Sounds of Becoming: 000memories

“Hide, I don’t wanna go play outside
So I sleep ’cause the world is too dark
I don’t want to, I don’t want to participate
Well, I might as well go and die
What’s the point of being alive?
Unconscious with no memories
No memories in me
Can you see me shake?
How could you stand there watching me break?
I’m feeling nothing, alone with my problems
SSRIs didn’t do shit to solve them
I think the whole world just wants me to break”

— 000memories by Ayleen Valentine

On Grieving the Woman Who Survived, Releasing the Weight of Healing, and Learning to Delight in Life Again.

Content Note: This reflection explores trauma, depression, emotional numbness, substance use, spiritual struggles, and thoughts of death. It is a personal meditation on grief, faith, and the desire to live.

The Music That Helped Me Understand Myself

I have been making playlists since I was in middle school. Long before I had the language to articulate everything I was experiencing, music gave me a way to explore my emotions, understand myself, and express things I couldn’t always put into words. Sometimes a song helped me recognize a feeling I hadn’t yet identified. Other times, arranging songs in a particular order allowed me to tell a story I was still learning how to understand. Music became a way of visiting places within myself, exploring different perspectives, and making sense of the complicated experience of being human.

For a while, I mostly gave that up. After becoming a Christian, I felt convicted about listening to secular music, and I began distancing myself from something that had been an important part of my creative and emotional life. I wanted to honor God with what I consumed, and I took that desire seriously. But somewhere along the way, I also began approaching certain forms of artistic expression with fear, as though encountering something that wasn’t explicitly Christian might compromise my relationship with Him. More recently, I have come to believe that God has given me freedom to engage with music differently, with discernment rather than constant suspicion. And returning to this practice has been revelatory.

I am discovering that a song does not have to articulate my theology to help me recognize something true about my humanity. I can encounter another person’s expression of despair without adopting every conclusion they draw from it. I can appreciate the beauty of an artistic work without endorsing everything it communicates. And I can allow music to help me explore my emotions while bringing those experiences into conversation with my faith.

Discernment does not require me to abandon my curiosity, and faithfulness does not require me to silence every part of my humanity that is still learning how to speak.

Recently, I intentionally began arranging playlists around a progression of mourning, surrender, and transformation. One of them is titled saraí’s funeral ⚰️, and its description reads:

thanks for helping me survive. 🤍 grieving you with love and honor. you did well, sarai 🫂 perfectionism, cynicism, impossible walls gone

The playlist that follows contains Strike Me Down from Heaven, a song that has become part of another stage in this creative and spiritual exploration. But before that encounter, before whatever transformation might follow, there is a funeral.

And one of the songs accompanying that funeral is 000memories by Ayleen Valentine.

A Funeral Without Condemnation

I think what makes this playlist so meaningful is that I am not trying to destroy the person I used to be. I am trying to honor her.

For so long, I looked at earlier versions of myself primarily through the lens of what needed to change. I thought about the habits I needed to overcome, the wounds I needed to heal, the ways I needed to grow, and the parts of my character I believed required correction. I wanted to become more disciplined, more discerning, more responsible, more faithful. I wanted to be free from the patterns that had caused me pain, and I genuinely believed that if I continued working toward healing, I would eventually reach a place where those struggles no longer defined my experience.

But I am beginning to recognize that the woman I was trying so hard to change was also the woman who had been helping me survive.

Her perfectionism was not always simply arrogance or an unreasonable desire to be flawless. Sometimes it was an attempt to prevent another disappointment. Her cynicism was not necessarily a lack of gratitude or faith. Sometimes it was the result of hoping for something beautiful and experiencing something painful instead. Her walls were not always evidence that she was incapable of love. Sometimes they were attempts to protect a heart that had become frightened of what vulnerability might cost.

That doesn’t mean every protective behavior was healthy or that every response was justified. I can acknowledge where those patterns hurt me or others without forgetting the circumstances in which they developed.

Something can help us survive one season and still become something we need to release in another.

And I think that is what makes this funeral different from the ways I have approached transformation in the past.

I am not burying the woman I was because I am ashamed of her. I am honoring the woman who survived because I no longer want survival to be the only life she knows.

She did well.

She really did.

And I wish I had known how to tell her that sooner.

The Grief of Trying to Heal

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from recognizing how sincerely you tried to get better, only to discover that the ways you pursued healing did not bring the freedom you expected.

I have been trying to heal for a long time. I have taken SSRIs. I have sought different forms of help. I have wrestled with substance use and the desire to become completely sober. From the beginning of my healing journey, I wanted to reach a place where I could experience life without depending on medication, marijuana, or anything else to help me cope. I wanted to feel free. I wanted to wake up without carrying the same heaviness. I wanted to be present within my own life.

And when I became a Christian, I began believing that I had already been healed.

For approximately five years, I operated from that understanding. I believed God had delivered me, and I wanted to live in accordance with what I understood Him to have done. There were genuine changes in my life, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But I also began interpreting the struggles that remained through the expectation that I should already be well. When old difficulties resurfaced, I often approached them as something I needed to overcome through greater surrender, discipline, obedience, or understanding.

