Music and Mental Health

I haven’t really told many people about my struggles with anxiety and depression and all that jazz because, quite frankly I was embarrassed by it. The people I have told a lot of the time say, “no way, you dont seem like you do.” or “But you always seemed so comfortable on stage and you’re so outgoing and happy etc”.

Earlier today I saw a post from a friend of mine who shall remain nameless for their sake. But the post was about how they love performing and playing music but their anxiety makes it very difficult to do so. After reading that I thought to myself “hey, me too” then we chatted about it for a while and now feel compelled to write this. So here goes.

I was the most outgoing obnoxious teenager I knew, always trying to be the centre of attention and making loud noises wherever I went. I was happy, carefree, constantly up to no good and always trying to go on crazy adventures. From about the age of 12 I wanted to be a rockstar or at the very least a successful musician. Before hand I wanted to be a fighter pilot in the Royal Airforce and, similarly to the character with similar aspirations in the film “Little Miss Sunshine”, I was told at the age of 12 that I had red/green colourblindness. Luckily I found that out at the age of 12 and not 18 and although I was pretty crushed by the news I was quickly moving onto the next thing which was music. Music had always been a part of my life, and although for 5 or 10 minutes here or there I considered doing other things, it was always there in the back of my mind. I watched School of Rock and that was it. I was gonna be a rockstar. I was huge into Blink 182 and decided I wanted to play bass like Mark Hoppus. My first instrument was a beautiful bass guitar that I got from my parents as a confirmation gift. I didn’t care about being confirmed into the church one little bit, regardless as to whether the Archbishop of Canterbury oversaw my confirmation or not, but I did it, so I could get a bass. My friend Benoit did it too for the same reason, and his parents got him an ELECTRIC GUITAR! Back then electric guitars, in my mind, were these rare and unattainable things that only rock stars owned. It was pretty cool, myself, Benoit and our friend Jacob who had a drum kit would jam in his garage and although none of us could really play our instruments we had a wicked time! I thought I had a picture of us jamming one time circa the time I used to wear my sisters eyeliner but alas, I cant find it!

I first went busking on the streets of Canterbury in the days leading up to Christmas in 2005 or 2006, I don’t remember which. The thing is, even though I was playing bass I was trying to write songs on the bass and play songs that I could sing along with on the bass. I also couldn’t busk with my bass so I learnt a few chords on my mum’s classical guitar and went busking christmas carols with my sister. We made a whole £15 with which we bought our dad a copy of “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zeppelin. An old man with significantly fewer teeth than most people also mistook me for a 17 year old girl and tried to kiss me, but thats a different story for a different time.

From then on, I’ve been playing music like it’s what I was born to do. Not because I thought it would mean old men with missing teeth would kiss me but because I genuinely couldn’t think of anything I loved doing more. I wanted to be a rock star, I wanted to play and sing and I loved the feeling of making a difference in peoples lives just from playing a guitar and singing songs. It was also an easy and fun way to make money as a teenager who didn’t have a job/had little interest in having one. I was living with my parents and had no expenses other than my £12 monthly phone bill. I was also pretty stupid with the money I made busking, often not saving it, in fact never saving it, but spending it on donner kebabs, rolling tobacco and pints from the one pub that served us when we were underage. It was brilliant, and it also felt pretty rock and roll to be not getting a job and choosing to play music on the street. One thing led to another and music became more and more a part of my life. I played in bands, either playing bass, singing and eventually playing guitar too. I played in a band called Cut The Ropes which then changed to Last Rites and a bunch of other silly names. The first time I played on a stage was with that band. We played some songs at The Battle of the Bands at my school in 2008 and didn’t come anywhere close to winning but we had fun. I felt like a rockstar and being on stage, jumping around, head banging and being the centre of attention came so naturally to me.

World Without Hero/Cut The Ropes/Last Rites or whatever we called ourselves.

Sadly after a while this particular band disbanded due to “musical differences”. However, I moved onto a new band called The Painkillers in 2009. This guy I went to a christian youth group with (I wont go into how I got involved with the music there…) asked me if I was interested in singing in a band he was in. I said absolutely and so one Thursday after school I walked across town to the school he went to. It was about a 3 mile walk and took me about an hour in the drizzling rain but it was cool because I had some rolling tobacco and at the grand age of 15 or so I was rolling smokes and listening to Ryan Adams the whole way. Anyway, the quickest way to the school where we practiced took me through a long straight footpath that was about half a mile long through a cabbage field. I saw a figure standing in the distance by the school and he just stood there waiting for me, It was quite intimidating. When I was within about 5 metres of him a young Bob Dylan looking kid stubbed out his smoke on the ground and said “You’re late” then turned round and walked towards the sound of a drum kit and bass guitar coming from one of the music buildings. This guy turned out to be one of my best friends in the whole world, my music partner for many years and someone I consider the closest thing I have to a brother. We played songs that mostly he and Manny D wrote in The Painkillers, but we threw in a few of mine too. One of the most rock n roll moments of my life was getting disqualified from a Battle of the Bands at our drummers school. It was an afternoon Battle of the Bands, with parents, kids and grandparents in the audience, so yeah, not rock n roll at all.

