Have you ever read something and discovered that you've been looking at the world all wrong? I finished a romance novel today. I know it's not the kind of thing you'd expect a busy, intelligent college student to read. Romance novels are my weakness--the happy endings are my friends. I've read so many of those books that I don't remember much about an individual story. Even the one I just finished. But it was while I was sitting with the book in my hands after completing it that I began contemplating the way the characters viewed their world. My brain seemed to balloon, floating highe, grasping for something just beyond reach. This book stuck in my head--not the actual story itself, but the characters. Most of the novels have perfect characters that live perfect, wonderful lives. This is an exception. The characters were not perfect, and because they knew they weren't perfect, they thought they'd never find love. I've been doing so much contemplation, so much journal writing in preparation for this paper, inspecting my past, my behaviors, everything. I thought I'd changed so much . . . but I haven't.
I thought I'd grown up a bit, moved beyond my tendency let other people rule my life. Well, it might not be quite as direct as it used to be, but I still let other people run my fear--I'm afraid of what they'll think of me, or say about me. My roommates are put off by my jealousy of their friendships with other people. I feel like they're going to stop being my friend just because they're spending time with other people too.
It was like I had been sitting and watching a TV show about my life, when suddenly someone pinched me. For the first time, I was awake--seeing reality, not just what I wanted to see. My roommate, Laura, is complaining because there are three guys that want to date her, but she won't date any of them, or comes up with excuses not to. I don't think my roommate doesn't want to date these guys--she's afraid to date these guys. I turned this sudden insight around on myself. Do I have the same problem? Do I come up with excuses not to do things because I'm afraid? I'm starting to think the answer is yes.
It's hard to deal with the real world when you've been dealing with the perfect little TV version for so long. It's scary. I don't know what to do. I feel small and vulnerable. I'm just waiting for a big fly swatter to come out of the sky and squash my pathetic little mosquito-existence.
I try to move forward, to move on. But I can't move. Everything is too raw. Before I can move, I have to heal this gash in my brain, work through these irrational fears. Where on earth do I start? Comfort. That's important. But what kind? As I sit at the computer, staring at the screen saver, I absently pick up my stereo remote, and push the play button. Through the haze of bewilderment, the breee of the music begins to blow. "My screams got lost in a paper cup / do you think there's a heaven where some screams have gone / I got 25 bucks and a cracker do yo think it's enough to get us there / years go by will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand / years go by will I choke on my tears till finally there is nothing left?"
I sit and let it swirl around me. The voice dulls the ache, and reorients me. I still have a huge gash in my brain, but I feel as though someone came up and slathered painkiller on it, and put a Band-Aid over it. It doesn't heal immediately, but the pain is dulled. And someone out there knows I hurt, and knows how it feels.
my paper on being an ewf
I remember the first time I heard a song on the radio by Tori Amos. I was shocked. I'd never heard a sound like that before. Screeching guitar, sliding up and down notes over a solo piano and a solo voice. I was drawn in.I could see the shadow of my life in her songs. When I first began listening to her music, I was in sixth grade. I had one best friend, but by eighth grade, we weren't speaking. She hurt me badly. When I was younger, I had always been shy. Now I was afraid too--afraid to make new friends, afraid to let new people close to me, afraid of being left again.I had missed out on becoming friends with the rest of my class, so I spent a lot of time alone. I also spent a lot of time being made fun of--at that point I was too self-conscious and afraid to stand up for myself. Tori speaks of youth: "Adolescence is that time when I think, it can be--well, it's the cruelest place on Earth. It can really be heartless." There were days I would come home from school, and immerse myself in repetitive episodes of "Saved By the Bell." I didn't want to think about how much I hated my life. "What girls do to each other is beyond description; no Chinese torture comes close," Tori recalls.Tori set an example for me in her music. She is never afraid to say what she thinks. Her songs are raw and honest. She showed me that it's okay for me to be different. It's all right if I'm not accepted in the "cool" crowd. My life doesn't have to be ideal--it just has to be mine. "You can only be you," she says. "A lot of times it's never enough for peope." She taught me to accept me, for my own sake.Tori was born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963, to a Methodist minister and his wife. Her family called her Ellen. As a child she spent a lot of time with her part-Cherokee grandfather, who influenced many of her thoughts and ideas about the world and life--and particularly her family's religion. Her father's side of the family was entirely Methodist. The family assumed that Ellen would simply follow her father's family, and her mother's example, and be Methodist. Ellen, however, could not understand her family's unconditional acceptance of their faith. She wanted to know more about the religion, the reasons behind beliefs and activities of the church--and no one could answer her questions to her satisfaction.Her grandfather's sharing of his Cherokee background influenced her eventual decision to explore what she herself believed, and to reject