I didn’t fully allow myself to acknowledge how disappointed I was.

I had tried medication, and it hadn’t given me the relief I hoped for. I had pursued sobriety, yet I continued struggling with the desire to numb myself. I had sought spiritual transformation, yet I still experienced emotional pain, exhaustion, and patterns I thought I had left behind.

And because I believed I was already healed, I didn’t know how to grieve the fact that I was still hurting.

I was trying to live as the healed woman while the hurting woman still needed care.

I can recognize now that the desire to heal without medication was a personal hope, not a universal measure of freedom. Medication is not a moral failure, and needing treatment does not make someone’s healing less genuine or their faith less sincere. The fact that one approach didn’t help me as I hoped does not mean that every form of support is ineffective. I am learning that receiving care can be part of stewardship rather than evidence that I have failed.

But I also want to honor how pure my original desire was.

I wanted to see in color again.

I wanted to go outside and play.

I wanted to participate in life without feeling that participation itself was another responsibility I had to fulfill.

And somewhere along the way, that beautiful desire became entangled with fear, perfectionism, and desperation. I began treating healing as something I needed to accomplish, something I had to demonstrate through sufficient effort.

But healing isn’t a test you pass by demonstrating sufficient effort.

I wish I had understood that sooner.

When Survival Becomes a Way of Life

There is something about 000memories that captures an emotional experience I have struggled to articulate. The song expresses a desire to withdraw from a world that feels unbearably dark, to escape the weight of remembering, and to become unconscious to the pain of existing.

I recognize that feeling.

Sometimes trauma makes the world feel so dark that participating in it becomes exhausting. You wake up, go to work, complete responsibilities, interact with people, and continue moving through your day, but there is a strange distance between what you are doing and what you are experiencing. You are functioning, yet you don’t necessarily feel present. You are continuing, yet you don’t necessarily feel alive in the way you long to be.

Sometimes it feels as though I am watching myself survive rather than experiencing myself live.

And when the memories become too much, numbness can feel like relief. I have learned how to move through parts of my life on autopilot, avoiding certain thoughts and emotions because fully confronting them feels overwhelming. In that sense, the desire to become unconscious is not always about literally losing consciousness. Sometimes it is about wanting to stop remembering, stop anticipating, stop feeling the accumulated weight of everything that has happened.

But there is a cost to that kind of protection.

When I disconnect from painful experiences, I can also become disconnected from the joy, curiosity, wonder, and spontaneity that make life meaningful. The same walls that seem to protect me from disappointment can make it harder to receive the goodness I have been longing for.

And this is where the imagery of playing outside becomes particularly heartbreaking to me.

Because play is participation without the burden of proving that you deserve to participate.

Children do not ordinarily go outside to play because they have completed every responsibility, resolved every emotional struggle, or achieved sufficient personal growth. They play because there is something delightful about being alive, about discovering the world, about moving through it with curiosity and wonder.

I miss that.

I miss the freedom of participating in life without feeling that I must first become sufficiently healed, responsible, prepared, or spiritually mature to enjoy it.

I do not simply want the absence of suffering. I want the return of delight.

And sometimes that is difficult to imagine.

When the Desire to Live Becomes Something I Strive For

There is another part of this grief that is harder to express.

I have experienced feelings of not wanting to be alive for as long as I can remember. Sometimes those feelings have emerged from profound sadness, sometimes from exhaustion, and sometimes from the discouragement of repeatedly trying to change circumstances that seem determined to remain the same.

I know the difference between the desire for pain to end and an intention to end my life, and I also recognize that those experiences can overlap in serious ways. I don’t want to romanticize despair or pretend that faith alone means I never need support.

But I want to be honest about the tension.

There have been moments when I have felt as though I was fighting to preserve my own desire to continue living. I would remind myself of Scripture, of God’s promises, of the goodness I believed was possible, and of the person I hoped to become. I would try to cultivate gratitude, discipline my thoughts, and remain faithful.

Yet sometimes, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself feel the joy I believed I should be experiencing.

And that became another source of discouragement.

I was striving to heal.

Striving to hope.

Striving to desire life.

Striving to experience the very delight I longed to recover.

And I began to wonder whether I was somehow failing at being alive.

But I am beginning to recognize that I cannot force myself into joy through determination alone. Emotional suffering is not always resolved through an act of will. Sometimes the capacity to experience pleasure, connection, and hope has been affected by prolonged distress, and restoration requires care, time, support, and patience.

I cannot punish myself into wanting to live.

I can choose actions that protect and nurture my life, even when my emotions have not yet caught up with that choice. I can seek help. I can rest. I can allow myself to receive love and support. I can acknowledge the darkness without declaring it permanent.

And I can remember that the desire to live fully is still present within me, even when grief makes it difficult to feel.

The Tension Between What I Feel and What God Says

One of the reasons this song affects me so deeply is that I hear a tension between the despair it expresses and the promises I have come to know through Scripture.

The song does not mention God, but my experience of listening to it is inseparable from my relationship with Him.

“I shall not die, but live,
and declare the works of the LORD.”