Lynden, our bassist, during the last song played in his boxer shorts while wearing a chicken mask. We got disqualified and asked to leave the premises. It was so punk rock, so we sat in the field behind the school drinking cider and talking about “fuck the man” kinda thing.

If you feel like I’m digressing away from the title of this post, you’re right, I am, but I’m having fun reliving these old experiences and I feel like this kinda context will help you all understand just exactly what I experienced later in life.
Alex and I (the young intimidating Bob Dylan looking kid) began busking together a lot, and it was amazing. Every weekend and any time we had time off school we were in the street playing our shitty acoustic guitars and singing songs at the top of our lungs. Performing became something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do. I lived and breathed for it. Busking brought me more joy than anything I had ever done and almost preferred it to playing on stages, partially because, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to play on the street, there was no booking system I had to go through to do it. We didn’t have to wait around for someone to ask us to play on their stage or in their pub or whatever because, on the street, we could meet up and just play for as long or as short as we liked. As Alex and I began to busk more, The Painkillers (or I think we were called The Contenders by that point) stopped playing so much. I moved secondary schools in September 2011 and had to repeat the year I had just completed due to lack of work, laziness and other such things. Thats where I met Dan Love or as we now call him, The Funnyman. I had to go to classes on FUCKING SATURDAY at that school (only for the first year I was there, thankfully) but I was free to go at 1pm or so. It still sucked, anyway, I would finish my classes, run and change out of my school uniform and run down the hill into town as fast as I could in order to get as much busking in before it was too dark.

I also got involved with the school’s drama department because the drama teacher heard me sing and so asked me if I wanted to be in a production of A Chorus Line. I felt pretty out of place at that school because it was a private school and I had been at state school my whole life and just didn’t feel like I’d fit in with the kids there. So I thought, fuck it, I’ll do it, I can make some friends and I’ll get to sing and be on stage. Little did I know, there was a lot of dancing in that particular play and I also joined six weeks late. So I was six weeks behind and almost all the songs, dances, and lines were memorised by the rest of the cast. But with the help of my ever suffering friend Faye, and a few others, I managed to somehow get up to speed in time for the dress rehearsal. I made some amazing friends thanks to that production and that school and although I was dragged there kicking and screaming, I ended up not wanting to leave and it’s incredibly dear to me. The people, the teachers, the opportunities I had at that school will stay with me till the day I die. I am incredibly lucky to have been able to go to (as I so eloquently described it to my parents before my first day there) “that fucking posh snobs school”. So yeah, there I was dancing and singing and acting on a stage with new friends and loving it and deep down, knowing I would have never been able to do that at my old school for many reasons including that I would have most definitely been called “gay” for doing it.

This brings me to when pretty much everything changed. In early 2012, Alex and I were back at our busking after the christmas holidays. Funnyman would come down into town with me after school on Saturday morning and just kinda hang out while Alex and I played. Eventually Alex and I said to him, “why don’t you just buy an instrument so you can jam with us” or words to that effect. So he did, he walked up the street and came back with a Cajon. And just like that, The Four Roads, the musical project that changed my life forever, began. One night in late January 2012, Funnyman (Dan Love, incase you forgot his real name) were walking up the highstreet about to do some drinking at a pub somewhere. While we were walking up the street we saw two friends who also busked on the streets of Canterbury; Hugo and Dan, who was better known as Taihg. Hugo and I had been friends for a few years as he was in the year below me in secondary school and he had joined Alex and I for various busks a few times over the years. Taihg was someone I met through busking and it would be a rarity to make a trip into town without bumping into him. I have a whole long story about the events that led up to this night, my experiences with Hugo and Taihg and how this evening progressed. But that's another story for another time.

Funnyman and I hung out with them and played a few songs and headed off to the pub. Hugo was meant to join us there later. Sadly, that night was the last time I saw either of them as they tragically died a few hours later. I could go into details but I dont really want to right now. It was a tragic accident and it could have been so easily avoided. Its truly heartbreaking and it changed my life, as well as many others lives forever. After their deaths, the police investigation, memorials in town, busking to raise money for funeral costs etc, was a strange time. I remember it being a very grey time, thats the only word I can use to describe how it felt. It was grey, bleak and hopeless. I realised then that I wasn’t invincible and it was the first time I questioned my own mortality and could really comprehend how fragile life is.

