The Detour Project

My Background

I was 14 years old when my father died by suicide, and my last words to him were in anger. We were in his car, running errands and we were fighting about my math grades. I was failing math (again) and my Dad was really upset. This was something that we fought about frequently because it was my worst subject, and he made his living as an accountant. This time seemed different somehow though. He was literally screaming at me, and I didn’t understand it because he’d never yelled at me this way before. I thought it was way over the top, and I got pretty freaked out.

When we got back to his place (my parents had already been divorced for about 6 years and this was Dad’s weekend), I called my mom and I asked her to come and pick me up, I didn’t want to spend the rest of the weekend with Dad. I waited in my room until she pulled up in the drive and I ran out the front door and screamed at my Dad “I hate you and I never want to see you again!” It was the last thing I ever said to him.

Over the next few months, he tried to call – I wouldn’t answer the phone, I wouldn’t listen to the messages and I wouldn’t call him back. He sent letters in the mail that I never opened. I just ripped them up and threw them out. I was 14 years old, angry, and determined to be right – to win this fight and not back down.

My mother got a call from our step-mom one night and was told that Dad was missing, she didn’t know what was going on, but he was acting really strange when he left. Not knowing what was going on or what was going through his mind, my Mom took my brother and I over to our grandma’s house. Now that he was missing, and nobody knew where he was or what he was doing, all I could think about was how sorry I was that I said those things to him. I went to sleep hoping and praying that someone would find him and bring him back home safe, so that I could apologize, and tell him that I loved him. I dreamt of a reunion, he was smiling, we both apologized, and we hugged. Everything was all right. Then morning came. My grandma made breakfast for my brother and I and we ate in silence. I knew something was up. They took us into the spare room where we had slept, sat us down and told us the news. The police had called very early that morning. They found our Dad, and he had taken his own life. I remember tears, shock and detachment from that morning. It was like I literally walked away from my physical body and was watching a horrible nightmare.

How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this? How could God let this happen? Nothing made sense anymore. I would spend the next 10 years of my life blaming myself for my Dad’s death. It didn’t matter how many people told me that it wasn’t my fault, and that there was nothing I could have done. I believed that I killed him and I spent every day of those 10 years trying to kill the guilt, shame, anger and pain that came with his suicide. I shut down. I gave up. I did my best to self-destruct. Life sucks anyway, it will always suck, and so I might as well try to have some fun and experience every wild thing I can before I go out with a bang. My goal was to be dead by the time I was 25. I would die of a drug overdose, or alcohol poisoning, or some horrible, bloody accident. I dreamed about my funeral and who might show up and what they might say.

“Even with everyone around, I still feel alone”

That quote, written on the back of a poster in my bedroom, is how my journey back up through the darkness that had surrounded me for so long began. I had hit what felt like rock bottom. I had no self esteem or sense of self worth, I was angry and filled with anxiety all the time, I sat alone in my room every night drinking myself into oblivion, I felt completely isolated from everyone in my life and I was over $100,000 in debt.

I was completely self-centered, lacked the ability to empathize with, or relate to others (even my closest friends), and my motivation in any relationship was “what can this person do for me”. I was unable to maintain a romantic relationship, lonely, isolated, empty and sad – all the time. I would constantly find myself in a fit of cynical rage because I believed that people kept letting me down (or rather, not living up to MY expectations).

I was miserable. A constant thought in the back of my mind was “there has to be more to life than this.” Something was wrong, something was missing, and all my friends were moving on happily with their lives – graduating from college, starting careers, and starting families. They were living and enjoying life. I was watching it all from the sidelines. I couldn’t feel anything so I started acting recklessly in an attempt to get a thrill, to feel something… an adrenaline rush, fear, ANYTHING.

“You will be alone forever, nobody will ever really love you.”
“You are born to lose and you have failed at anything you’ve ever tried.”
“You are not good enough, or talented enough, or strong enough.”
“You are better off dead, and nobody cares anyway.”

