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My Love of Musicals and Duncan Sheik

A couple of weeks ago, I found out that Duncan Sheik, an American singer-songwriter and composer who produced hits such as “Barely Breathing” and the Broadway musical Spring Awakening, died at 56 years old on September 17, 2026. When I first heard the news I was shocked and deeply saddened. He was a member of this grassroots Buddhist organization that I grew up practicing in called Soka Gakkai International (Soka Gakkai means “Value-Creating Society” in Japanese), and growing up, I remember a lot of the Generation X and Baby Boomers grew up listening to his music and knew that he was a Buddhist for many years and really loved practicing it.

When I was younger, the president of our organization, Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023) published a book called The Way of Youth: Buddhist Common Sense for Handling Life’s Questions. The book includes a foreword by Duncan Sheik. I remember reading the book as a teenager and while I enjoyed reading the advice that Mr. Ikeda gave about navigating romantic relationships, school, work, family, friendships, finances and other areas of daily life, I did not know how much of an impact it would have on me as I got older. I did not date anyone when I was in middle or high school, and did not actually get into my first relationship until I was 22 years old. However, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are in high school and navigating a lot of anxiety around romantic relationships, college applications, schoolwork, and figuring out their purpose in life. To be honest, even though I am not in high school or my 20s anymore, I still love to read Daisaku Ikeda’s Discussions on Youth and The Victorious Teen. Even as young adults in our 30s, we can still feel anxious about our self-image, our bodies, dating or marriage, finances and, if you have aging parents, being a caregiver and navigating the process of grief if you have lost your parents. Even though these writings are geared towards teenagers, I think adults could benefit from reading these to navigate their own uncertainty or anxieties, because anxiety and uncertainty are universal human emotional experiences that anyone can experience at any age. The book was published in 2000 and in the foreword Duncan Sheik talks about how he started practicing Buddhism with the Soka Gakkai International at age 19 and how it helped him in his creative process as a singer and songwriter. Before practicing Buddhism, Duncan did not like singing in front of people because he was self-conscious and did not like hearing his own voice. But after chanting, he gained clarity around what goals he wanted to accomplish as an artist. He ended up being nominated for a Grammy for Best Male Vocal performance and going on tour all over the world.

He says in the foreword, too, that having a solid life philosophy is important because there are so many changes happening in society. In fact, the only constant is change, but as humans it can be hard to adapt to change. When he said that, I thought about Orlando Bloom, who is a famous British actor who starred in films such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings. He is also a longtime ambassador to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and has done a lot of humanitarian work around the world. There is an interview where he talks about growing up Christian in England and how finding out about Buddhism helped change his life. Orlando Bloom started practicing Buddhism at age 16 when he heard his roommate chanting the phrase Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. He was studying for an art exam for school and heard the roommate chanting and asked him, out of curiosity, what he was doing because he had not heard the chant before. His roommate told him that he was chanting for Orlando to succeed on his art class exams and also have a successful life. He encouraged Orlando to try chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo himself, and as Orlando chanted, he noticed a deep inner change. He gained confidence in himself and ended up passing his art exams with flying colors (no pun intended) and getting the highest grade out of all his peers taking the art exams. He continued to chant and also participated in his local SGI meetings in the United Kingdom, and since then he has flourished in his career. He says though that beginning to practice Buddhism helped him transform his life on a much deeper level. Navigating success as a young actor can be challenging, especially when you deal with peer pressure and pressure from society and the film industry to fit into their often unrealistic standards. But Orlando says that even with all of the accolades in his career, and even with the setbacks and failures that are also part of that career, he does not let those things define him or sway his commitment to acting or even other aspects of his daily life.

There is a really excellent interview that Steven Sater, an American playwright, did with the USA branch of the Soka Gakkai International and he talks about how he encountered Buddhism and how it led him to creative opportunities beyond his imagination. He collaborated with Duncan Sheik on adapting a German play written in 1891 called The Awakening of the Spring by German writer Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) about young teenagers in a small town exploring their budding sexuality in an oppressive 19th century society that discourages them from doing so. Steven Sater adapted the play into a Broadway rock musical called Spring Awakening and Duncan Sheik composed the songs for the musical. The original production premiered on December 10, 2006 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City and won critical acclaim, including several Tony awards and a Grammy award for the original album. Had I been older back then, I would have totally seen it, because it is a musical that deals with very mature themes such as sex, consent, rape and abortion. I remember seeing the Parental Advisory: Explicit Content label on the CD cover and wondering why it was labeled as explicit. This past year I decided to listen to the original Broadway album of Spring Awakening and honestly, I cried. The music was so powerful and it spoke to a lot of anxieties that young people still experience today even with the advancement of technology and AI. When I first heard Lea Michele sing “Mama Who Bore Me” as well as the reprise by Lea, Lilli Cooper, Lauren Pritchard and the rest of the cast, I started crying because it was so raw and real and their voices conveyed the angst and frustration and sadness of living in a society where adolescents are discouraged and banned from asking questions about sex and where babies come from. By the end of the album, I was in tears, especially when Duncan Sheik performed the final song on the album called “There Once Was a Pirate.” I have been listening to it more now after Duncan’s passing and each time I listen to it, it hits me hard and continues to move me emotionally. I really hope that more high schools are giving their students a chance to re-enact Spring Awakening. I recently found a documentary (thanks to the Wikipedia page on Spring Awakening) about a group of theatre students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida who navigate the aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting at their school, during which a 19-year old former student, Nikolas Cruz, went into the school and shot and killed seventeen students and staff and injured seventeen others. These students and their casting director stage a production of Spring Awakening in their local community while dealing with the traumatic aftermath of losing their classmates and faculty to gun violence. In the trailer for the documentary, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik are seen visiting the theatre students who are starring in the play and sharing encouraging words in the wake of the shooting. I did not know this, but Steven Sater wrote the musical for Spring Awakening in the wake of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, and he wanted a way to speak to the young people who experienced this unthinkable painful trauma of living through a horrific massacre like Columbine and give voice to their feelings of hurt, pain, betrayal and anxiety. I was only five years old when my family heard of the shooting, but now as I get older, it feels like we still have a lot of work to do in addressing gun violence in schools because school shootings still keep taking the lives of students and staff even within the past few years, like the school shooting that happened on November 30, 2021 at Oxford High School in Michigan, when a 15 year old young man named Ethan Robert Crumbley shot and killed four students and injured several others. It was the day of my birthday and hearing about the shooting and the deaths of students and staff just broke my heart and also made me angry about how the U.S. still continues to not have stricter regulations on guns. While I got to live another year, the four youth who were murdered would never live again, and as a Buddhist who practices a philosophy that upholds respect for the dignity of life, it really saddened me that the parents of these students would never get to celebrate their children’s birthdays again or even just live normal lives. They would spend their lives remembering the horrific day they found out that a gunman took their teenagers’ lives.