The day of Taihg’s funeral marked the end of the a very strange month, it was the last event, if you will. The previous weeks had been full of mourning, the buskers getting together to raise money, there were flowers in their hundreds at the corner where Taihg was often found busking as well as in the buttermarket where Alex and I busked with Hugo. But Taihg’s funeral was the last thing of it all? To me it felt like, I just had to keep living, keep moving forward. And that was exactly what I did. Alex, Funnyman and I came out of the church and stood on the high street after Taihg’s funeral, I wiped off the tears from my cheek and said, “what now boys?”. “Buskin” Alex replied. That, I feel is the day The Four Roads truly established ourselves as a band. We joined forces with fellow local busker, Stefan, played some songs on the street, went home to my parents house for dinner, came up with the band name and went and played our first show.

Our first show as The Four Roads. Funnyman was very nervous but we convinced him to play. A good time was had by all.
The Four Roads, or The Four Chodes as my sisters and friends called us, took us to the other side of the world, to street corners and venues of strange places we’d never even heard of before. I have had a long connection to Canada due to my mum being born in Toronto and spending a few summers here many years ago. Loooooong story short, The Four Roads applied and got accepted to The Kingston Buskers Rendezvous in the summer of 2012. With the help of our friends, family and fans, we scraped together enough money for the flights and we were off, to “hit the road” for 7 weeks. Alex and I had both dreamed of living on the road, after reading books such as “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and listening to music that leant itself to the kinda hobo/broke musician lifestyle of living on the asphalt of the highways of North America. We arrived in Kingston and were immediately treated like rockstars, being chauffeured around, presented with meal vouchers at fancy restaurants, given a $500 bar tab and our own rooms to stay in with en-suit bathrooms. It was crazy, Dan and I were 18, Stef was 21 and Alex was 17, turning 18 while we were “on the road”. We busked our asses off during the festival and loved every second of it. Now, here’s the thing, even though the deaths of my friends had actually made me question my own mortality and so on, I didn’t change my lifestyle choices at all, didn’t look after myself at all and I suffered from it, mentally and physically. On the last night of the festival, I began to feel sick at the wrap party. I ended up excusing myself to the washroom, held back vomit and decided to walk back to the residence, an early night would do me good, I thought. I ended up taking the longest possible route back to the residence, simply because I didn’t know that there was a quicker route. I arrived back at the residence after being accosted by a creepy old dude in a pick up truck, and tried to get to sleep. The room was spinning and I felt so nauseous but couldn’t actually throw up. I missed out on a crazy fun night and was gutted. The next morning, I woke up feeling a bit better and we packed our stuff and made our way to my friends family’s house where we had all been invited to for dinner and a place to crash for the night before we hitchhiked, yes, all four of us, to Ottawa for our next stop of the tour.

I was very sick, and didn’t know what was wrong. We ended up staying there for a few nights, tried to hitchhike up to Ottawa but turned back after I started feeling awful and nauseous again. I took a trip to the hospital, I had heatstroke and exhaustion. At long last I started to feel better and our tour continued, business as usual. A few weeks down the line, it got worse again. I ended up having chest pains, numbness in my face and nausea again. I was convinced I was dying or having a heart attack or both. One night, it got so bad that I was lying in my friends apartment in Toronto with the band and thought that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. I was so scared, I didn’t want to move or try and find a hospital, I didn’t want to cause the boys anymore stress. They could tell I wasn’t myself. Convinced that I would die that night, I wrote my bandmates all letters telling them how much I loved them and how thankful I was to have had such amazing experiences with them. I also wrote a letter to my parents, telling them I was sorry for everything I’d done (long different story) and telling them I loved them and stuff. My hands were shaking and my vision was blurry and before I finished the letter I passed out. To my surprise I woke up the next morning and I called it quits with the tour. I apologised to the boys and said I needed to go to the hospital. I ended up in Guelph, staying with my Aunt and during that time got taken to the hospital twice with chest pains and the same awful sensations. I was sure I was dying and that the doctors maybe weren’t taking me seriously.

The day before we were due to go back to England the boys were at Aunt Cindy’s house (our bands adopted Canadian aunty). They were having beers by the pool and missing me and stuff. I wanted so much to spend the last night of the “tour” with them. So I left my aunt and uncles house while they were at work, and hitchhiked to catch a bus to Barrie, a city north of Toronto. The boys met me with Aunt Cindy and we had a beautiful reunion and they told me what they’d been up to during my absence. We had an amazing night, floating around in the pool, drinking beer and eating good food. The next day we flew home.

I felt awful during the day of this gig and wanted to cancel, but the boys helped me pull it together.

