Today we’d like to introduce you to Symphony The System.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’m an autistic DID system with PTSD and BPD. The system-hood will be the reason for the use of “I” and “we” throughout. If you don’t know what DID is, it used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder–but got updated to Dissociative Identity Disorder in the mid-90s. I can’t tell you exactly which version of myself I am right now, but I can tell you a bit about the parts that make up Symphony as a whole. We spent early childhood out of touch with reality. We experienced every kind of abuse you can inflict on a person and repetitive, inescapable trauma between the ages of about 4-12 is part of the criteria for forming a dissociative disorder. In addition to the external abuse I was receiving, I suffered from a lot of untreated chronic pain. One of my earliest medical memories was waking up in the middle of the night vomiting with a migraine. I was rushed to the ER–the only exception to my mother’s silent “no doctors” rule–where I immediately stopped displaying signs of sickness. I can remember vomiting in the bathroom that night, but I can’t remember going to the Emergency Room. I don’t remember being better.
After that, my mother began diagnosing and treating me herself with all-natural homeopathic remedies. There was no Ibuprofen or Tylenol–just essential oils, vitamins, and supplements. My mother is a medical doctor, and my Dad is a full-time Gospel and Jazz musician. My dad spent most of his time overseas or in various cities. A few times early on, he would take me, my sister, and my mom with him. Both of my parents were really big public personalities in our community. They were always on stage, no matter how far from home we were. As kids, we got the opportunity to experience multiple foreign cultures before ever understanding the Americanized world we were living in. I will always be grateful for the traveling opportunities, but as an autistic kid, plane flights were incredibly painful for me. The worst incident was the flight to Tokyo. It was a 16-hour trip and we went three times from 2005-2009. My parents spent most of the trip medicating me with alka-seltzer to make me stop crying. The pressure in my ears, combined with the nausea from floating in the air, ensured that I couldn’t eat or drink anything until we landed.
Nothing seemed to help, and it was nearly impossible to sleep with all the sensory overload. The flights themselves were a terrible experience, but I hardly ever remember them. We were homeschooled from the 1st-6th grade, and any free time we had was spent doing every extracurricular you can think of. We took dance classes, acting lessons, pottery courses, sewing workshops, several classes on etiquette, karate, and any performance opportunity my mom could find. I started seriously writing when I was eight and published a Christmas hymn — “‘Twas On A Night” — in the African American Lectionary. Then I started writing poetry and entered a short poem titled “Fear and Hope” into the International Who’s Who of Poetry Contest and got my poetry published in a book. We spent so much time creating, but believe it or not, young me had TERRIBLE stage fright. Every time I was required to appear publicly, I’d cry before and after I took the stage. I’d spend the hours afterward vomiting with migraines. But around the age of ten, we discovered a new outlet–playwriting. Our system host–Esme–was born around this time and spent all her time reading Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. The plays we wrote reflected that and as we grew stronger, so did the desire to act. I started to feel myself become a different person with the microphone in my hand or the spotlight on my face. I stopped crying before a performance. I stopped externally reacting to things. I noticed that I could hide–by no conscious decision of my own–my true feelings and ideas so well that even I didn’t truly know them. Even now, I’m fielding multiple streams of thought into one cohesive message without truly knowing who I am or what part of me they’re coming from.
We didn’t always know we could sing, but being the kid of a Gospel singer meant that I was expected to. We would accompany ourselves at church or school, trying out covers of popular songs in the privacy of our homes. Soon, we were performing at churches all over the country. Although we didn’t get diagnosed with DID until well after I was 18, the effects of being multiple people were pretty obvious early on. I just didn’t have the terminology I needed to understand my selves. In 2017, we created a project called Love Notes but only released part of it–called it Love Notes Volume I. I heard my voice doing things I’d never heard it do before. It sounded so unfamiliar and was so jarring that I took every “different” sounding song and hid them. What used to be a 14-track album ended up being a 5-track EP. I got kicked out in 2019 for smoking weed, moved with my aunt and uncle and tried going to college. I found myself majoring in Accounting and Economics with no clear logic behind why. School quickly became overwhelming and we dropped out in October. The diagnosis happened a few months later. After that, the housing arrangement stopped working and we ended up back home. We came back to reality for the first time since childhood and began to recognize the existence of alternate identities.
