There’s a creeping dread that presents itself on occasion and asks an all important question: why are you even doing this?
The ‘you’ of this case is me, although it could apply to yourself in anything you do as well. The ‘you’ isn’t discerning. If anything, it’s all-encompassing. I just released the sixth and final book in my Trystero series, Cracked Palace. It’s a strange feeling to cap off a longer series like that. Now, I know there are authors who have series who stretch on into the vast expanse of space and can go pretty long. That’s fine, but for me? I don’t like reading longer series. So writing a longer series was a challenge and not something I ever envisioned myself doing. But, it was a necessity in this age of being an author and attempting to play to the invisible hand of the market.
The market likes series. The longer the better.
Book one (which if you haven’t read you should!) served as setting the stage, which meant introducing the place, the characters and the conflicts. Book two was when I took all of those things and introduced a much larger conflict, which played out over the next five books until the finish, which I just published. This series has done well for me.
But that question I asked above, or was at least asked of me, remains.
(CW: suicide, depression, childhood trauma, the works)
The other night I was endlessly participating in the decline of modern civilization by scrolling through my phone for no discernable reason while I could’ve been doing virtually anything else to the betterment of myself, and I stumbled upon a video on YouTube that was a couple reacting to the Gun N’ Roses song Coma. The video is of a genre of video that’s been popular in some circles over the previous five years where non-white people listen to decidedly white people music and film their live reactions to it. White people come into the comments and excitedly suggest songs and this was one of the suggestions for this couple. I’m just as susceptible to suggestion as the rest of you, so I watched this video, and it was interesting to see people hear a song that ended up being meaningful to me when I was a kid experience something as theatrically corny and beautiful as this song.
You see, Coma is the song that I commemorate as triggering my first big anxiety attack when I was younger. I’m sure I had others before this, but this was the big one. The first time I had to shut down for a few days and pull myself back together because I had simply fallen to pieces. Listening to music before I sleep has been something I’ve done for as long as I can remember, and I was, I believe, 15 when this happened. I’d tossed Use Your Illusion I into my CD player before I went to sleep, but had a hard time sleeping that night.
That means I was still awake when the last song of the album, Coma, was playing. It’s a song I’d heard so many times before, but perhaps never digested in the same way I did that night. It was the same song that Gilby Clarke was caught practicing and jamming out to by Axl Rose before hiring him, and prompted Axl’s quick decision to bring him on board after the departure of childhood friend Izzy Stradlin. I mean, the guy liked Coma, a song that wasn’t a normal part of their playlist. Axl had an overdose in the mid-80s on prescription painkillers that prompted writing the lyrics to this song, which came together much later when he heard Slash playing the main riff one day at a practice and helped solidify the idea. I mean, it’s a 10-minute long song with prolonged breaks for emergency room sound effects and people saying vaguely medical-sounding things, along with a thumping heartbeat. It was originally a dire, sad song, until Axl decided he had a personal responsibility to bring good into the world, adding the song’s coda in later, which was at least mildly optimistic considering the song was an opus about the thoughts that went through his head before he tried to commit suicide.
Seriously, if you listen to nothing else, from about 7:54 on is just… something.
An' all this crass communication that has left you in the cold
Isn't much for consolation when you feel so weak and old
But if home is where the heart is, then there's stories to be told
No, you don't need a doctor, no one else can heal your soul
For some reason, the lyrics codified themselves into my psyche that night. For the life of me, I can’t remember what happened to force me into such a pliable position, but around that period, there was so much. My mother, with whom I still have an incredibly complicated relationship with and who still seems to block out the entirety of my sister and I’s childhoods and the trauma inflicted upon us, had embarked on an affair with her college professor, served my dad with divorce papers, leaving my younger sister and I to be the adults in the situation that continually eroded. It was difficult not to find someone like Axl Rose and see a kindred spirit. Born into an equally downwardly mobile white family, faced unseen horrors at home and the public facade was one of religious masking, he was an intelligent, frustrated kid with no future who had to leave home and work incredibly hard to get anywhere.
If your experience with Guns N’ Roses is of the “their only good album is AFD” kind, that’s fine. If you’re one of those people who’s view of Axl Rose was formed because Metallica didn’t like him, or because he lashed out in public a bunch of times, or even because he penned an incredibly racist song and offered a milquetoast apology for it at the time, I get it. Trust me, I do. For all intents and purposes, the Axl Rose of today seems like a much more balanced and at peace individual, with a better set of values and… honestly, it doesn’t matter, does it? This isn’t a defense of Axl Rose. It’s why I, as a kid, saw this artist as a kindred spirit of sorts.
A lot of the less loved songs on the UYI albums are really different. They have an opulence that didn’t align with where rock music was headed, or where GNR had helped rock music to venture into, and came to life by Axl’s love of the band Queen and Elton John. Songs like Breakdown, Locomotive, Yesterdays, Estranged, Civil War and Coma were different. Grander in scope, less contained within genre restrictions, and aspired to be something much more than banger anthems like Paradise City. These songs took risks, risks that absolutely didn’t pay off at the time and only played into the narratives of Axl being full of himself and wouldn’t listen to anyone, but for those that did listen were special.
There were these moments in a lot of these songs where the songs devolved into raw, sonic chaos and in those moments, Axl would always find a way to have his vocals cut straight through the chaos, and in those moments, is when he’d offer out his hand and say he understood. That’s the thing about art of any kind. There’s this profound impact it can have on the person consuming it (I’m loathe to use the term, but it’s the one that works, as corrupted as it is) and makes them feel something.