Back in England I became pretty reclusive and quiet. I was still convinced I was dying and one night got taken to hospital in an ambulance. No one could tell me what was wrong with me. The term “nerve damage” got thrown around quite a bit. One of the paramedics in the ambulance, who was trying to reassure me that I wasn’t having a heart attack, told me “my fiancé was told she has nerve damage, but thats what Drs just tell patients when they don’t know whats wrong with them”. I guess what he meant by that was I was fine, but Drs tell people they have nerve damage when they actually don’t have anything wrong with them. From my experience it made me feel better telling people that the reason I was in hospital so much was because I had something medically wrong with me. Fast forward a few months, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder, much to my dismay and denial. I remember the first time a Dr suggested I should take anti depressants, I walked out on him. I saw my family Dr almost weekly and it sucked but she was lovely and broke down what I was going through into information that I could easily digest. She had done every test in the book for heart conditions and such, brain scans for the numbness/dizziness/nausea, everything and it all came back fine. Part of me wished there was something wrong with me, like a heart condition or SOMETHING. I just hated not knowing why I was so fucked up. I came to accept thats how I was and took the pills. 2012 into 2013 was a strange time for me, I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t mentally well and couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I, of all people, ended up like that. I was so outgoing and adventurous and stuff. But I ended up going out less, playing less and when I did go out and play, leaving my parents house became kinda scary. I had 3 places for that time that seemed safe to me? It sounds stupid. But it was my parents house, school and a cafe in town. As 2013 progressed things got better and easier and I almost started to feel myself again. In April 2013 I started taking cipralex and it made a huge difference. I began to feel like what I’d gone through over the past year was just a blip, a bump in the road.
By the summer of 2013 I was feeling MUCH better, we even did another tour in Canada and I made it the whole way through without a hospital trip. Although, I was very anxious for a lot of the time that I was going to get sick, that I was going to start having chest pains again. But I made it through. I had the time of my life. The Four Roads and our friends Sasquatch & the Jackalope drove round Ontario and Quebec in a VW bus, playing shows and busking. I was so happy. This is how it should have gone the previous summer. I was also weary of eating better, drinking less and getting more sleep. I still partied too much and drank too much on some occasions, but it wasn’t too bad. I had also come to accept that I was suffering from mental illness and thats ok. On the occasions I did begin to feel anxious I was able to tackle it, and stop it and I was really proud of myself for that. I had been seeing a counsellor at school during the year which helped me deal with it too.

Instead of returning to England at the end of that tour, I said goodbye to my pals in Toronto. They flew home to England and I took a flight down to Washington DC. My Dad had been offered a job in Alexandria, VA, a suburb of DC, a few months earlier. In May of that year I was faced with a decision. I was just about to graduate from school, all be it a year later than most people my age. I could have stayed in the UK and gone to university (something I was not remotely interesting in doing) or go and take a “gap year” in the USA. I genuinely didnt know what I was going to do. It was a fantastic opportunity for me and my family but my life was in the UK. Canterbury was my home, all my friends were there and although I’d spent so many of my years growing up there trying to leave, I found myself so much more attached to the place than ever before. My whole family were in Alexandria, VA when I arrived on August 15th. We didn’t have a house that was ready to move into yet and all of our belongings were on a freight container somewhere in the mid Atlantic. So, we were put up in guest rooms on the campus my dad was teaching at. I decided to stay there for the year for a few reasons. My mum and sisters would be going back to England for one more year. It was an awkward time for my family to move. My older sister was about to start a masters degree, one of my younger sisters was almost done secondary school and my youngest had just started year 9. It made more sense for the girls to stay in England for another year. So I decided to keep Dad company, help him move into the new family home and I would try and get a job and do music as much as I could. Turns out, the USA sucks for a 19 year old kid with no status in the country. I couldn’t get a Virginia drivers license, couldn’t work legally and worst of all I couldn’t play shows because I was under 21 and almost every place that had live music was strictly 21 and over. But I could buy a gun, even though the second amendment of the US constitution didn’t apply to me as a non US citizen? I did a lot of busking in Alexandria and the subway stops in DC, I hung out with Sasquatch & the Jackalope a lot before they went back to School in Boston. (turns out they were from the same area which was nice). The end of the summer and early September was actually a lot of fun. I spent it exploring and busking and travelling with my family. After my mum and sisters went home I was quite sad. Dad and I moved into the house, unpacked and made it feel like home. The girls flew over for half term and we all had a great time. I got kinda offered a job with the maintenance crew at the college my dad worked for and I got to know the dudes there really well and did lots of good, ol’ fashioned hard work. Sadly I couldn’t legally work there so I didn’t get paid, but I volunteered there because it was good to keep busy and have people to hang out with. One day after about 3 months, the dean of the college came up to me on my lunch break. “how long have you been volunteering with Mike and the maintenance team now?”, he asked. I told him it had been about 3 months. He then told me to take the afternoon of work, drive down to a guitar shop, pick out any guitar I liked and then call him. So I did just that. Mike, my boss and I drove down to guitar centre in Falls Church, VA and I spent about 2 hours trying out guitars. I ended up leaving with the first guitar I picked up. My Gibson Hummingbird Pro. Next thing I knew, I had a new, beautiful, expensive guitar. It was a great day.

