior of some one who listens to what their body desires, consumes it and then denies the body the nourishment.
~ Her ideal of being in her own apartment to be able to "smoke week and write songs all day." One is honoring soul and the other is hiding it.
~ Self sabotage as a way of living is bound to put you at the bottom and ultimately dead.
~ Being told "No" is something she was telling her parents she needed and asking for them to tell her (even when she was an "independent" young adult), but nobody listened, except her bodyguard near the end when it was too late as the patterns of behavior we set in replay mode.
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Drinking as the drug of choice is telling. It, like most drugs, is a depressant. It does damage to your body and mind that takes years to heal and may never be recovered. It makes you feel more in control of your choices than you actually are and your head can't hear your gut ~ your soul is silenced.
I quit drinking 30 years ago last month. It may sound odd, when you do the math, to say that I quit drinking at 23, in fact the day I turned 23. But it was very intentional and I've not broken that vow to myself in 30 years. You see I started drinking, to the best I can recall and have it verified by friends, when I was 12, but it may have been earlier. So by 23, I'd been drinking for over a decade. Right when most kids are getting out of college or coming into their own in a job and having money to afford alcohol on a regular basis, I was done. Like Amy, I felt I manipulated people when I was drunk. I felt I could suggest things and sowed seeds that I knew, deep inside, were destructive to other people I cared about or worse would make them come back to me for negative reasons. That was why I stopped. No one thought of me as "a drunk" or called me manipulative, but I knew it was true. Ironically, it was the year my father started a successful beer business, but that is another story.
Getting back to the Tony Bennett quote about learning to live life by living long enough, that was another part of the process. When I turned 20 I stopped doing any other drugs or such, and toned down my adrenaline junkie impulses. I still loved to be active outdoors in extreme ways, but didn't want to push that razor-wire envelope, as I wanted to live to be old. My new motto was to "grow old gracefully."
Food was another source of love and control in my family, so I recognized it in the AMY film. My families relationship to food is complex. We grew up in two households of mostly "health foods" with early ethnic cooking adopters. Plus where ever the parents travelled, they would try to replicate the food at home. We were not the house that had Capt. Crunch or Pop-tarts, more likely homemade yogurt or croquettes. There were large groups of us; often 8 at a table and the fewest at 4. Vats of one-pot meals at my mother's and generous portions of multi-pot cooking at dad's. We all learned how to cook, expect for maybe two brothers. Growing up in the age of Twiggy and TV as the social soother, where everyone was trim, made body image an issue. Plus the lens of our parents being projected onto us, especially the children most like each parent; that is alway the toughest soil to hoe evenly.
I hid my young female body in fat and vests until I was 17. I can't imagine being in the public eye or on a stage like Amy at that age, let alone progressing to constant paparazzi snapping at your heels. Even in a family where we all talked about everything, collectively and individual, in a compassionate way, several of us have battled body image issues.
It's not like you can just intentionally stop eating (unless you do of course, which for a while I did, by keep myself on too little food a day in my early 20's). Even during my brief late twenties modeling moment, I ate and just moved more. So you have to come up with a livable contract with yourself on that front. No one in Amy's life really addressed that issue, it seemed in the film, at all. It's not like depression and bulimia weren't known diseases with workable and tested ways of addressing them. But this is where time being sped up by fame, and not being able to live positively in the now, brought about her downfall. No one helped her slow down...they call it the fast lane because you're constantly looking forward, not repairing the past and never actually living in the moment.
What gets to me is her father, most of all. Her weak mother, who she told, even as a young girl, that she needed to be firmer with her and her siblings. And her disaster of a father whose only self involvement and doing what served him best at each turn trumped what she needed as a daughter, to the point of death. As a parent, I can't imagine being so self centered. I'm not perfect, but my god, these two were tragic.
Okay thats my last two bits on AMY: Take Two!
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