Crybaby is a song I wrote to express and articulate the difficult emotions I carry from having left places that once gave me shelter, people who were part of my journey and pets I’ve loved dearly. Piecing these memories together allows me to search for a safer, immaterial space to build my home. When I perform this song, I connect with the strength I have within me. I connect with my ancestors for the times they faced instability in their homes and were forced to relocate, while mourning what dreams, hopes and sense of stability they left behind.
1. Drawing music from generational trauma
Folk music has traditionally been used to empower and represent the lived experiences of those whose voices aren’t "important enough" to be heard. I myself use music to give space and attention to my personal, inherited and shared displacement traumas. These traumas, carried by my family in search of home and safety are worries that I carry myself to this day. One can imagine then how triggering it is to be evicted from a place I was learning to trust as a safe, by a landlord who wanted me and my current roommates gone in order to renovate our apartment and charge higher rent.
I have lived in an unsafe house. Living in emotionally and physically unstable environments fractures a person’s ability to feel safe, even after leaving that environment. Even once they leave it, they need a safe space to rest while they heal emotionally and psychologically. When I left this particular place, I remained on edge for years. Any minor inconvenience was (and sometimes still is) enough to send me into a frozen, suicidal panic attack. After moving into a new apartment, I still struggled to feel safe, even though this time, I truly was safe. A few months later, we got an eviction notice which we felt we couldn’t fight, and this enforced my crippling belief: I was not safe enough to settle in my own skin, and I must always be alert for the next struggle. I felt as though another person in my situation could be able to handle this without having a breakdown. And yet it felt like I hadn’t any control over my emotional responses. I continued for a long time after to feel unable to trust any person or place - the moment I did, it could all be taken from me.
2. Displacement and the immigrant myth
The housing crisis is an expression of the greed of land ownership. We currently live on stolen land from Canada’s indigenous people, and those with power hold it hostage from them and the settlers who reside on it. My family and I are such settlers on this land, my paternal grandparents having immigrated to Montreal from Greece after witnessing much war and suffering. My maternal grandfather escaped from Hungary right before the revolution as a 16 year-old boy, speaking neither English nor French.
We often project onto immigrants the dreams of coming to Canada, building something out of nothing, then passing on this legacy to their children and their children’s children. In actuality, it is a dream that comes true only for a rare few. My family had to work hard to assimilate in order to survive and provide for their families. They took jobs as housekeepers and in kitchens where sometimes members of the staff would bully them for being foreign. I watched the anxieties of my father’s mortgage haunt him and hold him hostage to a job he needed in order to provide us with housing and other needs.
3. The song itself
Crybaby is my attempt to connect with the emotional places within myself that need to be expressed about certain aspects of my past. It is about the deep sadness of countless, unoriginal stories of human beings simply seeking safety, while mourning the things left behind to make that journey. Finally, it is about how trust erodes when ‘home’ starts feeling like an intangible concept.
The song originally evolved from lists I would make about the complicated bits and beauties I missed and mourned from my past environments. As a folk artist, I feel like lists are acceptable methods of poetry. No one does it better than Paul Baribeau in his song “Never Get to Know”, where he lists each person he mourns, as he becomes more and more choked with emotion as he sings. My lists eventually became the chorus to Crybaby: “I had to leave the creatures behind so that the boat would be way less heavy”, the creatures being my family members and my pets, and the boat being my lifeboat to safety.
I wanted the song to tell a story about growing up feeling displaced instead of nurtured. I continued to work with lists and fragments that told the evolution of a character confused by their nonbinary gender, who isn’t able to make connections with others, and who despite living through a series of unfortunate events, gets up and moves onwards, into the unknown.
I think that people who haven’t lived through abuse cannot understand how complicated it is. Nothing is black or white, and oftentimes things can look harmless from the outside. You can be fortunate enough to live in a big beautiful, yellow house with excellent water pressure and a lovely garden; but in that same seemingly lovely house people are yelling, crying, trying to hurt themselves and breaking things that don’t belong to them. That’s a beautiful house with another broken, sad home inside it. I miss the garden, I miss the creatures, I miss the fairies that lived in the backyard. But home isn’t just a roof over your head. It’s about the comfort that greets you, the non-judgemental presence and safety it wraps you in, like in a mother’s arms. I refuse to accept that safety should be a privilege or a bonus to housing.
