On writing, music, Regression, and feeling too much again.
This is a story that began on a normal day, when I least expected it to start. I had been tirelessly writing, re-writing, revising, polishing, querying, with the sole goal of finally sharing my book, The Regressors, with the world. Now, if you have explored the website just a bit, you might be familiar already with what a Regressor and the process of Regression is (I won’t give away too much, though, as that is all part of some of the book mysteries…).
All you have to know is that ‘regressing’ is a process that leads a person from a state of complete emotional numbness to a rekindled and awakened condition where each feeling hits way harder than what a normal, ‘average’ human being perceives during their lifetime. I have been living with this concept for years, all the way back to when the first, obscure and immature spark burst in my head. Through my characters and their stories, Regression nested inside me for a very long time, and as I later realised, its roots were way deeper than I could have imagined.
Picture what it is like to live inside trauma, pain, loss, grief, desperation and—okay, I will have to stop here, or it could start sounding way too harsh or depressing. Anyway, you find yourself working around and inside these very dark, heavy and meaningful themes, and you think you are trained to endure them, that you’re in control, even though they still hurt you every time you hit certain points in your story, and then… You find out that, in reality, they had barely scraped the surface.
I had built a shell, a protection layer to shield me from the impact. An armour I didn’t even know I was wearing and that, unconsciously, I believed to be solid. Uncrackable.
Then, a post appears on one of your social media feed, a celebration of a certain someone becoming the most streamed Japanese artist on Spotify. Being someone who loves anime and enjoys a good anime OST, I thought—how did I not ever come across Ado before and why YouTube’s algorithm has hidden her from me for all this time?
So, I went on and started listening to her songs. At first, I was like “oh, cool, cracking voice and catchy songs, let’s dig deeper. Let’s explore live concerts, too.” Little did I know what I was about to put my emotionally exhausted self through.
It hit me.
Hard.
So hard I ended up watching One Piece: Film Red at 5:30 in the morning after my brain—and heart—had been overwhelmed by her feral voice screaming the entirety of Shinzou Live Concert in my ears. By the end of the film, I ended up being… devastated. And not by the plot of the film itself, but by the intensity of the feelings that a silhouette had flawlessly injected me with.
My armour was cracked.
Everything I felt that night got to me through an amplifying filter, an ethereal panel that absorbed each feeling—happy, sad, negative or positive—and rebounded it against my then-naked skin. I felt like I hadn’t in years, too busy trying to involuntarily protect myself.
And then, I realised.
I experienced the very thing I have been writing about for months.
I regressed.
Since then, everything has hit me way harder than it used to, so many emotional hues I had greyed out that I can now see again. Amplified. If someone had told me I would have become the same as my characters, I would not have believed that in a million years—and I can only apologise to them for what I, as their author and creator, have put them through and will continue to in every chapter.
And it all happened because of a voice.