Summer turned into autumn and autumn turned into winter, which in Virginia, aint that bad. But I owed my parents money, wasnt working, was living at home with my dad. The list of things I wasn’t legally allowed to do was longer than the list of things I was allowed to do. My US visa allowed me to live in the USA as a “dependent of my dad” until I turned 26. However, that was pretty much all I could do. Couldn’t work, or get a drivers license or a bank account or anything and, as I said earlier, I wasn’t of age to play anywhere worth playing. I did a show at the campus bar in early November 2013 and all of Dads students turned up which was nice and I did an open mic at a place in DC called Gypsy Sally’s. I somehow managed to sneak in. Funnily enough, I ended up playing a show there with my current band, The Wilderness last September. It was becoming clear that there wasn’t much of a future for me living in the USA, especially without a work visa or green card. If I was the age I am now, I would have probably been able to scrape by, busking and gigging if I was only making cash. But I would still have had to live at home and somewhat under the radar. In mid November I told my Dad I wanted to go back up to Canada. I would find a job, live with a friend and pay my parents the money I owe them then go back to Virginia for Christmas and reassess the situation then. I began saving my busking money and was going to try and hitchhike back up to Canada or at the very least, get a megabus. Dad, very kindly booked me a flight up to Toronto for the coming Saturday. I called my friends, The Varley’s, on the Friday night and asked if I could crash with them for a bit while I figured out my shit. “well, get here before 6pm and dinner will be ready” was the answer I got.

Dad drove me to Washington Dulles Airport on Saturday morning and checked me in. We were both sad. I could feel it, in the car on the way, we didn’t say much but I could tell we were both feeling pretty wobbly about the whole situation. It came the time to go through security and say goodbye to my Dad. He hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek, told me he loved me and I told him I loved him too. He gave me $20 and told me to try and stay out of trouble and then I went through security.
To make a very long story very short I now live in Canada. I went back to Virginia for christmas, but left for Canada again. I didn’t get a job and I lived on a couch for 6 months or so. I now live with my girlfriend and two cats in a small apartment in downtown Kingston, Ontario and although life has its challenges and things are pretty rough right now, I am very happy and very lucky that I somehow managed to fall on my feet, albeit after staggering around for a while. I feel like now, we are kinda up to speed with how I ended up here, how I started playing music, where my musical ventures have taken me but I have barely addressed the title of this goddamn thing.

So, November 16th 2013 is officially the day I “moved” to Canada. Things were interesting at that time. I slept on a couch in the basement of my friends family for about 6 months, in the east end of town. I’d hitchhike into town, or walk (which would take about an hour and in -30 weather sucked) or I’d take the bus. Once I’d get downtown I’d go busking opposite this place called The Sleepless Goat, where I’d eventually end up working for a brief amount of time. I’d been used to English winters, where I could busk pretty much all year. South Eastern Ontario, on the other hand, was a different story. The first winter I moved here was brutal; one of the coldest and longest in a long while. Regardless, I’d set up on Princess Street and play my guitar until I was too cold to carry on any longer. Once my finger tips felt like they were no longer attached to my body, I’d run across the street to The Sleepless Goat and warm up over a coffee and some free soup. I was very thankful for that place and for the staff. If I made enough money, I’d wonder down the block to The Toucan and upon entering the door, I’d already have my beer waiting for me at the bar. It was something like $4.50 for a tall can of Pabst Blue Ribbon; the cheapest beer they had. After many days/weeks of doing this and every day having the same bartender crack a beer for me when I walked in at 2pm, I figured that it maybe wasn’t too healthy and gave it a rest for a while. It was a fairly solitary time and I was pretty miserable. Kingston in the winter was a very different place from Kingston in the summer, especially Kingston during buskers fest. Occasionally someone would recognise me as “one of the buskers” from the previous summers and I would feel kinda ashamed and embarrassed. During that time I swanned around town like a goddamn rockstar and within a few months was shivering in the cold, trying to get a couple of bucks together for a coffee and some beers. I had a few friends in town whom I’d met either through buskers or from a summer camp I went to in 2010. I wasn’t totally alone, but it wasn’t the summer anymore. Most of them were either in classes or working during the day and I wasn’t doing anything. My pal Jacob was amazing and continues to be amazing and supportive to this day. We met at camp in 2010 and when I moved to Kingston we hung out. Within a week or so of me living there we filmed a music video together combining my passion for music and his passion for film. However, all this time I was becoming increasingly depressed. I couldn’t find a job and had no direction in my life whatsoever. One night I decided I would play the open mic at The Mansion in the hope I’d meet some musicians and maybe score a gig there. Alas, my guitar was out of tune, I snapped a string and played like shit to the 3 or 4 people in the audience. Dejected and miserable after my awful set I ran to catch the last bus back to the east end which I missed by about 30 seconds. I had $2.75 to my name, just enough to get the bus back home and no where near enough for a cab. So I walked the 6km back at 11:30PM in a snow storm and it was -15. Not a great night.

