A Month

Today marks exactly one month since I was upside down in a car in the middle of McGuinness Boulevard, being yelled at by men with thick polish accents, not checking to see if I was okay but angry that I made enough of a racket to rouse them from their slumber. My head was full of racing thoughts about how I had gotten there and who would be hurt most if I never got out. I’ve already covered that experience extensively in a previous essay, but the surprising thing about it is that this was just the beginning. The fact that my life would be turned upside down and right side up more than a couple more times in that span is not something I could have mentally prepared for. This month has yielded some true peaks and valleys and I think I’ve come out of it in the best way someone can come out of a 31 day stretch like that.

Let’s start with the lows, shall we? First off, I flipped a car, wound up in the hospital with all the requisite bills that accompany that, and had a few nagging injuries. More importantly than that though, I scared my friends and family because I retreated into the most foolish of modes, the one where I don’t want to add to people’s stress so I say nothing, or as little as possible. More so than death or injury, being a burden has always been one of my biggest fears. I’ve already covered that to some degree, as well, but this part I think bears repeating because a thing I discovered after the fact is that hiding these things hurt people more than just being honest with them. Someone very close to me found out about what happened to me by reading about it on this very blog and that’s a weight of guilt I carry with me still.

This struggle was compounded a few weeks later when my sister disappeared for a matter of days while in the throes of a relapse. The reason that I’ve retreated from being what I perceived to be a burden for so long in my life is because my sister’s drug use and the myriad of problems that came from it were a massive toll on my parents, who were already pretty old at that time, and as time is unfortunately linear, have only gotten older since. A few times early on I came with very small problems, a bad day at work, a petty squabble with a friend, etc, and was shooed away while my parents focused on much larger issues at hand like dealing with warrants or repaying large debts, which is understandable. My mistake was interpreting that to mean that any and all problems of mine were therefore an unnecessary distraction or burden so I just never talked about them to anyone. I took an approach designed for a small set of issues and applied them across all spectrums of my life.

This disappearance happened to coincide with my father’s 90th birthday. Watching someone you love slowly get weathered by the ceaseless drum of time is hard enough, watching that happen while someone they truly love constantly compounds that weathering is something I hope nobody I know ever has to deal with. It sucks a lot. One of the hardest things I’ve done recently was trying to pick out a birthday card in that context. The thing about birthday cards is they all talk about how great of a day you hope someone has or is having, and that felt extremely glib and inappropriate when you know that you’re handing it to someone who is in the midst of planning an emergency trip across the country to search for their missing daughter. I just stood, frozen in the greeting card aisle of a CVS while all the enormity of what was happening to my family intermingled with the miniscule inconvenience of picking out a card that seemed appropriate. Do you pick something that says “You’re the best dad ever” while your father is grappling with feeling like he’s failed his youngest child? Maybe a card that says “I hope your birthday is super great” when you know he’s going to read it on a plane to Boise with the fear that he might find his child harmed or worse when he lands? I ended up going with one that had a cat playing an electric guitar that said “You rock” because that somehow felt the most appropriate in the moment. My inscription just said “I don’t really know what else to say right now but I love you.”

The good news is we found her, alive and relatively okay. The bad news is she’s still not well. She was angry at us for being worried, mostly at me because I had tried to use all the good will and friend networks I had at my disposal to find her. I’m eternally grateful to my friends who put up their various bat signals to get the word out about her disappearance, but we’ll get to that when we get to the good parts of the month. Her reaction threw me for a loop because I felt like I had finally broken out of a harmful pattern of keeping things inside and in turn had ended up wounding my only sibling. She felt embarrassed and furious thinking I had shared all kinds of details about her life when all I told anyone was her name, her age and shared a picture. I had no idea how far of a reach my little post had, but it was far wider than I had ever anticipated. She’s also still unable to get the help she needs because the state she’s has been pretty reckless when it comes to the COVID response and as such she can’t get a hospital bed because they’re all full of people drowning in their own lungs because they won’t get a shot or two. So we end up coming full circle, me sitting on the porch of my childhood home, next to a friend I’ve worked hard to cultivate an extremely honest and open relationship with, especially in the month following my accident, while my dad tells me he’s found my sister relapsed in her bathroom again and not sure what to tell my friend because she has a lot on her own plate and there isn’t any finite ending point to what’s happening with my sister so why let a wound that may never heal bleed on something you treasure?

This, bizarrely enough, leads me to the good stuff. To start with the surface level stuff, I’ve had a pretty good stretch of shows, both in the form of the one I produce and the ones I’ve been lucky enough to be booked on. I’ve gotten a bit more confident singing at karaoke, even though it’s still not something I would say I’m good at, and I’ve felt good physically and played well in the various sports I play. That stuff is nice but it’s not as important as the deeper, more spiritual and personal successes I think I’ve achieved.

