Catch Up

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.

Assigned Value

I think that i often assign value to things I’m doing or that i want to do because i feel a need to justify myself. I think i promote those things via my public outlets at least partially to seek outside validation for those things that i am and that i want. Sometimes i think i even get so caught up in those things and in adding more depth and variety to keep my case interesting enough to myself or others that i fabricate new meaning and new wants.

I don’t need to build a case to prove my wants and beliefs to be sufficient enough. I don’t need to prove myself innocent, pure, interesting, or desirable enough in the court of public or personal opinion to be deserving of my original wants in the first place, but I am who I am sometimes.

Im an unchained melody and i enjoy the things i enjoy and want more of those things for myself. I do not care what those things do for you just as long as they’re not taking anything away from you to my awareness.

There is no set of circumstances that can make me happy unless it is the happiness itself that I’m seeking and allowing the circumstances that i have deemed desirable to just occur.

I don’t even have to want happiness. I’ve spent enough time wanting things that weren’t happiness to know that I wanted to try it out. I’ve tried wanting knowledge and depth and to an extent only learned more ways to paint others as separate from myself. I’ve wanted material success and got so much so fast at the cost of my time, sanity, and health. I worked so hard that the only function of that large number in my bank account every two weeks was to be spent filling an endless void with material possessions and loud experiences to drown the voice in my head that never stopped analyzing and bringing me down. I’ve wanted other things too in different proportions and have suffered proportionately to the size of those other wants. I don’t even mind suffering most of the time because it’s just such a standard state of being.

I started having an existenstial crisis the first time i watched fight club on hbo in 1999. I think i thought i was Tyler Durden for a decade after that. I don’t know if I’ve spent much of my life outside of an existential contemplation mode but i can say that the past few years have had more sane time than not, more intensely and for more prolonged periods of time. I do my best to just act like a “bro” and keep things simple and humorous anymore. I enjoy uplifting people and I’m fully aware that i like doing it for myself. I don’t do it for anyone else. I give of myself and accept myself getting filled up more and more. Shits deep but it’s also not that deep. People are people no more no less and I’m just a people.

HALT

I say I don’t care a lot and I’m not sure what I mean by it anymore. I know that I care deeply about many things, but in the same breath i feel very detached from people and my emotions most of the time. Maybe just my emotions. It’s like i have the emotions and I can identify them but I’m somehow cushioned away. I listen to a friend talking about their really heavy deep stuff and i can feel myself identifying and empathizing and being in it with them for a moment, but the whole time it feels like the strong emotions I’m having are five feet away and I’m indifferent to them. I don’t always feel this way but it is pretty common for me. I recognize that i probably worked too many shifts this week and didn’t eat enough or sleep enough, so I’m sure that these are contributing factors. Feelings are just funny and even though what I’m describing kind of seems like a lack-of emotion as I’m writing it down, I’m aware that it is not. It’s a feeling of exhaustion. I’m mentally physically and spiritually drained today and pretty much all week but at the end of the day I’m off tomorrow and I plan to rest. Objectively I feel great about my life and overall I’m in a great place and really enjoying most aspects of it. When I got clean the people who helped me used to say HALT. They suggested pausing for a moment when i feel any type of way and assessing whether i was too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. Typically if I’m feeling off my square it’s one of those so that makes these things easier to identify. I’m not always quick to get back into a solution mentality but I’m quicker than I once was and that’s tight. Time to sleep

Goodnight,

Rob

Non-Anti

When I can take a step back from my emotional reaction to things I can take an objective perspective of things, and the objective for me is sanity and healing. I saw someone posting anti suicide stuff this morning and I’m not anti anti-suicide by any means, I just choose to try and not be anti anything. So maybe you’re thinking I support suicide, but no I don’t. I had a buddy in elementary and middle school. We had the same flip up hair and were into the same stuff. I thought we would be friends forever. In middle school we each gained new preferences and we naturally just shifted apart. A year or two into high school he killed himself. Since then a large number of my friends and acquaintances have taken the same approach whether it be intentional or via drugs. I would love to bury my head in the sand sometimes and in a way I have to some degree. I’m very numb about the whole thing and choose to put my emotions selectively through music and other creative outlets. I would be a full blown mess if I attached myself to everything that I’ve seen in my life pre-addiction, active addiction, and in recovery. People live long lives and never experience half of this shit. And I’m not worse off for it either and I’m definitely by no means pitiful about it. I have a perspective of life and mortality that yields an end result of a lot of peace and acceptance. It didn’t always feel like peace and acceptance but it definitely grew into those things.

I’m not anti-suicide, I’m just pro-living my life. I don’t know any serial-grievers who are of any great service to anyone. I’ve never read a pity post or a “where was everybody when they showed signs” post written by someone who wasn’t even close to someone who committed suicide, and though to myself damn this post is going to spark a lot of change and growth in the community. I get it. Religious interpretations woven deeply into the fabric of our nation’s mentality mixed in with the big pharma and therapeutic community’s billion dollar propaganda campaign it’s harder and harder every year for someone who’s truly lost to find a simple real solution.

I get it. I watched an episode of 90210 when I was a little kid and I asked my dad what heroin is. I had no social context for anything just that this dude said heroin on a TV show and was the coolest character on the show. My dad said heroin is a drug and once you do it you either die or go to jail. After that the only things I ever heard about it were exactly the same and reinforced this idea. I believed that once you do heroin you are never ever ever ever allowed back. By the time my depressed and confused adolescent self decided heroin was just the next logical step I was so beat up I just didn’t care if that was going to be the results. I lived in a self made prison that I was too misinformed and ignorant to get out of. Luckily I met some people that literally handed me a simple solution and proof that it works and then said oh yeah and here’s a blue print for a successful life since your brain sucks at it. Most people don’t have access to this but we’re sooooo fucked that the universe opened up a worm hole and passed us this program. I’m glad it’s not a cult and has no leaders or religious vibes or really much weird shit or I would have freaked out.

I went off on a tangent but bottom line I’m not anti suicide, I’m not anti addiction or anti-drug use, and I’m not really anti anything else because there’s no solution in anti. It’s like saying that our prison system and therapeutic community and big pharma is making our country a more peaceful loving mindful growing evolving empathetic unified place with less death drug use rape and crime. We got kids shooting kids in schools. But we’ll be screaming about how anti we are and how great the stats are on our anti efforts until the bitter ends. Hard to swallow some days but I’m coming into more peace the more I accept the world and it’s ways as just the contrast that I was meant to build my preferences from. I prefer to be happy and build things up and recognize and appreciate and amplify that shit.