I think showing a musical like Spring Awakening would help teens navigate a lot of complicated feelings and would provide them with a creative outlet so that they did not feel like they had to navigate a lot of angst and anxiety alone. With smartphones and social media, it can be hard for teens to communicate effectively and have opportunities to connect face-to-face with one another, but with the arts and theatre, teens have a healthy cathartic medium which lets them express these human emotional experiences that they struggle to navigate in a healthy constructive way. The human brain’s prefrontal cortex does not develop until one is 25, so young people struggle with making difficult decisions, and if the adults in their lives do not provide sex education that encourages kids to practice consent and respect for themselves and others, then young people feel silenced and like they have nowhere to turn to. While I have not seen the actual production of Spring Awakening, I read about it on Wikipedia so I could understand the story that Sheik and Sater were telling through the songs, and the young teens in the musical navigate heartbreak, love, sex, abortion, sexual orientation and a lack of purpose in life on their own because the adults in their lives prohibit them from exploring these issues or giving them a healthy way to handle these experiences that are typical human life experiences, not something to hide from children and teens. The musical (and 1891 play) show the consequences of not teaching children about sex and not answering the big questions about life and our existence on this planet. In this age of artificial intelligence and groups of parents advocating for the ban of books about LGBTQIA identity, race, sex and other topics considered controversial in society, it is important more than ever for young people to have access to accurate comprehensive education and information so that they can make decisions for themselves and learn how to advocate for themselves and speak out against propaganda or misinformation. I really hope that Steven Sater and his team get to turn Spring Awakening into a film adaptation. Even though the content of the musical would be considered taboo and controversial in society, many movies have navigated difficult topics such as abortion, teen pregnancy and sexual orientation before. Of course, many of those movies are Rated R, so unless someone is 17 or older, they would have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian to see it. But after seeing the movie Waves, for example, I was so moved and blown away. The film deals with difficult subject matter such as teen pregnancy and abortion, but the performances in it are powerful and I feel that older teens could benefit from seeing it.

The Savages (2007): A Mature Film about Aging, Caregiving and Death

About a month ago, I rented a movie called The Savages from the library. The movie is not to be confused with the ultra-violent crime thriller Savages, which came out in 2012 and was directed by William Oliver Stone (I cannot watch it. Too gory.)

I remember hearing about The Savages when I was in middle school, but I was too young to see it. It is rated R. However, now that I am an adult and have gone through my own personal experiences with loss and grief, I appreciate that I waited to watch this movie. Common Sense Media recommended this movie for ages 17 and up due to its mature themes, and there is some truth to that recommendation. As a kid, I don’t know if I would have had much appreciation for this kind of movie. I was not very knowledgeable or aware about caregiving and aging when I was younger, but now I am dealing with the loss of many friends of mine who were seniors.

The Savages is a black comedy-drama directed by American filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and it begins in a senior living community in hot and sunny Arizona. A caregiver, while looking out for an elderly woman, is telling an elderly man named Lenny Savage to clean up after himself. The elderly man is stubborn and refuses, but then the caregiver threatens him, so the elderly man says he will flush the toilet. However, when the caregiver comes in, he finds that the man has written an obscenity on the wall with his own excrement. The care facility calls Wendy Savage and tells her that her father, Lenny, has written a curse word on the wall with his own excrement. Wendy, a struggling playwright, is in the middle of sending out her plays to fellowships in hopes that she will receive the funding needed to make the plays happen (and take care of herself in the process, because living in New York City is expensive.) However, this news about her dad’s behavior sends her into a panic, and she calls her brother, Jon, who she hasn’t spoken with in years, to tell him what’s going on with their dad. Jon is a college professor living in Buffalo, New York, and he is also trying to maintain a relationship with a woman from Poland whose visa is going to expire. Wendy is sleeping with an older married man. As Lenny’s health declines, the two siblings, while navigating their own rocky relationship with each other, must decide whether to keep him in a nursing home or let him stay in his own home until the end of his life.

