So I’m playing catch-up the past two weeks since coming home from Warped Tour, and one of the things I need to catch up on is blogging. Over the summer I decided to take my social text updates to my personal facebook where I wrote long posts about the days and weeks and actually months I spent on tour. I left my apartment June 1st for a two week tour with Rich People and Tranquility from Michigan. Spent a few days in the midwest then came back east and ended up in Philly for 3 days then literally just left for two months to go sell merch for Grayscale on Warped Tour. I was gone for a while then I got home and everything just stopped. All the friends I made all summer went back to California and Massachusetts and everywhere else they’re from. Even Grayscale. They moved into a new place right before we left that’s just far enough away that I can’t just pop-in like I used to when they were in Northern Liberties. We were living like brothers all summer. On top of each other all day everyday walking around a festival and a bus, sleeping in bunk beds, getting each others’ food, watching each other’s backs and introducing each other to everyone we met. We moved as a unit. We had stressful moments a few times for sure, but for the most part we honestly laughed harder and more consistently and for a longer duration than I ever have before in my life. It was the best summer of my life without any competition. I felt more at home with those guys than some of my closest friends in the city or even Jersey where I grew up. They got me and I got them. A lot of the ways they are untangled faulty belief systems I’ve had about myself and others my entire life without them even saying words. I’ll keep this short and just say it was truly therapeutic. I needed that. We spent off days with Movements and Four Year, and I ended every night sitting in lawn chairs with Jake and Joe and sometimes Regan and John.
I got close with so many people so fast, but we got home and it all stopped. Luckily we have phones and social media and we all chat a bunch still but the close physical proximity to a lot of really great friends just fell off, and I fell into depression. I’m not quite out of it even as I type this two weeks later. Sure I’ve sprung back into my normal rhythm and finally started a new job two days ago, but honestly it’s hard for me to justify getting out of bed lately. I straight up don’t feel like it. I slept until 4:36PM the first day I got home and shrugged it off like oh that’s fine we didn’t get home until 7AM. After that though the excuses have just gotten thinner and thinner. I’m just not really taking care of myself. I usually stay very active and hit the gym a bunch and work a lot, but it’s been tough kick starting that. I went to gym maybe twice since I got home and did a minimal amount of things then drove home. I don’t have much money for food right now so I’ve been cooking tofu or eggs and pasta twice a day. I’m very hungry pretty often, but my funds are a little tight and I’m working on getting back on my feet. I’m definitely eating enough food so this isn’t a cry for help or anything like that. I have enough to hit the grocery store and stock my basics every week. I’m just trying to describe the overall feeling. I get really good news about huge opportunities for Rich People and all of this great stuff is happening around us and we’re about to record next week and we got beautiful new merch made and yada yada yada everything’s falling in place and I just can’t feel it right now. The positives of this are that our show Friday will be one of our best ever. When I feel raw like this I often build up then let everything in me come out when we play shows.
It’s also fine to feel this way. That’s a big thing I’ve realized in adulthood. It’s fine to be depressed. Depression is just a feeling. As a society we spend so much thought and energy trying to suppress certain feelings that we have deemed unsafe or scary. We call it negative and we can’t accept it. My personal truth is that I get depressed sometimes. I had extremely severe depressions starting at age twelve. There were some episodes before that, but that was the first time I was truly depressed and couldn’t shake it all day everyday for months. It was crippling. I was afraid of day-time and light and I was afraid of the night and the way I let the TV consume me. Back then I didn’t know how to deal so we started going to shows and got a rush from that. Then we started bands and started feeling like I belonged somewhere, but I couldn’t shake all the back and forth anger and depression. Anger became my favorite place to go because it beat depression as far as feeling alive goes. In my teen years I tried joining sports teams and clubs and disqualified myself from all of it. I tried medications and combinations of medications and therapy only to disqualify the help. I started drinking heavily whether I was with people of alone at age 15 and the rest is history that you can read about in my other 8 million blogs. The point is I never accepted my depressions even in my mid-twenties with multiple years clean and in a recovery program for years. I stil believed that feelings should be controlled and that “bad feelings” needed to go away. I’ve had thoughts of wanting to die so long and so consistently at this point that I just laugh them off and keep it moving at this point. It’s fine to have some humor and just accept the passing thoughts. Part of me will always be a “crazy person.” I talk openly and honestly with a big group of friends/fellow recovering addicts who completely get me on a very regular basis and I stay in tune with a solution based lifestyle. I keep my feet moving in the direction that I want to go at all times and allow my head to move at its own pace. I’ve practiced the lifestyle I live long enough that the volume on my pain is much much lower than it was when I was younger. Im not cured and I haven’t outsmarted my negative sense of self, lack of self worth, and general fear of life and living, but that’s not really my objective anymore. Just accepting myself and others and my role in this place and keeping it fucking moving. At this point I’m just ok.