These were the things the voice inside my head was saying, anytime I was alone, for years. This voice was constant, and deafening, and I did whatever I could to try and drown it out. These beliefs and insecurities are what I was hiding behind my smile, and my obnoxious, reckless behavior.

I didn’t have the guts to make an actual suicide attempt, so I got really high and I got really drunk. I got behind the wheel when I could barely see and drove as fast as I could. I slept around. All the while secretly praying for death by some horrible accident or overdose. I craved and chased instant gratification with reckless abandon hoping to self-destruct. After a life that seemed to be full of mistakes, heartbreak and loss I just didn’t see a point in doing anything else.

I was 24 years old, going nowhere, filled with cynicism and despair. At the end of every reckless, drunken night, the sadness and despair would creep back in as I passed out, praying for death to come in the night so that this nightmare would finally be over. This was my depression, my darkness, my existential crisis – and it was with me all the time.

“How did I get here? How did things get so bad? What have I done to deserve this miserable joke of a life?”

These are the questions I wanted to answer, the questions I needed to answer. I hated feeling this way. I hated being angry and sad all the time and I hated the feeling that my life was going nowhere. It became my mission to answer these questions and do whatever I had to do to find some peace and balance and happiness in my life.

After asking myself these questions over and over again (for years), I would gradually realize that it was MY actions, and the choices I was making that were feeding this darkness. All of my self-destructive thoughts and behaviors had only contributed to feeling increasingly hopeless and worthless. Things just kept getting worse, until I recognized and accepted that I had to make some serious and significant changes in my life, and how I looked at things.

I wanted to be happy again. I wanted to love and be loved. I wanted to go home.

Writing had been a passion of mine ever since I was young. I had piles of notebooks filled with journal entries, short stories, poems, and song lyrics. It had been a few years since I had actively written anything and I had to get back into the habit of doing that when I was in my darkest places. This would help in a couple different ways. First – it would allow me to take all of these dark, self-loathing thoughts out of my head (where they would linger, multiply and consume me) and put them somewhere else. Getting all of this toxic stuff out of my head, and on to paper was a great relief in itself. Second – it would allow me to look at what was going on in my head from an outside perspective – it was like stepping out of my own head for a while.

I spent a few years traveling with some friends who were in a band. I helped sell t-shirts and CD’s at the shows, load and unload gear, etc. These guys were an amazing band, and amazing friends. It was their music, and their friendship, and the incredible people that I met along the way (some of who would become lifelong friends) that helped me through some of the darkest times of my life. Admittedly, the times and adventures were pretty wild and reckless back then, but this experience (along with another experience which I will describe later) helped me find some self-confidence and inspired me to pick up my guitar again and start writing songs. The first song I wrote was called “No Resolve” which was about how my Father’s suicide had affected me. Shortly after writing No Resolve, along with a few others, I met a girl named Anna who played piano and also wrote songs. Anna and I got together one afternoon and it was pure magic. She whipped out the piano riff that would become No Resolve’s signature in about 5 minutes, Student Driver Band was born and we were off and running.

After spending some time writing more songs, my friends helped Anna and I record our first full-length album. After releasing it on our own, they graciously allowed us to open up for them at some of their shows. Getting out there and performing these songs really helped me find an outlet for all of the toxic emotions that had been building up inside me for years.

Music has always been a huge part of my life. Whenever I felt like nobody else in the world could understand me, or what I was going through, music was my salvation. Just turning that stereo up in my room or in my car and getting lost validated every emotion and helped to release some of the pressure, anger and sadness. Now I was making my own music, and to be out there, chasing that dream, and following my passion, with support from my friends was incredibly empowering.

I had found a way to express my darkest fears and deepest secrets and my thoughts of suicide began to fade and became replaced with the will to survive, and do whatever it took to get through this. I thought, the longer I do this, the more I write, the more I sing these songs, the more the pain will subside. This was a crucial first step – expressing myself – but it was only the beginning.

Next: Taking Responsibility

** this post is an excerpt from Building a Foundation for Happiness