I was pretty miserable for that winter. I found myself spiralling in and out of a depressive state and often got drunk out of my mind in order to not think about it. I don’t want to make it seem like I was miserable all the time and didn’t ever have fun because that simply wasn’t true but, deep down there was a real sadness that I couldn’t shake. One thing that was extremely difficult for me was affording my medication. Even though in Canada there is free health care to all Canadian citizens and permanent residents, there is a strange 3 month probationary period after moving to Ontario before you can get your OHIP card and therefore access to free health care. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I had a Canadian passport and desperately needed to see a Dr to get my medication prescribed but without a health card I needed to pay to just be seen. Anything beyond being seen was extra. For example, my trips to ER in the summer of 2012 cost me thousands and thousands of dollars. Thankfully a travel insurance company took care if that. ANYWAY $40 isn’t much I know, but to me it was, especially as I was making next to nothing. In the UK I also got my prescriptions for free until I was 18 or 19. Once you are out of full time education you have to pay. I was out of full time education for maybe a week before I left for North America so I stocked up on a few months worth of prescriptions and it cost me £7.65. I saw a Dr who I guess took a shine to me and went above and beyond to help me out over the last few years. He also upped my dose of Cipralex from 5mg to 20mg. This, I thought was a good thing, and I think it helped. However, when I missed a day or two when I was on 5mg it was no big deal. If I missed a day on 20mg it was like the worst hangover I’ve ever had but worse. There is no cap in Canada on prescription costs. I ended up receiving bills of upwards of $300 for prescriptions that would have cost me £7.65 in the UK. It was pretty awful, eventually after many bus trips in the cold out to the Service Ontario by the highway, I got my health card, so at least I didn’t have to pay to see a Dr or if I needed to go to ER. It also meant that I was eligible for some mental health programs which was nice. It did not reduce the cost of prescriptions. Canadians pride ourselves for our fantastic socialised free health care, but in my opinion and from my experiences, its not that great at all. I think that having to pay upwards of $300 for pills that prevented me from offing myself in those cold dark winter months isn't really free healthcare. A lot of people I know get insurance through their work or school or opt into health insurance programs. I didn’t have that luxury. Without trying to sound too self pitying or whatever, it was a really tough time. My parents, luckily would send me money for prescriptions but it sometimes the money wouldn’t get there on time and other times for some stupid reason I’d tell myself I was fine and didn’t need them only to find myself sick and spinning out.

I met my, now girlfriend/partner in crime, in early January 2014. I was particularly miserable at the time and feeling pretty lost. She was studying at Queens university and showed me a different side to Kingston. Through her, I met some of my best friends and she has helped me so much over the last few years in so many ways. Her and her friend had a nice little top floor apartment that over looked the student ghetto in an old victorian house which we all called “The Birds Nest”. I spent many a night sleeping over, cooking dinner with Brit and her roommate Alyssa and meeting new people. I felt very much an outsider though as all of their friends were Queens students and none of them could quite understand what I was doing in Kingston if I wasn’t at Queens. Nonetheless, The Birds Nest was a wonderful place and I miss it quite a lot. I’d wake up in the mornings and Brit would be eating breakfast in the living room. I’d join here and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes until I felt ready to face the day. I wrote a lot while I was there and Brit was and still is so supportive of my music. I would balance my time between staying at The Birds Nest with Brit and with The Varley’s in the east end. Brit and I talked openly about our struggles with depression and anxiety and she felt like the first person I’d met who really got it. To be honest she was one of the only people I’d told at that point. It felt so good to be so open about it for once.

Honestly, I don’t know if its the same for everyone but my struggles with anxiety and depression have really come and gone in waves. Sometimes its awful and stays that way for months and then it, seemingly, just disappears. May 2014 and that entire summer was great for me. Things were really looking up. I moved into my own place, began playing music way more, got myself a residency playing on a patio at a hip and trendy bar that I got paid great money for and had a job. I ended up working at The Sleepless Goat which sadly, tarnished my love for the place and it didnt really end well for me, but thats another story for another time, maybe after a few beers. My friends were at my house all the time and it was just amazing. I was 19 turning 20 and I had my own place to call home, not a couch in someone else’s.

