I've thought about this, about posting this, thousands of times. Probably quite literally - two or three times a day, even now, and so over the last say, 5 years esp., = roughly 5,000x.
And every single time I have thought about it, I've also wondered if I would have the whateverwithal to do it, but as I type this, I think I'm finally there...
So the "MH" in the title of this post is Mental Health, and it's telling because that's even how I labeled the doc on my computer, MH Post, almost like it was code not only for things I don't wanna talk about, but for things I don't even wanna see in myself. Which I guess, brings me to why I am talking about it & about my own experience with it over the last decade esp...
why doing:
First, it's not about me per se, and I'm actually not putting it out there for the hug-mojis (truly appreciated as those are). I'm actually doing really fine now these last few years, for a lot of reasons. Truly.
But I know that there are a lot of people out there who are struggling, who continue to, struggles similar to these, to mine. I can see it (or think that I can) in some of the people I meet or already know, in family or in friends, in other people in music etc.. But I also know that I miss the signs too, or miss spotting the extent of it all, as w/ one of my brothers who we lost during the pandemic due in part to exactly these same sort of struggles. At the same time, and I can't tell for sure, I have a feeling that maybe people that meet or know me have no idea what's going behind the visor, that I've had similar problems (I really, if I'm honest, have no idea at all how I come across - it could be that my deals are completely self-evident - maybe none of us do..?).
So if my sharing some of this can help anyone at all, and possibly go in some small measure towards removing even just a little/more of the stigma around all this, then this feels like my one chance and avenue to put some good, something positive, out there in the world.
And sure, I’ve done benefit shows etc. for various causes, which is doing good in the world. And I know one could say that even just making & releasing music is doing good - and I agree in general on the vital value of art. But I also know that there's some vestigial part of me, sad as it sounds, that still likes when people say&write nice things about the music or clap at shows - baby happy! And I want to be able to do something good that doesn't involve, in short, charles-applause as payment.
why now:
And so only doing it now, not really as part of an album rollout, but partly because due to that album rollout, this is the probably-brief period in which I might have the most eyes on it, where it might do that most good (and partly because I'm only now working up the courage to do so). So using the opportunity with whatever attention is shone this way in the brief period of prep for the album release, to be able to say, 'this has happened to me too. You're not the only one, even as I know it can feel like that'.
so in my case...
root causes:
In my case, the stresses that led here were compound, a combination of poor choices playing out (both in career-life in general (music, music-as-career, band stuff) and this album-recording specifically), in combination w/ personality, personal history, my own over-packed set of internal Tourister baggage etc..
I know the myeloma drugs, esp. the steroids I was on for the first year or two of treatment, def. did not help (in hindsight, I also think I may have been more freaked, denially so, about that whole thing, in a way that I didn't actually feel day-to-day at the time. I was pretty upbeat about it all then - and now - it just didn't really affect me. In fact it made me almost happy to go into treatment every Friday because it meant I had an out on having to work on the record&music! You know your career/life choices are not going well, or that you've fallen into doing it all wrong, when the day spent doing cancer stuff is the one you look fwd to each week - ha.
After years of the stress of the album-making going badly, and working that around the at-home parenting (i.e. working too late into the night), things reached something of a give-point. It's oddly hard for me to remember exactly when, I think because all of this progresses so incrementally or at least did in my case. But I know the 2017-2018 school year was key - that's the year our youngest-of-three started pre-k, which meant that for the first time since 2008, I had the house to myself and a fairly consistent & solid 5-hour day, 5 days a week to work (just a quick aside about the album (so about me), the bulk of the final music you'll hear on it is from school years, fall 2017 to spring 2019). But what I hadn't counted on in having the house to myself, was a profound depression rolling in like a clumsy scene change in a school play. Or maybe it was having home to myself, and knowing the babies were quickly becoming not-babies and were already gone into the schooling-industrial complex, to never fully come back, that allowed a pot that had been simmering to boil over.
So to the point above, in my case, for years, how I spent my allotted time & efforts was in making music, one ridiculous record actually, and that served both as an escape from, and a cause of, a veritable tasting menu of mental/emotional health issues (depression, self-loathing, self-harm, ending-it-ideation, etc.).
the particulars:
It started fairly small and harder for me to spot at the time. For a couple years, I went nowhere that wasn't the four-block loop running from our house to our children's grade school and back again..pretty literally, 360-some days/year.