There is a pretty poignant scene that resonates with me more now that I am older and have had people in my life who are dear friends to me die in their 70s and 80s. At a diner, Jon and Wendy ask their dad whether he wants to be resuscitated or not when he is dying, and the dad barks at them, “JUST UNPLUG ME, DAMMIT!” as if that was the most obvious outcome for the end of his life. It shows how hard approaching death is for Lenny, especially since his girlfriend died. The film also gets complicated because Wendy and Jon find out that their father cannot continue to stay in his late girlfriend’s house because he was not put on the deed to the house so he does not own it. Wendy and Jon both have very different outlooks on death. I think Jon, like Wendy, is grieving his father’s decline and imminent passing, but he sees it for what it is, not as a smooth transition but an ugly unforgiving event. Wendy wants her dad to stay home, and at least, if he has to go to a nursing home, she wants him to stay at the finest nursing home. The siblings also come to understand that they did not have a very good childhood with their dad. They did not get to reminisce over their childhood memories with their dad. I think growing up, they had a dysfunctional family and did not have a lot of deep connection with their parents growing up. I think the scene where Lenny tells Jon and Wendy to unplug him reminded me of when my parents went over their estate planning with me, and I did not take it seriously enough or approach it in an emotionally mature way at first. I had this deluded idea that my parents would always be there to provide emotional and financial support for me forever, but after reading essays and lectures by a Japanese educator and philosopher named Daisaku Ikeda (1928-2023) about the Buddhist view of birth and death, I started to think about my own mortality and how I wanted to spend the last few years of my life. I developed a more sobering perspective on the passing of loved ones and the reality that I, too, am not immortal and will die at some point. From a Buddhist perspective, our life force continues even after our physical form as humans is no longer alive. We tap this dormant life force from within us by chanting the title of this Buddhist teaching called The Lotus Sutra. The title is Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, which we believe in the Buddhist community is the law of the universe and all life, and also that Nam-myoho-renge-kyo exists in us even after we pass away. It is an eternal law from time without beginning and has no expiration date.

Honestly, if I did not have the Buddhist view of life and death as the foundation for my outlook on things, I think this movie would have made me fearful of aging and death. But from the Buddhist perspective, death is one of the four sufferings that humans go through, the first three being birth, aging and sickness. I feel fortunate to have grown up in a religious community where I was around not just other young people, but also elderly people. Many of my friends in the Buddhist community belong to the Many Treasures Group, which is for seniors ages 65 and older. The Many Treasures Group studies Daisaku Ikeda’s writings about birth, aging, sickness and death and how we can transform these sufferings into causes for our enlightenment in this lifetime, without having to undergo austere practices lifetime after lifetime in order to finally attain our Buddhahood, or enlightened nature, only when we die. Every time I talk with the Many Treasures members, they are joyful and sincere and they always encourage the young people in our community whenever they are going through rough times. I remember in 2016 when I was feeling suicidal and hopeless about my life, I got the chance to support behind-the-scenes for memorial services at the local Buddhist center. There were no heavy formalities at these services. Everyone just came to pay their respects to their friends who passed away and shared fond memories of participating in activities at the Buddhist center with them. They encouraged me to study about the Buddhist perspective of birth and death, and even though I still of course go through those five stages of grief when someone I love dies, I know that their life force is eternal and that I can chant for their eternal happiness even after they are gone. If Jon and Wendy Savage were real-life people instead of movie characters, I would have told them about the Buddhist perspective of life and death, not to get rid of their grief, but to give them another view from which to look at their father’s aging and death that is more encouraging.

A Hard Truth that I Have to Accept

I have tried too many times to watch scary stuff, and I just cannot handle it. After a long day, I tried to watch reaction videos for this movie called Late Night with the Devil. It was a huge waste of my time that I could have been reading The Odyssey, which I got from the bookstore today. When people watch the movie in their reaction videos, they put the video in the corner of the screen so that the audience can watch with the YouTuber. I covered up the corner where the video played so that I would not have to watch it, but even just listening to the audio and sound effects of these clips from Late Night with the Devil grossed and creeped me out. I tried to sit through a scene where a girl is forced to converse with the devil on live television, and even just listening to the audio and hearing the girl talk in these strange multiple voices while possessed just disturbed and upset me. Even though I didn’t actually watch it because I covered up the screen so that I would not have to actually watch the scene, the sound effects team must have done a good job because all I felt while listening to the conversations in the film was disgust, shock and a LOT of anxiety. I watched the people watch these scenes on YouTube and elicit reactions from uncomfortable laughter to disgust to distress, and I have to say that they are much braver than me for even watching the entire movie or even just the trailer.