the organized church. She does believe in a "God," but she doesn't agree with the restrictions most organized religions place on members. "Most religions are not about humans becoming whole. If people became whole, institutions fear they won't need them anymore. And, of course, it should always be the wish of a master teacher that the students will surpass him or her. The sad thing is we don't have a lot of master teachers. Master teachers have to be willing to devote their lives to consciousness. This is a very courageous journey not many people have been willing to take."When Ellen was only two and a half years old, she began playing the piano. After a while she could play anything after only hearing it once. This is also the point at which she verbally began questioning her family's religion. "Being a minister's daughter means you get really good poppy seed cake at Christmas time, and you get really wonderful dresses and things made by these really nice little old ladies. And you also get an incredible amount of confusion. But when ... you don't know what your beliefs are, you're taking on everybody's beliefs around you and you're making them yours. And I'm not about the institutionalized Church. At all." The first time her father, the minister, told her the Christmas story, she asked him, "What would have happened if Joseph had come away from the manger shouting, 'Wow! It's a girl!'?"At age 5 her parents decided to "expand her horizons" as a pianist. She became the youngest student the Peabody Conservatory of Music had ever accepted. The teachers Ellen had at the school were determined to break her ear, and teach her to read music. Anyone who knows a little about pianists knows that being able to play by ear is a wonderful and rare gift. Her teachers also didn't like th way she played the classics. They wanted to hear them as if Mozart himself was playing them, but she wanted to play them her way, with her own interpretations.By the time Ellen reached age 10, her interpretations of the classics led the Peabody Conservatory not to renew her scholarship. Tori says, "I was accepted at Peabody when I was 5, and the whole idea was to get me to read. The problem with getting me to read was it was so frustrating, because they started me on 'Hot Cross Buns,' and I could play scores of musicals by then. So when you can play, you know, Gershwin, by ear--maybe not perfect, but, you know, you get the gist of [it], then you're going, 'Hang on a minute. From "Summertime" [Gershwin] to "Hot Cross Buns" is a far cry.' " She also says, "The whole idea was for me to become a concert pianist. Something got lost and it became deadly serious. It wasn't free expression anymore. It was going to be channeled into a career. I found I couldn't live with the piano in that regimented way. It was obvious that I couldn't work within those parameters. I just didn't want to do what was expected of me. I couldn't sit playing somebody else's music for 12 hours and be told that my interpretation was wrong and be okay with it. How do you know how Debussy would feel about my interpretation of his music?"After leaving the Conservatory, Ellen decided she wanted to be a rock star. So when she was 13, her father, who sympathized with her love for music, agreed to do whatever he could to see this become true. So she went to bars, with her Methodist minister father as a chaperone, and played.She also decided to change her name from Ellen to Tori. "I hated my name. My body was screaming to be called something, and it wasn't Myra Ellen." Inspiration finally cornered her. "A friend of mine at the time was dating some guy and she brought him to one of the clubs I was playing and he just looked at me and said, 'You're a Tori.' I just went, you know what? I am. So from then on, I made out my checks as Tori."By 1983, she had been playing in public for a while, and had developed a following. After accepting a ride home from a fan, he raped her and threatened to kill her. She promised herself that she would never speak of the experience, and tried to move on with her music career. Can you imagine that? She offered a ride to a fan, and he raped her. That would have given me a neurosis about performing, or strangers, or something. Tori continued to work. The incident remains one of her deepest ugliest scars.Her first band, Y Kant Tori Read, took its name from her experience at the Peabody Conservatory. And like that experience, her band and their first album didn't work. Too much hair spray, too many synthesizers, too many '80s rock cliches, and not enough soul. The experience left her reeling. "When 'Y Kant Tori Read' bombed, I didn't have any respect for myself." She went from being a child prodigy to being a failure.Her record company decided to giver her one more chance. They sent her to England to find her voice. While there she saw "Thelma and Louise." It broke down all the barriers she had placed around her memories of her rape experience. She left the theater in tears, but she went to her room that night and wrote the song "Me and a Gun." "Me and a gun / and a man on my back / but I haven't seen Barbados / so I must get out of this." She had finally come to terms with her experience. That same night she performed it for the first time at her show. Audience members broke down into tears.The song has since become one of her trademarks. "For many years, I shut down that place inside myself that needed to rage, cry, ask questions, and basically just express herself. I made a conscious choice when I put 'Me and a Gun' on the record not to stay a victim anymore." Over time it has insired many of her fans to share their own experiences with her. Dealing with these experiences became too much for her to handle on her own, so she founded RAINN--the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. "Yearh," Tori says, "I do write about stuff I'm going through, but I think you've got to..." She took a horrendous experience that would have stalled many other