— Psalm 37:4 (KJV)

The words in this verse have sustained me during seasons when I struggled to imagine a future worth participating in. They remind me that my life is not reducible to the pain I have experienced and that despair does not have to determine what happens next.

But there are also moments when I look at my circumstances and struggle to reconcile what I believe about God’s goodness with what I am experiencing.

I believe He cares for me, yet I sometimes feel abandoned.

I believe He provides, yet I have experienced profound financial uncertainty.

I believe He sees me, yet I have often felt misunderstood and overlooked.

I believe He desires my good, yet I have spent years struggling to experience the fullness of life I thought healing would bring.

And sometimes, when the pain becomes overwhelming, I begin to wonder whether the world wants to break me. In my darkest moments, I have even struggled with the fear that God might be allowing me to break beyond what I can bear.

I don’t want to pretend those thoughts are easy to reconcile with my faith.

But I also don’t want to confuse the conclusions I reach in despair with the entirety of what is true.

Scripture gives us room to bring those contradictions before God. Psalm 13 asks how long the Lord will seem absent. Psalm 42 describes a soul cast down and disquieted. Psalm 88 ends in darkness without offering the kind of resolution we might expect from a testimony.

And yet these prayers remain part of Scripture.

The presence of despair does not mean the absence of faith.

I am learning that I can bring God my disappointment without treating it as rebellion. I can acknowledge that I am exhausted without concluding that I have failed to trust Him. I can ask why certain things remain so difficult without assuming that every unanswered question reveals a deficiency in my surrender.

I can tell Him that I want to live, but that I am struggling to experience life as something beautiful.

And I can ask Him to help me see differently.

Not by pretending the darkness isn’t real.

But by helping me recognize that darkness is not all there is.

The Return of Delight

“Delight thyself also in the LORD;
and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.“

— Psalm 37:4 (KJV)

I have thought about this verse differently at various points in my life. There were seasons when I approached delight almost as another spiritual responsibility, something I needed to demonstrate so that I could receive what I was hoping for.

If I delighted in God sufficiently, maybe the desires of my heart would finally be fulfilled.

But I am beginning to recognize how easily even delight can become another form of striving when it is treated as a requirement for receiving blessings.

The invitation to delight in the Lord is not a formula for obtaining every desired outcome. It is an invitation into relationship with Him, one in which my desires can be expressed, examined, nurtured, and transformed and I wonder whether I have sometimes been so preoccupied with becoming the person I believed God wanted me to be that I have forgotten to enjoy being a person He created.

I have spent so much time trying to be responsible with my gifts, careful with my words, discerning with my relationships, disciplined with my habits, and faithful with my choices.

Those things matter.

But so does wonder.

So does creativity.

So does laughter.

So does rest.

So does the freedom to make something beautiful without requiring it to become productive, spiritually instructive, or evidence of my growth. Maybe part of learning to delight in God involves rediscovering the goodness of being alive in His creation. Not because every experience must carry an explicit spiritual message, but because life itself contains opportunities for gratitude, curiosity, connection, and joy.

I want to learn how to enjoy the life God has given me without treating enjoyment as something I must first earn.

And I think returning to music has been part of that discovery.

The playlists I create are not simply expressions of sadness. They are opportunities to listen, to reflect, to make connections, to explore my humanity, and to recognize things about myself that I had not yet understood.

I am not abandoning my faith by encountering the complexity of human emotion through art.

I am learning how to bring more of my humanity into my relationship with God.

A Dream About Being Seen

Recently, I woke up from a dream about someone I once loved deeply, someone I have not spoken to in five years.

The dream began with rejection. I was supposed to meet him, but when he saw me, he withdrew. Other people appeared in the dream, including individuals whose perceptions of me seemed to have influenced how he understood me. As the dream unfolded, some of those defenses began to soften, although the recognition of misunderstanding did not come with complete accountability.

Eventually, I found myself sitting beside him. We were watching a game, and there was a sense that he had chosen to spend time with me without the interference of others. I embraced him. I told him I missed him. I asked him why things had happened the way they did.

What struck me was how I responded.

I wasn’t defensive. I wasn’t trying to prove that I deserved to be loved. I wasn’t presenting evidence or attempting to correct every narrative that might have been constructed about me.

I was simply present.

I don’t know whether that dream was prophetic, a reflection of my desires, or a way my mind was processing unresolved grief. I cannot assume it reveals anything about what other people actually think or what will happen in the future.

But I can recognize what the dream allowed me to experience.

For a moment, I was able to encounter someone associated with profound emotional pain without feeling compelled to protect myself through constant explanation.

I could ask questions without becoming an investigator.

I could express affection without demanding an outcome.

I could remain vulnerable without abandoning my dignity.

And I think that matters, especially within the larger narrative of the playlists I have been creating.

Because the woman I am grieving spent so much time trying to protect herself from being hurt again.

And the woman I am becoming is learning that she can remain discerning without making fear the foundation of every encounter.

That does not mean reconciliation will happen. It does not mean boundaries are unnecessary or that affection can replace accountability. If a relationship is ever restored, trust must be rebuilt through genuine mutual willingness and changed behavior.

But I can honor the tenderness of the dream without making its fulfillment a condition of my future happiness.