Benoit, my childhood pal and my friend through school came out to visit for two weeks, and although I was working a lot while he was here, we still had time to get up to no good. We hitchhiked to Ottawa and had a blast staying with friends who live downtown. We drank beers in the market, swam in the lakes in Gatineau park and had an absolute blast. One night in Kingston we stayed up all night and got drunk on the pier and Ben took a 6am dip into Lake Ontario. Alex came over from England shortly after Benoit left and Ryan and Rob (Sasquatch and the Jackalope) came back up from Virginia. We did Kingston Buskers again as kinda The Four Roads then I quit my job at The Goat and we hit the road in Girtty, The VW bus, and did some busking here, there and everywhere. I ended up moving at the end of that summer to a place right downtown on Princess with some friends in early September and was due to start a Music & Digital Media program at St Lawrence College. Things were going really well. I never really wanted to be in school and dropped out in the first semester. I should have loved the program, it was right up my ally but I found myself staying at home a lot on my couch playing Red Dead Redemption and losing the will to do anything. My granny died during the first few weeks of school and I missed a lot of class going down to Virginia and then back to England. After I dropped out I felt like a failure, having not been able to stick at something I should have enjoyed. I kept playing music and running the open mic at Musiikki Cafe where I had found myself a new job.

Things took a turn for the absolute worst they’ve ever been in March 2015. I won’t go into it too much but I was miserable, suicidal and a total fucking mess. I had started a new band in January of that year, The Wilderness and things were pretty rad with them. By early march though, I was a state, I think my friends and bandmates knew I was having a rough time and probably knew why but I don’t think anyone knew the extent of just how bad it was. I don’t think even I knew how bad it was. My mum came up a few times and begged me to come back to Virginia so her and Dad could look after me but I was stubborn and indignant and had a bunch of gigs booked with the band. I did them as best I could, by getting drunk out of my mind before and after and trying to appear like I was A-OK. When I was on stage, everything was fine, I forgot everything I was dealing with for the 45 minutes to an hour I was up there, but that soon changed. It all got too much for me, so one day, I called my Mum and Dad and in some kind of blurry fucked up state I asked if I could come see them. I was on the plane to Virginia the next day and stayed there for about two weeks. I lost a lot of weight, and there wasn’t exactly much to me before hand. I barely ate, barely spoke. Just sat around wallowing in self pity. It truly was the worst time in my life. I cant describe just exactly how awful I felt. I thought that it was it, I’d never get better and that would be how I’d feel for the rest of my life. I didnt particularly want to be alive anymore. I felt like a totally failure, I was going nowhere, had dropped out school, owed money, had no money, no future, no nothing. But I still had music.

Determined not to let my bandmates down I got on an overnight bus from DC to Toronto after my parents begged me to stay longer, in retrospect I really should have, and arrived back in Kingston. I now feel like at long last I’m at the point I wanted to originally address. I know I’ve got so bogged down in the fine details of the however many years its been but I feel like its important for what I’m about to say next. When I arrived back in Kingston and began to play with the boys again there was something distinctly different inside me.

Music had always, ALWAYS been a cathartic outlet for me. I craved being able to perform, show off and sing my lungs out. All I wanted to do was be on a stage and if I couldn’t be on stage, I’d make one for myself on the street. I always bragged to my friends and peers that “I never get stage fright” and it was true. In the many years I’d been performing and busking and playing shows, few times had I been nervous to do so. I can maybe count them on one hand, the number of times I genuinely felt anxious to get on stage or in front of people but it was never anything more than a healthy/normal nervousness. I had heard of people getting so anxious before performing that they’d puke or get nauseous or have panic attacks. That never happened to me. Even at the peak of my anxiousness and depressive episodes in previous years getting on stage didn’t phase me. It helped me, took me away from everything I was feeling at the time and for that 45 minutes to an hour, or in some cases, 3 hours I was on stage, I felt fantastic. It sounds like such a cliché but in many ways it felt like playing music temporarily cured me. Something was different now though. I remember it so vividly. The boys and I were playing an end of the school year show at The Brooklyn, here in town and before hand I was ok but I began to feel incredibly sick to my stomach as soon as I got up on stage. I remember holding back on certain notes because I felt as though if I belted it out too much I would vomit. I figured it was just a bad day or whatever and didn’t think much of it.