Later it became returning home to hours on the couch after the school drop-offs, often crying out the morning. Tellingly, I fell into the habit of 'rewarding' myself with one episode of the Twilight Zone (orig. series, I'm not an animal) before setting up mic's to record or whatever. I'd google "Twilight Zone Episodes" to check the original air-date of each and find one that corresponded with that day's date (there were five TZ seasons, so there's usually one that lines up, or close enough, esp. during the school-year since tv shows generally didn't air in the summers back then). And I'd reflect on all the say, October 4ths that had happened since, most of which I was alive for, what I'd done with them etc. (Oct. 4th, 1963 being the classic "Steel" episode, by-the-by).
After watching, I also took to reading up on that day's episode (Wikipedia or IMDB) and to find that almost all of the actors, many of whom for which that ep. of Twilight Zone was career apogee, were dead was of course not surprising. But somehow learning that many/most of them died decades after that zenith, many/most right near Hollywood, only made things worse as I pictured them waiting by the phone for another 40 years, for the call from their agent that another/better offer had come in. Keeping at it, like a Bissell on a wrens record - ha. I'm sure it wasn't like that, that they each had full rich lives (god, I hope) but that's how it played to me due to - and that sad routine as well as anything shows - where my thinking was at then.
At the worst of it, I was engaging in what I guess I can only bring myself to half-name as 'ending-it ideation’, and I enjoyed the sweets of self-harm (when life comes to shove I’m apparently given to self-punching, like the office scene from Fight Club except I don’t leave with a full severance package and a computer).
the whole thing in one bonkers paragraph:
At some point, sort of at the tail-end of the worst of it (so maybe around 2019 when work on the album was finally finishing..?), someone asked what the album was about. I just came across my answer the other day, looking for something else, and it encapsulates my complete panicked mania at the time, why it was all so hard and took so long, the toll it took mental health-wise, financially etc.:
It's also not a bad new band-bio...
"..if your goal (dear listener) was to ridiculously try to make the absolute best thing you could do, in your whole life, a recording in this case, and better than everyone else making them (that you've been positioned to unwittingly compete with for attention/money/etc.), and you didn’t start until your late-40s and it took into your mid-50s to finish…like a novel…and pursued against most current stylistic standards…and did it at-home, on pro-sumer gear, completely by yourself but simulating the interaction of a whole band that wasn't there, playing a song that never happened, in a magical room that doesn't exist, (except in the speakers), piece by dumb piece...and having to undo most of every single week's progress because it wasn’t actually working musically...filling hundreds-to-thousands of gigabytes of hard-drive space with failed versions en route, because you knew going in (and confirm over & over along the way) that you’re not talented - not really - and instead rely on plain dumb mule work...and that that comic amount of labor is making you miss your children growing up right in front of you, even as you're the at-home parent, but an exhausted & therefore lousy one much of the time due all of this, because you’re busy trying to make crappy rhymes in your head or re-do the chord progression to the songs ABOUT missing those children growing up, while they’re actually climbing the playground right in front of you as two-years-olds (now ten-) or whatever...the all-or-nothing just as you’ve always done…and taking the ext. hard drive & headphones on every single family vacation for 10 years to “get precious work done”...all while making no money on any of this, year in&out, and while still incurring pretty real med-expenses as your spouse foots the bill for your hobby-goal (and everything else)...but with that classic music industry carrot of an eventual payday that always comes "right after THIS round of work…no, really"…while packing on a good 25-30 lbs. due all that sitting at the recording desk...all of which leads you down a mental health decline that humiliatingly culminates in the last couple years w/ self-harm, and for the first time, actual ending-it ideation on the couch...
…would you do it? Would you keep at it to the end?
Well...would ya, punk?
haa…that’s what the record’s about."
(that's supposed to be a Dirty Harry quote/joke at the end).
but i'm fine now..
I should restate that I'm doing fine now, great even, increasingly over the last four years or so.
Part of that is due to work stuff (i.e. the record done and that no longer governing my life in the same way) and part is getting out of what might be somewhat unkindly but not inaccurately called a bad relationship. And part is no doubt the lack of steroids. Seriously, young people...the drugs.
But part is that much of the way back for me coincided with the start of lockdown in the beginning of the pandemic. So even as so many people had the hardest time of their lives, between isolation and losing loved ones, and while we had both of those too, my world during those first three months was completely reset into a recurring Groundhog's Day of routine and repetition, very quickly an increasingly happy one, of getting the children on&off Zoom classrooms etc., all going to bed at the same time (i.e. me not staying up late for precious 'work'), that completely recalibrated everything for me, or at least started that process.
outro:
So there it is. Now you know. When we meet, you'll know, and it may be in the back of your mind. If so I hope it's because life is, or can be, exceedingly difficult and you've felt that too (just hopefully in not-too-terrible ways) and you recognize in me, another just like you and that we're all in this together.
I think I'll hand off the closing words to John Richards, the KEXP person who many of you prob. know, and his ever-message which I think about often, 'you are not alone'.
And you aren't.