Icarus, Let Me In: Songs For a Better Story

For MIA's first Song of the Week post Mark Lipman talks about the album he created he wished his 23-year-old self would have heard.

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Music is a boundless container for the human experience. These are words that I can say that I live by. My music is my way of helping myself heal by stretching that container to hold the experience that has always been so difficult to explain to so many people. My hope is that my music helps others who are going through or have had their own spiritual crises or other stigmatized non-consensus reality experiences.

If you are reading this, I hope my story inspires you to create, to use your own words and images to tell your story in a way that doesn’t require subscribing to any belief that makes you feel inferior. Find your own voice and use it. Tell a better story.

Hello, my name is Mark and I’m a musician, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, and an Expressive Therapist. I have a song that I want to share with you for Mad in America’s Song of the Week launch, and I will tell you the story of why this song is important to me.

When I was in graduate school for Expressive Therapies, I had what I call a spiritual awakening–an expansive rebirth of my love of life. During this time I felt an overwhelming sense of connection and purpose, and it was as if I had been asleep up until that moment. It all began when I fell in love for the first time. Since the love was unrequited, I decided to open myself to—and fall in love with—the world. What followed was months of finally feeling liberated to explore my life, take chances and feel powerful. I wrote a lot of music, it seemed to flow out of me. I also put myself in some dangerous situations, and when I was faced with disillusionment of this awakening not lasting forever, I tried to end my life.

At the time, I did not have a healthy way of contextualizing my experience and integrating it into my life, as all that was available to me in my internalized cultural paradigm was either “I must be Jesus,” or “I am genetically defective/I have a chronic illness.” I chose the former (who wouldn’t?) but it proved to be a case of hubris as I believed that the power I was feeling belonged to me because I was more special, “chosen.” I learned the hard way, much like Icarus, that flying too high leads to nose dives. Unlike Icarus, I somehow survived.

I’ve spent years healing the Jesus-illness chasm, and luckily, I continue to find my way. My spiritual awakening does not mean that I’m Jesus, nor does it mean that I’m ill. I was just having a human experience that didn’t have a healthy story to help guide it.

At times people have said to me, “so you must be Bipolar?” or “that sounds like mania.” I understand where these statements are coming from. Diagnosis and illness symptomology are prominent stories in our culture, and compartmentalizing and categorizing is what humans do because it makes us feel good to believe we know something. The problem with these labels is that they prevent people from seeing the whole me and sitting with the beauty and complexity of the whole story. Instead, the person filters my existence through an illness lens, which doesn’t support my healing.

The way I understand healing is about telling one’s story from a place of wholeness instead of fragmented parts.

Enter Music

About 7 years ago when I was 33, I released my debut recording project Goodbye Copilot. Soon after, I took a big step back from performing because I was at odds with trying to market and brand my authentic self. I decided to refocus on my other passion: bringing therapeutic music and arts to people in psychiatric hospitals. In the years that followed, I sustained a vocal injury singing through the tension of feeling at odds with the values of the psychiatric hospital culture and not feeling safe to express my values or be open as an ex-patient. I paid quite a price to learn a tough lesson. The lesson was to not give my power away.

Fast forward to the Spring of 2021, when I reached a certain point in my pandemic-inspired existential crisis. I woke up one day and realized that I wasn’t looking forward to anything. I knew the dangers of being idle with that information, so I decided to reach out and do the thing that I had told myself it would never be worth doing again: I had to make an album. I eventually realized that that wasn’t enough, I had to make THE album. The one that I wish my 23-year-old self would have been able to hear. I needed a way to tell an integrated story where stigma and diagnosis would otherwise cause fragmentation, and here it was. Music.

Telling the Story

I wrote one of the songs on the album, “Icarus,” during my spiritual awakening period. It is written from the perspective of that 23-year-old who was trying to sort through so much beauty, desire, and insight to understand the elusive “truth.” Years later, I penned another song called “Icarus Reprise,” in which I tell the story from Daedalus’ perspective post-Icarus’ fall. Icarus is despondent and ashamed in his bedroom, and Daedalus stands outside the bedroom door singing to his son, being honest, compassionate, and giving him advice and hope.