As a kid, that big panic attack happened listening to a song where someone whose music I had a connection with talk about a dark period in his life, those feelings of desperation that were all-too-familiar and it got to me. My sister and I opted to stay with my father, who was absent most of our childhoods, opting to ignore the problems we were facing because he couldn’t get over his own. He worked second shift, so he was asleep or at work during the tough hours, then got time home alone by himself late at night where he drank himself into an oblivion. There wasn’t a “good” choice for us, and we had to be vessels for his performative rehabilitation from drinking. Neither one of them were particularly good, and while at the time it felt like a very logical choice to both of us to pick my dad, it’s easier with distance and having a family of my own to see the choices he made when he was younger and the stress it put on my mother. None of that excuses any of her actions, I just wish he had been present and aware of everything that was happening, instead of simmering in his own depressions of not living up to his family’s expectations and how he let his emotionally unstable wife drive a wedge between his family and himself.
My friends at the time couldn’t understand what I was going through, either. When these things happen while kids are at that transition point from being kids to having to assume the role of adults, there are so many odd factors at play. My increasing problems with anxiety and depression led to occasionally lashing out and there weren’t really any friends that were at a point where having normal, supportive conversations happened. One of my best friends left a note in my locker telling me I needed to shut up, my life wasn’t too bad because I was going to have four parents who loved me and the new stepfather was rich and would buy me whatever I wanted. (Aside - Many years later, out of the blue, he apologized for it, which was cool. We were just dumb kids.) That stepfather was not rich, and is perhaps the only person I’ll ever go out of my way to say “rot in piss” about. To make matters worse, I had a few good friends that were girls and I was at that awful point of misunderstanding how vital having good, open relationships with other human beings was beyond “maybe if I’m a good enough friend, she’ll be my girlfriend.” I ruined some good relationships with that line of thinking when I was around this age.
There was no future at this point. Any of the things I was good at or cared about weren’t the kinds of things schools pushed. This was before the surge of “STEM rules all” pushes, and perhaps still at the stage where the viable career paths were doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Instead, I was the kid who’s interests were art, music, books and movies, but my family didn’t have money or influence, so those didn’t seem like viable solutions. Still being a kid, my life had broken down to choosing between a mentally and physically abusive parent who wasn’t stable and their new spouse, or an alcoholic absentee parent who was suddenly much more present because things were getting real.
No friends, no future, no family, and no meaning.
The song flat lines, those four drum beats hit, and that was it for me.
I’m pretty sure I had flipped my mattress and tor a bunch of stuff off of my walls, maybe smashed up a few other things and my dad found me like that, but I didn’t talk. I didn’t talk, or eat, or really interact at all with anyone for something like four days after this. All I did was sit in my room and stare at the walls. I was just a broken kid who saw no future, a crummy past and an unbearable present, and knew there was so little in my power to fix any of it. Through this period and onward, I saw a myriad of counselors and was too strong-willed to take any sort of medication, something in the folly of my youth I saw as being strong instead of being kind to myself. None of this stuff fixes itself, nor does it ever go away. Counseling is learning to have the language and understanding of your conditions, as well as how to live with them and try to continue with your life.
Through all of this, there were beacons, though. There were people who made things I loved and meant so much to me. They could break through the muck and mire of that loneliness and depression and show me that not only did other people feel that way, but they could push through that and make stuff. They could make stuff that made people feel something. Even if at the bare minimum that stuff was there to make someone feel like they were seen and that they weren’t alone in their feelings of desperation.
This month I’m turning 40, I’m married, I have two kids, live in the nicest house I’ve ever lived in throughout my entire life, have two decent cars that are paid off (ugh, for now, time waits for no one), have released a plethora of books that have been well-received, and there are plenty of people in my life that are fantastic and supportive. The material things are fleeting, and while they’re nice to have and it’s nice to not be living the same way that I did growing up, they ultimately aren’t what matter.
The reason I do what I do is that creating things is important to me. It’s because when I was a kid and I thought there was nothing good on the horizon and nobody there for me, there was always art. In that art, there were people that were like me who created them, and they were able to reach me and tell me that yeah, it’s tough, but they understood. I could say that was all that I needed, but it would sound flippant and trite. It was always more than that.
Nobody creates in a vacuum and nobody creates without the weight of their own history, beliefs, and experiences urging them into motion. I’m not done creating by a long shot, and what I know is that I won’t stop until I’ve made that perfect something that I know 15-year-old me on the constant verge of a breakdown would love and help make that next day tolerable. Because the truth is, there are many people out there who feel that same way, and who life is that much more difficult for. Right now, in an age of rampant, destructive capitalism, omnipresent distracting technology, endless white supremacy, bigotry, fascism and colonialism, and the surging bullshit of “AI” tech that looks to “disrupt” reality, knowing there are other people out there who get it can sometimes be what gets you through.
There’s no way I’ll change the world, but making it more tolerable for a handful of people feels like a great goal. Whatever I decide to create next, know it’s not happening within a vacuum and also know it may exist outside of the dreaded “market.” Just know it’s done with intent.
With love, that kid that didn’t have it together.
Love yourselves and each other. Keep making cool shit.
—
Bonus Material!
Here’s some of the stuff that really got me at the time. As I matured, my tastes did as well, although most of these things I still very much enjoy.
Guns N’ Roses - UYI II and some of UYI I
NIN - Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
The Church - Starfish
Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies, Dirt, Unplugged
Nirvana - In Utero, Nevermind
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation, Empire and Robots series
Timothy Zahn - the original Thrawn trilogy (still blows my mind I got to be involved in a thing with him last year)
JRR Tolkien - Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
Earthbound (Mother 2)