I may just have had such an adverse reaction to listening to the clip because I am not really a fan of horror movies and do not watch films with exorcisms or possessions. Maybe it’s just because when a demon or supernatural entity is controlling a human being and speaking in a creepy deep voice through them, the person is not in control of their body because the demon is controlling them. I know it’s just a movie and it’s fictionalized, but I somehow felt bad for the character in the movie who got possessed and was coerced into doing it on a talk show. I think that is why I have to just accept the fact that I have a really low threshold for horror, especially supernatural horror or body horror. This is why I cannot watch movies like The Substance, Clayface and other body horror movies. I don’t know why I do this to myself because deep down I know that consuming this kind of upsetting content does not make me feel good mentally or physically. I think I tend to rely too much on the Internet for my entertainment. There are a lot of low-stimulation activities that I could have done from 5:30 to 7 pm that were more productive than watching a bunch of reaction videos for a movie that I will never see because I’m just too scared. I could have read a book. Even though it’s not as stimulating as watching YouTube, it’s better for my mental health. I think watching all these reaction videos doesn’t serve me much anymore. I have just been doing it to distract myself from things I should be doing, like applying for jobs and updating my budget spreadsheet. Or just low-key stuff like reading a book or playing my cello. I wasted time on You Tube and I know I cannot get back that hour and a half. Also, watching these reaction videos made me feel queasy so if I don’t feel good after it, then I have to accept that all I got was this cheap rush of dopamine and nothing else.

Journal Entry- June 11, 2026

I had a hard time sleeping last night. I think it’s because I was under too many covers. Or maybe it’s because I had that Starbucks latte a little too late in the afternoon (caffeine messes up my sleep schedule). I had a weird dream that some college kids crashed this girl’s house and were making a mess, and these two tall college kids were going to fight each other, but then I screamed “HEY!” and everyone fell silent. Then I silently picked up the Coke cans and other things they left strewn around the house, and surprisingly, all of the kids at the party started helping me clean up the house. They put up dishes, they vacuumed, they took out the trash, and by the next day, the house was clean and the parents of the girl acted like nothing ever happened and said good-bye with cheerful smiles to all of the guests. I think it was better than the dream I had the night before. I was trying to convince my dad to not watch the movie Jigsaw because it was late at night (my dad convinced me that he is very much NOT interested in seeing that movie). I think it’s because I’ve been doing this weird thing where I try to numb myself against unpleasant emotions, so I will do things like watch reaction videos to slasher or horror movies from channels like Struggle Nation, Draven Mayberry and GortheMovieGod. I was feeling bored, and even though I normally like boredom, being on my smartphone makes it hard for me to enjoy being bored and alone with my thoughts because I am always distracting myself. And it’s funny because I don’t even actually watch the scary movies that these guys review. I place my hand above the square where they are watching the trailer so that I don’t have to be the one to deal with all the jump scares and gruesome special effects. I watched a couple of reactions to this upcoming slasher movie called Ice Cream Man, which is about a man who gives children ice cream that turns them into these murderers who kill a bunch of adults in the neighborhood. Even though I knew deep down that watching these reaction videos wasn’t a good idea and would make me sick to my stomach, I did it anyway. It was kind of like that famous study where people administered electrical shocks to themselves because they did not want to sit alone with their thoughts in boredom. Even though I had my hand placed over the area where the YouTuber showed the trailer so that the viewer could see it and react to it, too, I still heard the gruesome sound effects and the creepy dialogue and screams. At some point, I had to ask myself why I wanted to watch people react to these very violent and disturbing movie trailers. Because watching Draven Mayberry being sickened by the red band Ice Cream Man trailer actually did not make me feel good either. I was not entertained. I really was doing all of this just for the dopamine rush. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that rewards you doing pleasurable behaviors, so to get that reward you have to keep doing the behavior, even if that behavior doesn’t serve you well in the long run and is just a short-term fix for a longer-term more major problem. I was dealing with a lot of other personal issues like figuring out my career and anxiety about my future and the future of the world that I wanted to distract myself. However, I have realized that watching (or in my case, listening with closed eyes) horror movie trailers does not make me excited at all. I don’t get that rush of adrenaline. In fact, being in movie theaters and having to sit through the red band previews for horror movies like The Monkey was a miserable experience. I didn’t enjoy hearing people’s throats getting slashed, or people screaming in pain as their limbs get cut off. Thirty minutes would pass and I would think, Wow, I just watched all these reaction videos and I have nothing to show for it. What a waste of time. I had the dream about trying to convince my dad to not watch Jigsaw before bed because I was in the employee bathroom at work, dealing with stress, and I brought my smartphone in the bathroom with me (gross, I know. I’m trying to curb the habit, I really am.) I watched Struggle Nation’s reaction to the movie Jigsaw, without actually watching the trailer myself (like I said, it’s this weird thing where I want to watch the person’s expressions as they watch the trailer, not watch the trailer myself. Because I am too chicken to do that.) I watched the YouTubers’ grossed out expressions and after a while thought, Why am I consuming this content? I have to draw a line. When I went to see an R-rated feature (I think it was a comedy) the trailer for Until Dawn played, and unlike watching a movie at home where you can skip the trailer and go straight to the disc menu or control the volume on your TV or laptop, you cannot mute a preview playing in the movie theater. After trying to sit through the Until Dawn trailer with my eyes closed, my heart started racing and as I heard the characters panic and scream as they died in gruesome ways (again, I am too chicken to watch, but I would hear the sound effects of these characters being slaughtered) I excused myself and went into the restroom to calm my panic. I think I just have to accept that I will never enjoy movies with gratuitous amounts of blood.

3 of My Favorite moments in SpongeBob SquarePants

I have been MIA with writing lately, and I feel bad, so here is a short post.

