music – Like An Anchor

Favorite INFJ Songs Playlist

22 September, 202020 September, 2020Marissa

A couple weeks ago, Susan Storm asked me to write an article about songs that INFJs love. When I asked some INFJs on Facebook for feedback on that topic, I was overwhelmed by the responses. It was far more than I could fit in just one article! I’ve compiled a Spotify playlist with the recommended songs, albums, and artists that you can click here to listen to. It’s over 6 hours long, and growing with each new comment. I’ve found several new favorites, and I hope you will too!

Coincidently, I finished writing this article shortly before I finished listening to Jordan Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning” lecture series. In the final lecture, he spends a few moments talking about music.

“Virtually everyone gets intimations of meaning from music. And I think music is hierarchically structured patterns that are representative of being laying itself out properly. … It is an abstract representation of proper being.” — Jordan Peterson, 2017 Maps of Meaning 12, time signature 1:51:00.

Music is meaningful to us on a level that I doubt most of us (me included) really understand, at least consciously. And, in the case of many of the songs INFJs list among their favorites, it really does prompt us to think about “being.”

We think about an ideal state of being, listening to hopeful songs like “I will Spend My Whole Life Loving You” by Imaginary Future.
We encounter our own brokenness and resilience listening to “Elastic Heart” by Sia.
We revel in the whimsey of different perspectives on the world through songs like “Whole of the Moon” by Celtic Woman.
We face our darker, hidden, hurting sides and think about how others may respond as we listen to “Demons” by Imagine Dragons.

Some of these songs represent irrepressibly hopeful ideas of the world, while others dive deep into brokenness and pain. Some are raw, some are happy, some beautiful, some hard to listen to. But for at least one INFJ out there, the different songs on this playlist are expressing the sorts of things “which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” (to quote Victor Hugo).

How Do You Hold on to Hope When You’re Fighting Anxiety and Depression?

14 January, 202013 January, 2020Marissa

Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental illnesses, and they often occur together. Just because its relatively common, though, doesn’t make dealing with both feel any less weird. Exhibit A, this image I ran across on Pinterest:

It’s overly simplified, of course, to say “depression is when you don’t really care about anything” and “anxiety is when you care too much about everything.” Still, these comments capture part of how strange it feels to simultaneously (or alternately) deal with depression and anxiety. “Having both is staying in bed because you don’t want to go to school and then panicking because you don’t want to fail. Having both is wanting to go see your friends so you don’t lose them all, then staying home in bed because you don’t want to make the effort.”

Anxiety and depression are going to show up a bit different for everyone who struggles with them, but for me it’s like one day I’m on-edge, jittery, and so distracted by my inner anxiety monologue that I struggle to remember how things actually happened. Then the next day I feel like a weight’s pressing down on me snuffing out all motivation and hope. And some days, the smothering feeling is there but I’m also anxious about stuff I should care about and there’s this weird fight going on in my head. It’s exhausting.

Holding on to hope isn’t easy when you’re fighting a struggle inside your mind that tells you the worst could happen and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. But we’re also not helpless victims of our own minds. We can change the patterns of our thoughts. We can choose to hold on to hope even when there seems no reason for it, and the easiest/best way to do this is with the Lord’s help.

Mental Illness and Musicals

3 April, 20192 April, 2019Marissa

The theater where my sister and I hold season tickets is getting the touring Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen for its 2019/2020 season. Pretty exciting, right? Actually, I’m excited about the entire upcoming season. It’s packed full of musicals, and they’re all such good titles that I can’t say there’s one that I’m least exited to see.

I can, however, tell you that Dear Evan Hansen is one I’m most excited about. Two years ago, this musical was nominated for nine Tony Awards and won six, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Actor in a Musical for Ben Platt. And it more than earned those accolades with brilliant scrip, music, characters, and acting all coming together to tell a story that contributes to an important conversation about mental illness. Read more →

What’s Behind The Facade?

2 July, 201830 August, 2018Marissa

Yesterday my sister and I went to see a community theater’s production of the musical Jekyll and Hyde. It’s a show that our cousin introduced us to years ago through the soundtrack and we were excited to it on stage. I’m not sure I’d call this a favorite play, but the music is fantastic and the story line prompts some intriguing questions about the nature of human kind and how our personalities work.

Jekyll and Hyde is a classic tale of good and evil. The play is quite different from Robert Lewis Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the original version, Jekyll develops a serum to separate his darker side because he’d already started indulging his vices and wanted to keep doing so without fear of discovery. The play offers a more compelling protagonist; a Jekyll searching for a cure to evil on a grand scale. If you’re curious, you can watch a really good high school production of the play on YouTube by clicking here.