As we’ve covered extensively, I’ve never been good at sharing the load. If anything, what I bring to the table is that I’m willing the shoulder more than I need to because I want others to know they can depend on me. However, more so in the past month, and more so with these aforementioned crises, I’ve worked hard to be more open, especially with the people who matter most to me. I’ve realized that trying to save people the hardship of dealing with your issues can do more harm because you hurt them far worse than you mean to by disrespecting the level of care they have for you. If you truly love someone and they truly love you then you share the weight of each other’s burdens and for too long I was selfish in that respect. So I’ve tried to talk more openly about things and that’s been a strengthening process. I’ve learned that openness can be its own reward. I learned this many times over the past month in varying degrees. I’ve had a friend confide in me that he felt I didn’t respect him as an artist because I hadn’t asked him to do my show yet, when in reality he’s one of the people I've looked up to artistically for almost a decade. I’ve had friends be upset with me because I didn’t share more openly with them and I’ve been upset with friends because they shared things I wished they hadn’t with others. But, an important thing to realize is that if you never address these things, then you can never fix them. As painful as it might be in the moment, as sad or as angry as it may make you at that second, the blessing of having an opportunity to work on something together and getting to a place where you’re both happy with it, is so much more important that trying to seem unbothered. I’ve learned that shared frustration can be an avenue to deepening bonds and not necessarily the source of anger that I’ve cowered from. I’ve learned that saying things like “I miss you” and “I love you” aren’t reserved solely for romantic partners, but are a language shared across all bonds and are not signs of weakness but of confidence in the place you hold in each other’s lives. Most importantly I’ve learned that vulnerability and sharing pain can be just as much a sign of strength as being the strong silent type. These are things that I’ve carried misconceptions about my entire life and I’m so incredibly grateful to shed those chains.

Strangely enough it took being away from almost everybody for me to realize the importance of deepening relationships and finding snatching spiritual victory from the jaws of perceived defeat. At the beginning of September I was supposed to go on a 3 day swing of shows around Massachusetts with my friend. The plan was to drive to Worcester, spend the night at my childhood home and then drive to Boston and spend the next few days doing shows there. Mike Tyson once said “Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth” and in this case the punch in the mouth was a combination of a substantial rain storm, a potential tornado and low ticket sales. Almost immediately the cracks in the plan started to emerge. Our car had a leaky tire, our Friday show in Boston never materialized and as soon as we arrived in Worcester we learned that our Thursday Boston show had been cancelled due to a combination of low interest and Hurricane Ida. An earlier iteration of my being would have interpreted this as a sign of failure not just of the tour but probably, as has long been my wont, a harbinger of doom for one of my most prized relationships. Previous John would have pushed to go back home as soon as possible, tucked tail and hid from my feelings and from my friends as I tried to tend to my own wounded pride alone. What happened, instead, was that we spent 2 days in the woods of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, working on getting ourselves together for our various upcoming forays in to the larger world while simultaneously embracing the fact that going insane in light of 18 months of chaos was a perfectly natural thing. I won’t go in to too much detail about what we did out there because it’s not important to this story, it probably would seem pretty boring and silly to an outside observer and also because sometimes it’s important to keep special things between friends special and between friends. What I will tell you is that it taught me a lot about myself, and about what I want out of my relationships as a whole. It taught me that you can share your light with people and that doesn’t diminish it for yourself. It taught me the importance of small kindnesses where I previously had prioritized grand gestures. It taught me that if you’re open about your disappointments you can find that they weren’t really disappointments in the long run. It taught me that by sharing your disappointments you can build stronger things on top of that ground that would be much shakier if you don’t. Most importantly it taught me that any earnest effort is appreciated by the people who love you and who care about you the most.

These lessons came to fore not more than a week later as things I had worked on and planned fell apart and became other, equally beautiful things. Whether it was a show that I felt wildly unprepared for and lost some of its most notable bookings in the days (and in one case minutes) before or a basketball tournament I’d worked hard to secure permits at one of the most beautiful sets of courts in the city only to show up day of and learn that a clerical error had actually placed us at a couple of severely broken blacktops underneath the highway. These are defeats that, again, a previous version of me, one that hadn’t been through a month of trial by fire, would have glommed on to and internalized, interpreting them not as small hiccups but as deep indicators of my failure as a person. Instead, through the lessons learned over the previous week and month, I decided to steer into skid, embrace the chaos of the moment and revel in the fact that while plowing ahead without the implicit shame of things not working out the way they were supposed to may be a little crazy, things tend to be better overall when you just let the craziness take hold and my life I think has been better for this realization than I could have ever anticipated.

I don’t know how to wrap this up, it’s sprawling and a bit rambling in parts and I’m not sure it even makes sense but I realized that writing these things is important to my process of processing but I’m gonna try to land this plane now. It is not lost on me that the exact end to one of the most transformative months of my life, if not the outright most, this 31 day period of personal chrysalis, happens to be Yom Kippur, a holiday whose entire premise is the concept of rebirth through accountability. I’ve never been one to believe in divine intervention or holy meaning. I mostly identify as Jewish because my dad escaped the Holocaust and holding on to the faith that got him through that has been an important part of his life and as such an important part of mine. That being said, there is some part of me that thinks this can’t be all coincidence. Part of me believes that surviving a month like this, literally and metaphorically, is indicative of some greater meaning. I’ve dealt with my own mortality in a more serious way than I have in years, and probably one of the most serious ways I ever have. I’ve been lucky enough to learn so many lessons over the past month and I can’t shake the feeling that it happened to be this month for reasons I may never fully understand and that’s fine. Not everything is ours to understand, but what is important to understand is that the only way to ever truly get out of something is to go through it. Otherwise we’re always haunted by the idea of what is on the other side of that fire and that will always hamper your ability to move ahead with your eyes fully forward and to me that’s the only way I want to move forward with things anymore.