  1. “Boating School”- episode 4, season 1: In this episode, SpongeBob and Patrick come up with a plan for SpongeBob to finally pass his driver’s test and get his boating license. Unfortunately, the plan they used turned out to be an epic fail and SpongeBob ends up failing his test again. He was so close to passing with flying colors, until he found out that Patrick helped him cheat on his test by giving him all the answers, such as “put it in drive” instead of “1924.”
  2. “Can You Spare a Dime?”: After Mr. Krabs accuses Squidward of stealing his prized dime, Squidward quits working at the Krusty Krab and ends up begging for money on the street. SpongeBob has pity on Squidward and lets him stay with him in his pineapple house. However, Squidward ends up taking advantage of SpongeBob and starts demanding him to fulfill unrealistic requests, like refusing to drink the lemonade that SpongeBob brought upstairs to him because the lemon wedge in the lemonade had three seeds in it, which is an odd number thus making it undrinkable to Squidward. In some of these episodes, SpongeBob seems to have porous boundaries (no pun intended), making it easy for people to take advantage of his good will. However, SpongeBob finally kicks Squidward out of the house and forces Mr. Krabs to give Squidward his job back. Also, Mr. Krabs finds out that his huge dime was in his pocket the entire time. Not sure how he can fit a dime that big into his pockets, but his daughter, Pearl, made him take his dietary supplement in the form of a huge pill in “Mid Life Crustacean” so I guess anything is possible.
  3. “Culture Shock”: Squidward directs the talent show, and he wants everyone except for SpongeBob to star in it, so he has SpongeBob mop the floors backstage. However, it turns out that SpongeBob is the actual star of the show because while everyone else boos Squidward’s performance, they cheer when SpongeBob mops the stage after everyone makes a mess throwing tomatoes at Squidward. Yesterday, I needed a chuckle, so I watched a GIF of Squidward doing his silly looking dance at the talent show.

Movies/ Books About the Complex Relationships Between Mothers and Children (part 1)

Today is Mother’s Day, and while it is a wonderful day to celebrate and appreciate those people in our lives who are mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, or any other motherly figure, it is also a day for me to remember that not everyone’s mother is alive or they may have a really difficult relationship with their mother. Also, motherhood, while rewarding, can be difficult. You are literally taking care of a human being for eighteen years and then even when they become an adult, you still worry about them. I am not a mother, but from listening to my female friends who are mothers, having kids is a huge responsibility. This is why I also love to watch movies and read books because they show that human relationships, particularly the relationships between parents and children, are complicated and sometimes traumatic. Film and literature can give us an opportunity to learn from other people’s perspectives, especially if, like me, you have never gone through another person’s experiences or trauma and cannot relate. A lot of these books and movies I list contain mature material and may be emotionally difficult to read or watch, but as I was thinking about what to blog about (especially because my blog has been collecting digital dust and cobwebs for months) I thought about all of the movies and books that I watched and read about motherhood and/or complicated relationships between children and their mothers, and it seemed like something that was worth writing about. So I hope you enjoy.

  1. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy: After reading this book, I could not stop crying. And honestly, I don’t know Jennette McCurdy that well. By the time iCarly came on Nickelodeon, I was busy with extracurricular activities and schoolwork, so I rarely had time to watch TV. But from the little that I knew about the show, I remember that there was a character in the show named Sam, played by Jennette McCurdy. Although I have not seen iCarly, reading McCurdy’s memoir helped me understand that everything was not all laughs and sunshine when she was doing the show, and in fact is why I am glad she finally pursued her dream of becoming a writer and left acting. In fact, Jennette was battling a serious eating disorder and grappling with the passing of her abusive mother, Deborah, while dealing with fame, toxic relationships and workplace harassment during her time as an actor on Nickelodeon. Before she died of cancer in 2013, Deborah criticized and belittled her daughter throughout her childhood and well into her teen years, and pretty much controlled her life. She forced Jennette to become an actress as a child because she herself never got to achieve that dream. Deborah’s parents never let her become an actress, so she projected all of these unrealized expectations and dreams on her daughter, who was only six at the time that her mother forced her to go into acting. She restricted Jennette’s calorie consumption, leading Jennette to develop anorexia nervosa, a severe eating disorder. While I am not a psychologist, it is evident that Deborah probably had narcissistic personality disorder, because her behavior towards her daughter was manipulative and also Deborah also had a sense of entitlement. She used her cancer diagnosis to manipulate people into casting Jennette for acting roles, and it is sad because Deborah’s parents also were very controlling people who restricted her calorie intake and also probably wrecked Deborah’s self-worth from an early age. I’m just saying, hurt people hurt people. When Jennette wrote a script for a movie when she was young, her mother dismissed her project completely, saying that “writers are frumpy” and that Jennette was never going to be a good writer (when I read this part, I shrugged and thought with a small chuckle, “Well, fuck it, if Deborah thinks writers are frumpy, then, I LOVE being frumpy if it means I get to do what I love, a.k.a. write. In fact, I relish it.”) Deborah also treated Jennette’s siblings poorly and it was painful to have to read how they watched Jennette’s mother abuse her and manipulate her. The hardest part of the book that stuck with me and had me sobbing was when Jennette goes through the painful recovery from another life-threatening eating disorder that she developed after her mother’s death. After her mother died, Jennette experienced complicated grief, an intense form of grief that continues for months and even years. People with complicated grief experience intense emotions, such as resentment, anger, and guilt, and they cannot imagine life without the person. This kind of grief has a significant impact on someone’s daily functioning. After Jennette’s mom died, she could not imagine life without her. Even though Deborah abused her throughout her childhood and managed and controlled her daughter even when Jennette become of legal adult age (18), I think because Deborah had so much power and influence over her daughter’s decisions and life, Jennette didn’t really have anyone or anything to fall back on as she grappled with losing her mother, and she felt that without her mother to constantly punish her and restrict her calorie intake, she developed bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder where one eats copious amounts of food and then purges through vomiting, exercising more than normal, or taking laxatives. Even after falling in love and getting into a romantic relationship, she still battles with bulimia, and her partner at the time sees that she vomited in the toilet and tells her to get help or that he will not stay in the relationship. Even though Jennette receives a lot of compliments about her body, these people have no idea that she buries a lot of pain. As someone who never dealt with an eating disorder, I did not realize how arduous and painful the process of recovery and rehabilitation is. In one scene, while in eating disorder recovery Jennette has a bowl of spaghetti placed in front of her, and she has to eat the food without purging. It is an excruciating experience. for Jennette because she spent so much of her life with this unhealthy relationship with food and her body image that was filled with shame and guilt because her mother, who had her own unhealthy relationship with body image and food growing up, made her daughter feel like she could not enjoy even one bite of a cheeseburger without feeling like she was committing some sort of crime. I take it for granted that I can just eat and enjoy food, but for people who have developed eating disorders, food can be a source of anxiety and shame, so it’s not just like you can tell someone, “Just eat, it’s just fries and a cheeseburger.” Like any mental health condition, recovery takes time and it’s not always pretty. When I read the part in Jennette’s memoir when she was able to refrain from purging for 24 hours, I put the book down and could not stop sobbing. I cried until I thought I was going to stain my bedspread with tears. As someone who dealt with self-harm and depression, I will tell you, getting help for mental illness is an accomplishment in and of itself. When Jennette got professional treatment for her eating disorder, I felt like I just wanted to meet Jennette so that I could give her a huge hug. Because by the end of the book, all I could think was, wow, this girl went through so, so much. Even after reading this book a couple of years ago, it has stuck with me for quite some time.

