"Sunshine and Roses", an open letter by EllaHarp
Photo credit: Holly B Rose
Dear mental health,
There was a time when I moved to Scotland, had questionable self-cut hair, no friends, and pursued my BA in Scottish harp music/Gaelic song from the RCS in Glasgow. I had come from rural Los Angeles, thinking only of adventures, tall castles and perfect moors in the Scottish highlands; completely oblivious to the culture shock, city living and myriad personal troubles I was about to drown in.
Those four years I began writing songs and finding my voice in the beautifully tangled language of music, but also marked the start of my ongoing battle with depression. A dull ache of stagnant, frozen emptiness, combined with crippling anxiety and a swinging pendulum of eating disorders that dictated almost every aspect of my life at the time.
I know now it’s naive to think these struggles were continent dependent, but I remember boarding the plane back to Glasgow after a sunny LA summer, hair damp from a last minute jump in the ocean. Every mile, every hour feeling less and less, as if each construct of time and distance slowly stole another part of me. One by one in quick succession; pulled and discarded like wilting petals from a dandelion. As I waited in pouring rain for the Glasgow 500 bus to town, I felt nothing of myself. The faint crisp of sea salt and a few grains of sand that fell to the cold, grey pavement as I put back my hair were all that was left to remind me.
The connection between mental health and creativity isn’t a happy thing to talk about. It’s frequently touched on and glossed over and written off. And I get it, because it sucks. We all try to focus on the happy shinies, but for me it’s begun feeling increasingly disingenuous. Largely because, 1. It is an undeniable factor, and hiding that isn’t fully representing this experience at all, and 2. Despite the weight of stigma on all this, I personally refuse to accept that depression has only done me harm.
Depression has forced me to be a problem solver. It is because of it that I create. It is because of it that I am driven to change my circumstances, to make something of myself. I can wallow with the best of them, but creativity is the one, consistent thing that pulls me out of the deepest darks (so does cleaning but let’s get real I ain’t doing that) and I firmly believe my 'success' is inextricably connected to this disorder.
If I’m honest, almost every song I’ve written came from some aspect of depression, though my latest is the first I’ve released where I didn’t try to censor that. Everything else could have been about a break up, or an experience or a ‘bad day’, but ‘Sunshine and Roses’ is about nothing besides acknowledging that I’m not ok all the time and that, in itself, is ok 💙