Happy New Year! 2019 already. A lot to look forward to, and a lot to look back on.
One of my favorite things to do as the new year approaches is count down my favorite songs of the year. I have such a wide and strange taste in music that it always winds up being way different than the typical end of the year countdown. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably saw the countdown progress.
(Start here, keep going until you hit #1! )
And if you reached the end of the thread, it’ll lead you right back here for an explanation as to why I picked the #1 song as the best of the year.
The song of the year, for those who don’t have the time to follow the thread and listen to 50 different Spotify links, is “Ghost” by the band Badflower
It gets the crown over established acts like A Perfect Circle, Tom Morello, Portugal. The Man, Nothing More, and 49 other songs on the countdown (over 160 originally getting consideration), as the best of 2019.
It rocks, of course. It has a powerful message, yes. Musically, it’s a fantastic song. But what sent it to number 1 was the chord it struck for me on a personal level.
The song details the downward spiral of a remorseful subject who continually self-harms and attempts to take his own life, until the final extended chorus where he succeeds.
Let me preface it with this…
I never considered myself suicidal. I never got to the point where I thought that killing myself was the only way out. I know there were always people out there in way worse mental shape than I ever was. And to this day, I accept that I was an odd, lonely kid in junior high into high school—but I never felt the depth of despair that lead young people to put a blade on their wrist.
But I knew people like that. I had two of my classmates commit suicide during my four years in high school. I have relatives who are chronically depressed that I’m afraid to leave alone. And I have friends who suffer, who have made idle threats, and who have made attempts on their own lives. All the while I empathize and I try to help, but I believed that I never truly understood because I had never felt that horrible emptiness that would lead me to self harm.
This song, and certain lyrics, made me realize how close I was to the precipice of that despair.
“All I really wanted was someone to give a little fuck
But I waited there forever and nobody even looked up.”
Public high school is absolutely brutal on a young person’s social mentality. It instills the idea of subdivisions of students, whether you’re on the inside or the outside. And worst of all, it made you believe that you needed the approval of every single student and teacher you came in contact with. Some select few got that approval, and some knew enough to not care about needing everyone’s approval.
I was unfortunately neither one of them. I had a few friends, I was in band, drama, and on the golf and baseball teams, but I still felt like I was mostly just a background character, a walk-on part in my own show.
“This life is overwhelming, and I’m ready for the next one.”
End of sophomore year into junior year was the time I felt most alone. And my grades were slipping. I was an advanced student when I was young. I was at a 3rd grade reading level in kindergarten, I was given extra reading assignments in 1st grade because I aced every bit of cirriculum the teacher had, I won every single spelling bee from 3rd to 8th grade (except 4th, and believe you me, I never misspelled “government” again for the rest of my life!). But the rest of the students caught up with me over time to the point that, by junior year, I was the one struggling. Things became more difficult, and the willingness to learn that was there early on was shutting down.
“I thought about my friends, and the way I didn’t give enough”
My classmates were beginning to take the PSATs, talking about colleges, talking about majors, graduation next year. And … I just couldn’t get excited about any of it. I was feeling the pressure beginning to mount, and failure becoming imminent. And trying to figure out how I was going to graduate, what I was going to do after I graduated, where I was going to college, plotting my entire life out (as some students were) made me feel like I was trying to climb Mt. Everest with nothing but a pair of mittens and a snow shovel.
For most of my junior year, I felt like I was on a conveyor belt getting molded and formed to factory setting being prepared to be shipped off but… oh no! I was a defect heading to the incinerator.
Even the slightest thing, like algebra homework or making it to drama rehearsal on time, became overwhelming.
“I should have left a letter, but I had nothing to write about.”
I felt pointless, like all that was being led to was a trite life of mediocrity because I had my shit together and then it all fell apart slowly. And of course, I suffered in silence. I didn’t tell my parents, my sisters, my friends… no one knew, because I thought this was normal, and I didn’t believe I was depressed. Depression is often affiliated with a deep sadness, but now I know it’s not even close. Depression doesn’t feel like anything; it’s a numbness that devours your emotions until you’re a husk of your former self; until you don’t even remember what it’s like to even feel sad, or happy, or angry, or even the standard malaise that students feel… All you feel is exhaustion with everything. But I didn’t know that then. I wasn’t sad, ergo I wasn’t depressed. Just numb, overwhelmed, uninterested, and accepting my own failure as an inevitability…
I lived that way from sophomore to most of junior year. Then, by the punctual crossing of fate, I snapped out of it. I was invited over to hang out with some underclassmen, realized that people actually cared about what I thought, what I said, and how I was, and by the time I graduated high school, I had the best damn year of my life. And I haven’t been that close to despair since—don’t get me wrong, I still have low moments but nothing as bad as that year.
No, I never felt suicidal. But when I first heard this song, “Ghost”, and processed it, I had a flash that had I not so luckily “snapped out of it” maybe the course of the song was where I was going to end up. Overwhelmed, numbed to reason, self-loathing, and willing to end it all.
I wish everyone who suffered had that realization; that moment that they just snap out of it. But it doesn’t work that way. If not for the support of others, even unbeknownst to them that I was suffering to begin with, I don’t know how much further into the void I would have slipped. Maybe this song is a parallel universe where I did fall into that emptiness…
Who knows what would have happened then? This song made me realize how close I was to the edge. It struck me on a personal level that I haven’t thought about in over 17 years.
For that reason, this was the #1 song of 2018.
A Story About Waffles 