This song is the epitome of the vision for this album: to tell a story of mental health and recovery using a non-stigmatizing, non-diagnostic framework which addresses hubris as the issue, not a genetic defect nor a chronic illness. The song also posits bravery, love, intergenerational wisdom, and caring for each other as the way toward a better life. I get to play the role of Daedalus when I sing this song to myself, and it comforts me and fills me with hope.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Mark

    What a powerful story, and such passionate and melodic music to match.

    I related to your blog as someone who worked as an LMHC clinician for 22 years in the community mental system in New Bedford, MA., and I have fought against the oppressive Medical Model of so-called “treatment” for 30 years. I have 17 blogs on related topics in the catalogue of blogs at Mad in America.

    I also related to your blog as a performing singer/songwriter who is “Making Music to Change the World.” Here is some links to two of my songs on the topic of psychiatric abuse:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmpfq0b7tLA

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAEDadKFfek

    Your story about identifying with Jesus is actually quite common among people enduring extreme forms of psychological distress. Sometimes this identification with Jesus relates to an individual’s belief that their level of suffering could not possibly exist, and/or be possibly endured, unless it somehow corresponded to the level of pain and suffering endured by Jesus, himself, on the cross. In other words, “how else could God allow such extreme suffering to occur for myself, UNLESS it had some devine purpose in life on earth.”

    I say all this not as a religious person, but as someone that is trying to understand the powerful impact that a belief in an omnipotent spiritual entity can have, along with the negative impact that a belief in “original sin” can have on people living in a traumatic world. After all, this is the same world where psychiatry promotes multiple “genetic theories of original sin” in their oppressive DSM “bible.

    And I loved your story in the song “Icarus Reprise” where the character “Daedalus stands outside the bedroom door singing to his son, being honest, compassionate, and giving him advice and hope.”

    This reminds of some of the work I used to do with EMDR therapy for trauma. It was always a significant sign of progress for a person when they achieved some sort of “distance” from their trauma history, when they would experience mental images of themselves “observing” or looking through a screen at themselves when they were a child, and at the same time experiencing strong feelings of compassion for what that child had to endure. This always represented an important step in overcoming the toxic feelings of “guilt and shame” that many victims of childhood abuse still feel within themselves as adults.

    Mark, I did check out your website and will reach out to you via email. I currently live an hour south of Boston, and perhaps we can meet up in the future and share some music. I do know some people that run some songwriters in the round at some local venues, perhaps that might be a good place to rendezvous.

    All the best, Richard

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  2. Mark,
    Thank you for sharing your Journey and your beautiful, compassionate song. I resonate: I worked as a music/expressive therapist in a psych. hospital back in the ’80’s before Big Pharma and insurance companies ran the show. Then I re-entered inpatient psych. from 2003-2013 and did my best to bring light, compassion, and connection; I know we co-created that in many of my individual encounters and groups…but the system was just too toxic and I had to leave again. Thank you for heading back in with your heart and your art, and for gifting a world so desperately hungry with all you have to offer. May your music and wisdom ripple in ever-widening circles.
    Warm regards-
    Peggy

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    • Thank you so much Peggy. Those words are a balm for me. I appreciate you taking the time to read my story and listen.
      “Thank you for heading back in with your heart and your art, and for gifting a world so desperately hungry with all you have to offer. May your music and wisdom ripple in ever-widening circles.” I will take this with me as I head back to work 🙂

      Greatly appreciated,

      Mark

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    • Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoy it. It doesn’t have more versus, but it is part of an entire album which has a lot more verses 🙂 I’m releasing it this Fall, so if you’re interested in more, please stay tuned! Marklipmanmusic.com and https://igg.me/at/marklipman are both ways to keep up with my music.

      Also, I like the name, I looked it up and will have to read more about Rasselas’ story 🙂

      Mark

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  3. Thanks. I will be keeping an eye out for your album.

    The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is a thought-provoking work by Johnson and definitely worth a read. If you are okay with non-paper reading it’s long out of copyright and available on archive.org.

    If you I enjoy that text I’d recommend you read Candide by Voltaire. It covers a lot of similar ground and has a lot more humour.

    Best wishes.

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