Over the weeks that followed this same feeling of nausea followed me wherever I went. It was never when I was at home on my own hanging out but as soon as I left my apartment. There were days that I’d just be walking down the street but then have to violently throw up (which by the way happens to be my biggest fear) because everything became just so anxiety inducing. Even when the depression subsided the crippling anxiety stayed and probably even worsened. I used to love A) drinking in bars and pubs B) going out to dinner C) performing. I ended up avoiding all of those things. Whenever someone invited me for dinner I’d make an excuse not to go. I booked fewer shows, never busked and stayed inside a lot. It was the worst. I feared leaving the house for the fear that I would puke everywhere, which, incidentally happened a whole lot. Public places in general were awful for me. I couldn’t even get on a city bus without having to get off at the next stop and empty the contents of my stomach onto the sidewalk. This was the worst. It sucked so much. I have always hated vomiting; I’ve never even puked as a result of drinking too much. I’m actually pretty terrified of it. I had an awful stomach flu less than a week after I moved to Kingston that kept me up all night puking. Prior to that I had successfully avoided it at all costs for years. With anything, some days were better than others and I was able to play without throwing up before hand, and sometimes grabbing a beer wasn’t so bad. But for the most part it was awful and pretty debilitating. I don’t think anyone really knows I went through this, apart from the psychologist I was seeing at the time. We tried new medications including beta blockers but it just didn’t work. I was pretty desperate, because all I wanted to do was play music and at the same time I wanted to avoid it at all costs. I’m so thankful I was in a band and not doing it solo at that point in my life. If I didn’t have other people counting on me I’m sure I would have given up. I was so angry that the one thing I loved doing was becoming a nightmare instead. Every time I got up on stage and started singing I’d feel like I was constantly trying to keep the vomit down, to just make it through the set. The enjoyment of performing had totally gone and became something I had to get through and focus on not getting sick. Whenever I was in a new social situation I would be fighting the same sensation. I’m gonna wrap this up soon because finally, at long last I’m getting to my point.

I started a CBT course and of course, I was told to do “exposure therapy”. So essentially that means is, “so you know that thing that causes you crippling anxiety and makes you feel like you want to die? do that. Over and over again”. The lovely chap who saw me for CBT sessions about half way through our ten week program said to me “I don’t know what to say Jonas. You’re like the poster child of this program”. I was kinda confused about what he meant by that, but it kinda made sense. Because I was in a band and had others counting on me to show up, I was doing it even though it made me feel like garbage. That struck a chord with me because I was being told for once, I was doing something right. So I set about making sure I put myself in situations that made me feel anxious and nauseous and awful. I narrowed it down to a list: Busking, Playing shows, eating out, drinking in bars, public transit and anywhere that I couldn’t make a quick escape from if I started feeling sick. Once I had that list compiled I tackled them one by one. The first thing was busking, I lived on Princess Street right downtown, so I would literally open my front door to busk, if it got too much I’d retreat back inside. But it slowly got better and by the time buskers fest rolled round, I busked all weekend no problem at all. I’d then make excuses for myself to get on the bus and I’d take it one stop at a time. I’d ride the bus for one stop, then two, then three and so on. By the end of the summer I was back to busking a lot, being able to have drinks with friends at bars and such and feeling way better. I booked a tour for the band and put all my time and energy into it to make it the raddest tour ever. It was pretty rad. We toured across a huge chunk of the USA in two weeks.

The tour was incredible, everything I hoped it would be and way more. Admittedly our first show at The Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto was scary as hell because it was our first Toronto show and The Horseshoe is a fairly prolific venue. I was nervous as hell and had to fight back the feeling of nausea somewhat but I made it through the set. By the end of the tour that feeling had almost completely gone. I still couldn’t eat before shows because of nerves but once I was on stage they left and I was fine. Now, almost a year later, my life is so different. I play all the time, music is my full time job (if you can call it that) I play on my own and with the band. I sometimes host an open mic, I go out to dinner all the time (well thats a lie because I cant afford it) but when I do, I don’t get anxious anymore and I look forward to it. I can eat before shows. I enjoy every second I’m on stage and no longer just try and “make it through the set”. I go out, socialise, meet new people, put myself in situations that, this time last year would have sent me into an anxiety driven meltdown. I’m really quite happy and content for the most part. Anxiety and depression nearly, but did not succeed in ruining my life. I guess I took control and by exposing myself to things that would induce those miserable sensations, desensitized myself from them, almost like a vaccination? So yeah, there you guys go, if you’ve read this far. My story of music from beginning to now with all the shitty stuff included. I just want people to know that I felt pretty hopeless and that I thought my life had been ruined by something in my brain, but it wasn’t ruined. It sucked but it wasn’t ruined. It was a strange time in my life and thats all. Things get better, they always do.

Rock and Roll.

Jonas.