My whole life, I’ve had these rare and ephemeral moments where I feel connected to some deep pool of feeling. When I was a kid, I would call this “having a moment.” Let’s call them, for lack of a descriptive word, HAMs.
I can recall having one on the beach in Union Pier, MI as the waves lapped the shore and the sun set. My family was packing up our things, and I was just standing there, vibe-ing. I remember sometimes feeling it driving in cars; as a kid in the backseat or in some boy’s Toyota Celica in high school, windows down in the Chicago summer, cruising Lake Shore Drive, listening to Brian McKnight.
I remember getting HAMs in relationship to art. There is a story that when I was 3 or 4, we visited the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C. and I knelt down in front of it and put my hands together in prayer. (We were not a religious family and Jews don’t pray this way, but presumably I had seen it represented on tv or in books). I remember having one sitting in front of the Chagall stained glass windows at the Art Institute.
I was a deep-feeling kid. I have a book of poetry I wrote, starting at age 6. My favorite songs were by Joni Mitchell and Carole King. I was prone to dramatic flair. But still, these rare moments of connection transcended the day-to-day emo. And they were always a surprise; I couldn’t plan for them.
They were almost… the opposite of panic attacks? If you can imagine a panic attack, which can come out of nowhere, and suddenly you are depersonalizing and feel outside your body and everything feels like you’re in this weird tunnel and time is somehow moving too fast and too slow?
HAMs were the light to that dark. Where suddenly everything feels expansive, you feel totally in your body and aware of every sensation on your skin, and everything around you looks absolutely beautiful.
During a HAM, I would find myself smiling unwittingly. I was not a kid prone to doing that. That “chills down your spine” feeling was often part of a HAM, but not always. Sometimes I felt just very present. And I remember feeling unbothered, unconcerned. Again, not a typical feeling for me.
I have always had a yearning to connect. But I have also always been an anxious introvert who dealt with the baggage of being teased and bullied for being who I was. The quality of the connection mattered. And most of the time, I didn’t feel seen.
Except in these “moments”. I felt seen not by a parent, or a teacher, or a sibling, or a friend. I felt connected to the universe, or maybe just to myself. And in those moments, not only was that enough… it was everything.
I’ve invested a lot of time and emotional energy into cultivating a dual persona — one that I presented to the world and the “real me” that no one1 saw.
But these moments… they set the bar. I wanted to feel that euphoria in real connection with other humans, and not just with a sunset, or with a song, or with the contrast of light and dark that is the Chicago coastline at night.
I think that for a couple of decades, though, I put that yearning on the shelf. Maybe that is the normal course of events, at least in the white, cis-het, eldest-child-of-divorce-labeled-as-gifted-to-private-college pipeline.
The pandemic tho. This fucking guy. It has brought all that yearning for connection right back up to the surface.
And it got me thinking about my HAMs.
The brain seeks balance. Like most things, I suppose. If HAMs were my brain’s way of balancing out my day-to-day panic and anxiety as a kid, then what could I do to counter the existential despair and day-to-day shitstorm that we’ve all been wading through and compounding for the last, oh, 6 years?
Maybe that explains why I feel like a pretty different person today, having just turned 40, than I was at 30. I guess maybe that sounds obvious, and probably is a universal sentiment. In my 30s I grew my art practice, became a parent, started treating my anxiety disorder, and so much more.
But the thing that I think ACTUALLY transformed me is my openness, an earnest willingness to be open-hearted and seek out people that can see me. It’s like creating HAMs, but instead of just seeing myself, I’m seen by others and I see them in return.
I’m not sure that I would have gotten there, opened up, been willing to be vulnerable and to take on the responsibility to hold other’s vulnerability, if I wasn’t seeking out the balance from extreme anxiety and depression.
So tell me, do you think you’ve ever had a HAM? Is this a real thing, or just a weird Elana thing?
I’ll be honest, I had planned to make this post about how music has been demonstrated to activate the reward areas of the brain that are also activated by other euphoria-inducing stimuli like sex, drugs, etc. And then I was going to make a Spotify playlist that we could all add our favorite songs to that have given us our own HAMs/ moments of euphoria. But man, I cannot cross Joni Mitchell. So a participatory newsletter that uses Spotify as a platform is a no-go.
So, you know, go buy some music from actual musicians. But below, as a treat, are a few songs that were the soundtrack to my HAMs as a kid. I don’t know if these songs do anything for you; your mileage may vary. Some of them are, lets face it, deeply embarrassing.
These weren’t my favorite songs, or the ones I would put on repeat on my discman, or the ones I sang aloud to with my friends. These were the ones that for a little glimmer of a moment, allowed me to part the clouds of my anxiety, and low self-esteem, and the need for me to keep everyone and everything okay, and let me see myself.
I Think We’re Alone Now - Tiffany (1987)
Yes, the fucking Tiffany version. On cassette tape.Walking on Broken Glass - Annie Lennox (1992)
I remember completely JAMMING to this in my gymnastics class while tumbling into this giant death-pit of foam.That’s What I Think - Cyndi Lauper (1993)
Really everything from Hat Full of Stars just gave me goosebumps. I still remember all the words to almost every song on this album.Stay (I Missed You) - Lisa Loeb (1994)
Yearning + brown-haired girl with glasses = pretty much a slam dunk for me, tbh
With a few exceptions.
I love HAM as a term for this. I wonder if I've experienced similar but at least your description of this feels familiar to me. I recall moments of surprise peace and clarity from my childhood- these moments were seemingly mundane but have stayed with me. The first time I heard Rio by Duran Duran I was on a camping trip and I felt almost a buzzing through my whole body and that absolute peace and clarity.