There were so many emotions: anger, denial, defeat, depression, relief, understanding, and hope. I learned more about my past and my lack of awareness in those few months than I’d had in my entire life. And I didn’t know what to do. I felt lost and alone. Covid hit in March of 2020 and we enrolled in college a second time, this time majoring in Psychology. The music was always the goal, but it was lost to us. Until one day, I got a call from a friend of mine, Nathan Jordan. He told me he’d started making beats and wanted to know if I was still interested in making music. I told him I was, but hadn’t released anything since Love Notes. He sent me three tracks that inspired a creation I’d never experienced before. The songs wrote themselves–it was like the lyrics were being dictated to me. The first song we wrote was called “Pieces”. We released our second EP: Otherworld, on January 1st, 2021, and dropped out of college again a week later. Ever since then, we’ve been on a journey to de-stigmatize our mental illness through our art, sense of style, and song. You can check out SPACESHIP THE MUSIC VIDEO and SYMPHONY THE DOCUMENTARY on our youtube channel: Symphony The System.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t been easy. After I dropped out of college the second time, my health began seriously declining. I lost my health insurance once I stopped being a student, and my parents hadn’t had me on their insurance plan since kicking me out. In the days after the release of Otherworld, I couldn’t eat or sleep. I vomited near constantly until it was speckled with blood. I ended up in the ER with a kidney infection. I left my hometown after that and moved in with my best friend here in Atlanta. It was difficult learning to live life as a multiple. At first, it was hard to keep jobs and make friends, but the art community here welcomed us in with open arms. We learned to be more open and carefree and began to heal the trauma wounds we were carrying around. Our spiritual protector–Zara–began healing the religious trauma through tarot and divination. It started out as a tool for healing but quickly became a side hustle.
For about six months, we escaped the claws of Capitalism and financially supported ourselves by giving readings to people on the street in Little Five Points. But at the end of 2021, my boyfriend and I both started working traditional jobs and moved in with a roommate on the outskirts of Atlanta. L5P was nearly an hour away from our house, and the living situation suddenly took a turn for the worst. Our roommate took financial advantage of us, even stealing my car for a few hours at one point and verbally berating both of us before my boyfriend and I decided to take a leap of faith. We chose to move into our car for two months and use the time to save for an apartment. We promised ourselves it would be no longer than two months and we’d stay optimistic. As a system, we’d been open on social media about the situations we were in and dozens of people donated to our Gofundme campaign, with thousands more reposting our story. On April 22nd, 2022, we signed the lease and moved into our own apartment. We’ve been performing songs from Otherworld all over ATL and writing songs about our experiences along the way. New music is coming soon! Just stay tuned.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I think what sets my work apart from others is that it’s not all coming from one person. If you can think in terms of the multiverse theory, imagine that having DID is living with every possible version of yourself. The version of you that chose to go college and the version that chose to drop out–coexisting in one body. We write from the perspective of a multitude. The same goes for musical inspiration. Our inspirations range across genres with legends like Beyonce, Diana Ross, India Arie, Luther Vandross, Jazmine Sullivan, Michael Jackson, the Weeknd, Smino, Earth, Wind & Fire, Tina Turner, Janelle Monae, Rico Nasty, Solangé, GHOSTEMANE, Poppy, and so many more. We see ourselves in everyone and at the same time, strive to be expressly unique. I’m proudest of our authenticity and how it thrives regardless of our environment.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I’m still looking for a mentor actually! And a manager at that. We need someone who understands our disorders and disabilities intimately. For networking purposes, though, I’d advise going to as many artsy events as you can find and just talking to people. Everybody knows someone. The 6 degrees of separation theory says that you can connect every person to every other using only six connections! You’ll meet the right people.
Pricing:
- Features: $80 per verse, $50 per chorus
- Tarot Readings start at $10
Contact Info:
- Website: symphonythesystem.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/symphonythesystem
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwJTh5mDH4JAi95P1-pBqZQ
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6eU3rXp8ETv8gQShyLAqQG?si=Upd1VqgUQw6fwlIthMWy-w
Image Credits
@sagegeographix @malbyrd