This isn’t the sort of play that I recommend frequently. It’s dark. It’s complicated. It’s more sexual than the scandalized ladies sitting behind me expected. It doesn’t end happy (don’t look at me like that — you don’t get spoiler warnings when the book’s 132 years old). But it’s also a deeply compelling story that dives head-first into tough questions about the nature of man. Read more →

Even If You Don’t: Holding On To Hope In Dark Times

14 April, 201814 April, 2018Marissa

We know God can do anything. So how do you react when He doesn’t do something that you beg him to? When your loved one isn’t healed? When your heartbreak feels unbearable and then something else piles on top of that? When you just don’t know how to go on, yet you have to anyway?

I’ve been going through a rough patch emotionally, especially over the past few weeks but really for a few months now. And I feel like God has thrown me some songs as “lifelines” in this time. First it was “I Am Not Alone” by Kari Jobe and more recently it was “Even If” by MercyMe.

I know You’re able and I know You can
Save through the fire with Your mighty hand
But even if You don’t
My hope is You alone
I know the sorrow, and I know the hurt
Would all go away if You’d just say the word
But even if You don’t
My hope is You alone

I didn’t much want to sing this when it popped into my head. Actually, I couldn’t at first since all I remembered was the “But even if you don’t” line. But I looked the song up, grasping for some hope to anchor my soul, and after playing through it a few times I could breath and pray again. I’ll admit, though, that there was still a part of me crying out, “Why?” when I thought about Him choosing not to take away the sorrow and hurt. And it’s okay to do that. As my counselor said, God is big enough to handle it when His kids are frustrated with Him.

Hope is one of the key things that gets us through the times when we’re frustrated with God and don’t understand what He’s doing. And it’s something I don’t think we talk about enough. Paul tells us “faith, hope and love remain” (1 Cor. 13:13, WEB). They’re all three virtues that aren’t going away, but we talk about faith and love a whole lot more than hope. Which is a shame, because hope is something that’s very much needed in this world. Read more →

A Little Celtic Culture

15 May, 201714 May, 2017Marissa

My family and I have been wanting to see Riverdance for years, so when we realized they were coming into Columbus Mother’s Day weekend we snatched up some tickets. And I’m so glad we did. Just watching the videos on YouTube is impressive, but seeing the entire show live was fantastic. I’m still in awe of how fast their feet were moving. And it’s so precise! I can’t even reliably walk down stairs without tripping over my own feet

Amusing side-note: since I started dancing at church, people compliment me about how graceful I am. But a couple months ago, I’m walking downstairs to where we practice before Shabbat services and managed to trip down the stairs hard enough to create an enormous, instantly purple bruise on my shin. Any gracefulness I display while dancing is a genuine miracle.

One thing I hadn’t expected from Riverdance was how much of a Celtic “feel” there was to the show. I supposed I’d expected it to be more “showy” and less cultural, if that makes any sense. The poetic voice-over played a big role in setting that tone, as well as the musicians (have I ever told you how much I adore Irish fiddlers and bodhran players?), and a singer who made me wonder if I’d wandered back into a Celtic Woman concert. The whole thing was fantastic.

Riverdance is actually the second Celtic show I’ve gone to this year. Emmet Cahill was on his first solo tour with his new album (if you don’t know who he is, drop everything and click here. You’ll thank me when he’s the biggest name in Irish music a few years from now). And I’m hoping to get to Dublin, Ohio’s Irish Festival this year, too. And see Albannach (a Scottish pipes and drums band) at the Renaissance festival. One can never get too much Celtic music!

Random thought: none of the people currently in Riverdance have red hair. This does not fit my assumtion that there must be tons of Irish redheads out there since everyone automatically assumes I’m Irish because of my hair.

A Little Celtic Culture | marissabaker.wordpress.com — the Celtic section of my bookshelf

I can’t really pin-point a reason I love Celtic things so much. I do have some Celtic ancestors in my background (we’re English and Scottish on my dad’s side of the family and English, Scottish, and German on my mom’s side), but it’s so many generations back that I doubt we can say genetics play a role. But since my hair has been reminding me of my Scottish heritage my whole life, we’re going to say it still had some influence on how much I love Celtic culture, music, and dance.

Are any of you obsessed/in love with a culture that’s not the one you grew up in?

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