artists, and turned it into a sign for other victims, a resurrection that they could look forwrad to for themselves.The next album she released sounded simple. It was pretty much just Tori, her piano, and her voice. Her listeners value the albumand all of its successors because of the intense honesty with which she writes. She is not afraid to tackle hard subjects, to talk about things that are taboo. Her emotions are apparent in whatever she writes. If she's happy, she writes about it. If she feels angry with someone, she takes her frustrations out in song. The songs describe small episodes of her life.In 1997 she found out she was pregnant. Only three months into the much-longed-for pregnancy, Tori had a miscarriage. The scar of her deep, abiding sorrow is felt in every song on the next album she wrote. There are many references to her feelings of inadequacy, helplessness, and self-pity. The song "Spark" contains the lyrics, "She's convinced she could hold back a glacier / but she couldn't keep Baby alive / doubting if there's a woman in there somewhere." The song "Playboy Mommy" also describes some of her feelings. "I'll say it loud here by your grave / those angels can't / ever take my place / somewhere where the orchids grow / I can't find those church bells / that played when you died / played Gloria / talkin' about Hosanah / don't judge me so harsh little girl."She says about the writing process, "You begin to create where you can. If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music .... This record really became about being alive enough to feel things, no matter what it is." Shorty after the catharsis of writing that album in 1998, Tori married her sound engineer, Mark Hawley, with whom she now has a beautiful daughter. It was at his castle in England that she finally recorded the album.It's 6:45 on a cool night in early fall. The sky is dark. It looks and feels like it's going to rain, but no one in the ampitheater cares. The air smells of popcorn and beer. The audience has been waiting for months, planning, preparing. Eagerness murmurs through the crowd after the opening act. The lights dim and silence sneaks into the ampitheater. I feel a shiver crawl through my body. My ears tingle in anticipation and my fingers tingle with the cold. I'm snared by the building excitement. Everyone holds their breath. Suddenly, the lights go on. Music starts, but I can't hear it. The ecstatic scream that rises from the crowd overpowers it. My throat tickles--one of the voices shouting and cheering sounds an awful lot like mine. I'm not usually the kind of person that participates in this kind of mania ... but ... I can't help it.A redhead marches onto the stage, head held high, a small smile across her lips. She is dressed in all black. A sequined smock-like creation covers the front of her clothing like dazzling armor. She sits down at the piano and presses her trademark pink-glossed lips right up to the microphone. ("Lipstick and lip gloss, always, always. I was in the hospital recently and I had my lip gloss in the operating theater.") She opens her mouth and breathes out the first words. My heart trips along with the music. I don't want to blink--I'm so afraid I'll miss something.She plays piano with fire and passion, like she's possessed. She straddles the bench, trying to ride the song--or it will ride her. She throws her head and her body around, completely lost. The songs themselves are never the same twice--she has a general idea of how they go, knows the words, and recreates them each time she plays. I am in aw of her. I wish I could play with such passion and abandon. And, of course, with such ability. By the time I finally remember to breathe, the song is over. I have a goofy grin floating on my face. I look around at the people seated near me. They all wear that same goofy grin.The redhead takes a moment to greet her "Ears WIth Feet"--her congregation of her most devoted followers. Sounds like a religion. And in a way, it kind of is. The Ears With Feet refer to her as the "flame-haired goddess." They eagerly consume every word she speaks. At the end of her tour in 1997, a fan asked her to say something to the rest of her fans over the internet. She said, "Know that you really sometimes made me feel really good, and sometimes really bad. And just know that I really respect you, not as--I hate the word fans, I'd like to call you ears with feet, and never use the word fan agan--because you're ears with feet."She shares her creed whenever she gets the chance. "If all young people would start listening to their own voice instead of saying what adults say or whatever MTV dictates, this would be a whole different planet." The Ears absorb her words into their souls. These Ears that attend her concerts are creative, independent---and scarred.Her followers see her as a deliverer--almost a female messiah. However, she is quick to point out her shortcomings. "Somebody will come backstage and go, 'You saved me.' And I have to go, 'Stop right there. You saved yourself.' " She doesn't want to be deified. She's human. She's got a life. She has her own scars.Although she might not agree with people who say she saved them, she understands that she has a great impact on her followers. At a time when I was raw, wounded, and bleeding, she came along and offered me solace. She shares some words of comfort with those working through emotional pain: "People are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into the wound to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin."Many times in my life, she has been the person who came up to me, saying, "I know how you feel. It'll all be okay," and placed a Band-Aid over my wounds. She might not have saved me, but she gave me a way to heal. "Healing takes courage," Tori says, "and we all have courage--even if we have to dig a little to find it." I wear my scars proudly. Daily, I find new scratches--some shallow, some deep. But now I know that I can live with them.