Music Albums I Have Listened to in the Past Few Months, part 1: O by Damien Rice

Written on March 31, 2026. (cue timecard in SpongeBob’s French narrator voice: “One month later….”)

One album I recently listened to was O by Damien Rice. I first found out about this artist because I was looking at celebrities’ playlists on iTunes. This was back around 2007 or 2008, and one of the playlists was of Joss Stone, a soul singer from England whose music I enjoy listening to. One of the artists on her playlist was Damien Rice. I didn’t know who Damien Rice was, but when I listened to the song on Stone’s playlist it really moved me. Then later on, in my senior year of college, a girl in my dorm invited me to play a little informal gig in our dorm’s living room. She played acoustic guitar while I accompanied her on the cello. I cannot remember what song we played, but all I remember is that it was beautiful. A few weeks ago, when telling alumni about our upcoming college reunion, I emailed this girl telling her I remembered us playing that Damien Rice song in the dorm room. She never replied, and so I figured she forgot me, which is ok. It did spark a desire to revisit Rice’s music, though. Damien Rice is an Irish folk musician and singer whose songs are very sad but also beautiful. They don’t have a ton of bombastic melodies and harmonies. They are very slow and dialed down, but the lyrics, if you listen to them closely, are pretty sad and mature. For some reason I love sad music, so I gravitated towards Rice’s music. I went on vacation this weekend and could not sleep because I had a lot going on in my mind, so I turned on Spotify and listened to the album O by Damien Rice. Listening to the music was very healing, and I also love it because one of the main instruments he uses to accompany him is the cello. As someone who loves to play the cello, I got pretty pumped when I heard the cellist playing alongside Rice’s guitar and beautiful vocals. It was like an intimate dialogue between the cellist and Rice. A few of my favorite songs on the album are “Cannonball” and “Delicate.” Before listening to the full album, I am pretty sure I heard “Cannonball” many times on the radio or on the soundtrack of some movie or television show. The chorus of the song sounded very familiar as I listened to it (“Stones taught me to fly/ Love, it taught me to lie/ Life, it taught me to die…”) After I listened to the album O, I started to listen to the album 9. The album O came out in 2002 and his second album 9 came out in 2006. As a kid, when I first found out about these albums, I was curious about why the album 9 had the black and white “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker on the CD cover. Looking at the front cover of the CD as a kid, the cartoon illustrations somehow made me think that it was going to be an age-appropriate kid’s album. What’s so explicit about this? I thought. And then as I was sleeping this past weekend in my nice breezy hotel room in Florida, with my headphones in, playing Damien Rice’s “Rootless Tree” on his album 9—

“FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU and all we’ve been through…”

I sort of jolted in my sleep. It sounded like he was yelling at me instead of at whichever anonymous ex-girlfriend he was cussing out in the song. And then, for some reason, in my dream I was taking care of a fictional long-lost baby cousin who suddenly appeared in my house out of nowhere, and as I was taking care of him I was listening to “Rootless Tree” and kept repeating the chorus “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU” as loud as I could when I had a moment to listen to the song in private, away (thankfully) from my baby cousin. After listening to the song, I realized, Ohhhhhh, that’s why the album has that Parental Advisory label. Because otherwise the songs didn’t strike me as inappropriate in any way, but then again, I think I got so distracted by the beautiful cello melodies on the album (and Damien Rice’s beautiful voice) that I ended up not focusing much on the lyrics or the deeper meaning of the lyrics. Also, I was sleeping so I was more focused on REM sleep than I was trying to do a lyric-by-lyric analysis of the song “9 Crimes.”

