Some damage doesn’t leave a scar. It never even finishes forming a wound and that doesn’t look cinematic, it doesn’t look like one gigantic blood-bath. It’s not a single moment… Rather, it’s thousands of tiny moments that never decay, that all conflict, layer over one another, and fall out of order. This kind of damage isn’t the kind that breaks a person instantly… It’s the kind that chisels away slowly until something that was whole, begins to look a little more like fragments of itself.
Compression damage is different than impact damage. Impact damage leaves those scars and bruises, but compression damage causes cracks. In this section of the series we’re going to look at the things that hurt, or the compression force, as the cracks, and the fragments as a response to those cracks that keep the whole from collapsing underneath the compression.
What fragmentation feels like
Fragmentation isn’t obvious. I’m me, but I have six operating modes that are functionally unique. They are not identities in the strictest sense of the word. I never lose myself in transition, and it’s not Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is better described as a stance change. My agency is intact, but how it is applied changes drastically enough that who I am in the moment changes in a definable way for the people in the room and from the outside, it has created confusion at times as to whether or not I’m still me.
My fragmentation
My fragments still exist, they just no longer possess me the way they once did. I can invoke that stance change at will and prevent it at will. That wasn’t always the case.
One stance is my original design. My blueprint, if you will. The one that existed before the pressure was applied. One stance protects me and the people and things that I love. He doesn’t negotiate, he doesn’t hesitate. He stands like a stone wall between threat and safety. One stance builds things. He works in hard first principles logic with creative flair. One stance catalogs the damage… you’re talking to him now. One stance smooths the edges. He speaks when the tone has to fit the room.
Each of these fragments was purpose-built for function: self, emotion, rage and containment, logic and memory. They were shaped by necessity when the pressure became too heavy to resist as one. They are pillars.
Synesthetically, they each carry their own color, texture, taste, sound and smell. One moves against a white canvas, another smells like wet metal…
Music as containment
Damages wasn’t written in a single voice or single sensation. Partly because that isn’t who I am, and partly because each song carries part of a fracture pattern than needs it’s own sensory lens. That’s why, when listening to Damages, you’ll encounter tones that feel unstable, transitions that sound abrupt, lyrics that contradict…
This album isn’t written for unity, but to hold each piece as it actually is… Paradox held in infinite tension.
Why this matters
Society tells you that you can only be whole or broken, but what if the truth is more complicated than that? What if you can be deep, and composited? What if wholeness is a fragmented concept?
I wrote Damages to honor that question. To give voice to the fragments without gluing them back together… Because they’re still me.
Breathe deeply, my friends,
Jonathan
The Origin, The Ghost, The Performer, The Protector, The Engineer, The Archivist