The Perils of Sleeping in Class

In college, I often stayed up until the wee hours studying. I was a type A perfectionist, and while I don’t regret all of the time that I spent studying in the library and in my dorm room, I do regret not getting enough sleep. As I am getting older, I am realizing that without sleep, the body literally cannot function. Our bodies were not naturally made to function on less than 7 hours of sleep. I think because I was so sleep deprived, it made it hard for me to stay awake in class. And when I was tired and stressed, I would resort to piling my plate high with food and eating until I was overly full. Of course, because I would eat lots of food before my next class, I would get sleepy. One minute I would be enthusiastically jotting down notes about Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes, and the next thing I knew class was over and my notes went from being legible to looking sloppy.

It also did no favors for my rapport with my professors. One year I took a class about Western classical music history. The professor was nice to me at the beginning, but as class went on, he started being less nice. When he would hand people worksheets, he would toss mine at me so that it would fly through the air and I would have to pick them up from the floor. I realized in retrospect that I was drinking Bigelow Sweet Dreams tea before class and it was making me sleepy. One time while I was studying in the library (it was a performing arts library next to the music department building) the professor approached me and said, “I think you have narcolepsy.” It wrecked me. After he told me I might have narcolepsy because I was sleeping in class, I broke down, feeling embarrassed and ashamed. However, once I realized I just needed to stop drinking Sweet Dreams tea during breakfast, no matter how delicious it was, I stopped sleeping in class. Also, I saw how hurt my professors were whenever I would sleep in class, because when I would give presentations or talk to the class about something, I saw some students who were sleeping or had their eyes closed during my presentations. At first, I got upset, but as I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about my situation, I realized that I was sleeping in class and that it probably hurt my professors’ feelings, so now I was starting to understand that when people sleep through my lectures or presentations, it can feel like, Wow, that’s so rude and annoying, but so, too, was my sleeping in class.

How I Became a Metalhead for a Week

Content warning: some mentions of suicide, mental illness, cutting

This week, I decided to explore new musical genres. Normally I am a Motown, classical music, old school Phil Collins kind of listener, but I remember when I was in fourth grade there were these two kids named Rachel and Isaac who were older than me (high school aged). We attended the same homeschool and they both really loved this band called Korn. I remember Rachel drew a cartoon comic strip of her cat, Daphne, doing various things. One part of the strip showed Daphne leaning over a toilet bowl throwing up, and another part of the strip showed Daphne with headphones on, listening to Korn.

“Oh,” one of the students said. “I thought you said Daphne was listening to porn.”

My naive innocent 10-year-old brain didn’t register. What was porn, and what was this Korn that Daphne the cat was listening to? Immediately, I envisioned corn, the vegetable.

I went through a print music CDs catalog (this was back in 2005) and saw a few albums. I was always intrigued by the album covers that had the Parental Advisory stickers on them. I never listened to a lot of explicit music growing up so finding out about these explicit CDs felt like I was encountering some forbidden fruit. As I perused the catalog, one CD album cover caught my eye. It was a dark twisted illustration of a young boy, pale as a ghost, staring in fear out at the viewer, holding a teddy bear with its head ripped off. A demonic looking rabbit was putting a crown on the scared little boy’s head, and a demonic looking horse was holding the head of the boy’s teddy bear. The album was titled See You on the Other Side. I was around 11 or 12 when I saw this album cover, and because I like weird art (this was around the time that I got into this short story collection by Tim Burton called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy) I went online and listened to a few samples of the songs on the album. I was too chicken to listen to the original explicit version of the album, so from what I can remember I may have just listened to the clean edited version on iTunes. Or, rather, a 30-second sample of the song “Coming Undone” and then deciding that heavy metal was not my cup of tea. The song sounded demonic and terrifying and it had lots of screaming and angry growling that sent chills down my spine.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m working on an unpleasant assignment at my desk, passing the time at my 9-to-5 office job. I decide to listen to Korn. I have a Spotify Premium membership, so why not? At first, I was reluctant to listen to Korn because I tried listening to “Freak on a Leash” and some other songs on their other album See You on the Other Side, which features another disturbing album cover of a group of kids following a young girl as she plays hopscotch and runs to jump off the edge of a cliff. I’m sure any fans of Korn or metal music reading this are just rolling their eyes and thinking, Well, DUH, it’s Korn. What do you expect? But again, as someone who didn’t grow up listening to the nu metal band Korn (or other groups like Slipknot and Seether) listening to this genre was a whole new listening experience. Here are the few metal albums that I listened to these past few days while handling a gruesome task (I do work in personal injury law, after all, so what’s a day without a bunch of scary photos of amputations?) I’m probably getting the release dates wrong for the following list, but it is 11:00 pm and I am very tired and have no energy to continue writing and editing at the moment.

  1. Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces: Seether (release date: January 1, 2007)
  2. See You on the Other Side: Korn (release date: December 6, 2005)
  3. Follow the Leader: Korn (release date: August 18, 1998)
  4. History for Sale: Blue October (release date: January 1, 2003)
  5. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (release date: June 8, 2004)

There are a few songs from my listening experience that I listened to on repeat. One of them is a beautiful cover of “Careless Whisper” from Seether’s album Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces. I grew up listening to George Michael’s song “Careless Whisper” on the radio as a kid, and it was one of my favorite songs by him besides “Faith” and “Father Figure.” After listening to the entire album by Seether, I think I was better able to appreciate Seether’s unique style and personality that they brought to their cover of “Careless Whisper.” It gave the song a much darker gloomier feel to it. I also really like another song on the album “Rise Above This.” Growing up, the first song I heard from Seether was “Fake It.” It was around seventh grade when I was exploring new music on iTunes. I mainly started listening to this album because I thought the album cover art was interesting. The cover of Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces shows a young girl with jet-black hair showing her ribcage against a dusty background with what looks like an alphabet of hieroglyphics on the right side of her. Like I said, I loved a lot of twisted strange art as a kid, so for some reason, while I was too chicken to listen to the full explicit rage-filled albums of Korn and Seether, I had no problem looking at the creepy disturbing album covers.

I will say, I am glad I waited until I was much older and mature to listen to Korn and Seether’s albums. One reason is because growing up, I was never exposed to a lot of dark scary stuff. Sure, I loved Tim Burton, but I never watched Sleepy Hollow or Edward Scissorhands. Just the heartwarming fantasy drama Big Fish and the spooky but kid-friendly film called The Nightmare Before Christmas (I can’t also forget his film adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, which I was obsessed with as a kid.) Any other film that showed creepy dudes in white masks with holes in them or possessed toy dolls with red hair, overalls and a real penchant for killing people: forget it. As I got older and started to understand myself more, and also went through my own dark, scary painful stuff, I think I was able to understand why these guys produce this kind of depressing metal music. At first, I was worried that listening to the music would re-trigger me, especially as someone who has been in that dark nasty hell of major depressive disorder and is still recovering from quite a few horrible episodes. Especially since quite a few of the songs on these albums are about suicide and self-harm. When I first started listening to Blue October’s album History for Sale, I was worried because one of the songs on the album is called “Razorblade.” As someone who struggled with self-harm in the past, listening to this song was pretty painful, and I wondered if I was ever going to get through the album. Of course, if you don’t like an album or a certain genre, don’t pressure yourself to listen to it. Then again, listening to a different genre than I was used to exposed me to a new style of music that I would not have listened to otherwise. Weirdly enough, I got through History for Sale and ended up loving it. One of the songs on the album is called “Calling You” and I would hear it all the time on the radio, in the supermarket, at the doctor’s office, everywhere. But that was just one song. Listening to the entire album gave me more exposure to other songs that Blue October had written and performed besides that one song (even though it’s one of my favorite Blue October songs.) Listening to the full album helped me appreciate all of the blood, sweat and tears that went into writing the lyrics, which are so raw and personal and vulnerable, and rehearsing the songs with the band and then playing the songs multiple times on tour. I’m sure Blue October loves it; otherwise, why would they have gone into the music business in the first place? However, I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Justin Furstenfeld, the lead vocalist, guitarist and lyricist of Blue October, to write songs about mental illness, cutting and suicide. Even though we have more spaces where we can discuss mental illness, and even though more people are going to therapy, there is still that lingering stigma attached to having a mental illness. I think that is why hearing about the actor Robert Carradine’s suicide was so painful. Earlier that week when I heard he committed suicide, I was contemplating my own suicide, and I felt like I would never get out of that dark place where I just felt my life was hopeless and meaningless. And then I heard about Robert Carradine’s suicide, and I could not stop crying in my car during my lunch break. I cried while microwaving my lunch. I cried while in the parking lot trying and failing to eat said lunch without bursting into tears. I finally had to go to the public library and chill out with Lost Illusions, a novel by Honore de Balzac. I simply could not believe that the actor who played Sam McGuire, Lizzie McGuire’s dad in one of my favorite shows as a kid, Lizzie McGuire, took his own life. I also didn’t know that he struggled with bipolar disorder for decades. My reaction to Robert Carradine’s suicide reminded me of the profound grief I experienced in 2014 when I found out that the actor Robin Williams took his own life. I could not believe it. I thought it was a sick joke. But after reading more news, I realized that Robin Williams was actually gone. I still remember bawling like a baby when I saw Robin Williams laughing on the cover of TIME Magazine and the caption, “Robin Williams, 1951-2014.” I guess it was just hard because I had this naive idea that Robin Williams was happy because he was living this successful life as an actor and had an incredible career. But of course, actors at the end of the day are human beings with their own challenges in daily life, and Robin Williams had his own struggles with his mental health. Even though there is help and even though there are services to help people with mental illness, even just the action of asking for help can feel like an uphill battle. You may just not have the energy to do it. Or you may be dealing with family members, partners, or friends who discourage you from getting professional help or speaking honestly about your feelings. Or you may just feel like people aren’t going to care about what you’re going through, so why bother? It is hard to remember that there are people who love you, and that there is no shame whatsoever in seeking professional help for mental illness, whether it is for you or for a loved one, but even if you don’t think it’s true, the undeniable fact is that there will always be someone who cares about you and that you are loved inside and out.

If you or a loved one is struggling, there is a 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline you can call. This is a link with more information.