Here’s the Deal with My New Album “Details”
Content Warning/Spoiler: Mental Illness
Today I’m releasing a pretty sad album. I usually avoid saying too much about the content of my songs, for fear of ruining their mystique, spoiling what they mean to someone else, or compromising my own confusing commitment to personal privacy despite the fact that I sing about my deepest personal thoughts for a living. However with this album and this particular moment in my life, I feel compelled to step outside of that for a minute.
If you’ve ever listened closely to any of my albums, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that I’ve struggled with debilitating depression and anxiety for the past 15 years. It’s always been a part of my music, because it’s always been a part of my life, but this record feels like the first time I’ve written about it instead of writing through it. It’s not the subject of every song and I promise the album isn’t a total bummer all the way through (unless that’s what you want, in which case I invite you to hear a soft, comforting ooze of irony in every affectionate or hopeful line), but it’s very much there.
I guess I’m partially writing this to say… I’m good? I don’t assume “how is singer/songwriter Lauren O’Connell doing?” is a prevailing thought in any of your days, but a few of you who are especially familiar with my catalog will ask sometimes, which is very kind. More importantly, a lot of people have mental illnesses, and I also wanted to say, “hi, me too!” and share some of my experience. I have no real advice and spend most days feeling like I am still in middle school and falling up a flight of stairs in slow motion, but if you like my music, maybe this will matter to you in some way.
Let me start by saying that at various times over the years I’ve been diagnosed with depression (ranging from major depressive disorder to moderate dysthymia, depending on which clinician you ask), anxiety (though I don’t remember which colorful descriptors were included), ADHD (inattentive/non-hyperactive type, which makes me wonder why the “H” is included at all; basically “scotch and soda, hold the soda”), bipolar disorder (by one psychiatrist when I was 19 who was a real wildcard and only met with me once or twice), insufficient levels of various vitamins (though D seems to be everybody’s favorite; I blame this heliocentrism fad we’re experiencing right now), and “maybe you should try harder to make some friends” (which I can’t find in the DSM-5).
Don’t get me wrong — it’s been useful and comforting to put labels on these experiences at different points in my life, but when I list them all out now it feels kind of arbitrary and ridiculous. Maybe that’s because I have enough stability and perspective at this point to see all the clinical threads woven together as a single, enchanted tapestry of horrors that is by turns unsettling, mildly distracting, an actual nightmare, or just a normal unobtrusive piece of wall decor, depending on how it catches the light on a given day. You can also just say “Lauren’s a little jumpy and gets quiet sometimes.” Whatever.
In any case, I started realizing in my early teens that I felt disconnected from other people and I wasn’t turning into the person I expected. Being a teenager is hard for everyone, and maybe that on top of a genetic predisposition for mental illness put me especially and irretrievably deep in the feedback loop of self-doubt and isolation. I don’t really know. But I turned into a lonely kid who was more or less terrified of everyone and everything, and had no interest in much of anything. I spent most of my time either asleep or freaking out, and usually alone. It only got worse with time, and eventually my parents insisted that I get treatment.
(I’ll briefly digress to acknowledge that I’m privileged as hell. Aside from the fact that I’ve often been certain that my brain was trying to kill me, just about everything in my life has been aligned for me to succeed. I have an exceptionally supportive family who has believed in me even when it didn’t make sense, and had the means and willingness to help me in every way they knew how. I’ve had a lot of room to fail in my life, and the mere fact that I’ve never had to worry about being homeless due to mental illness is an enormous blessing.)
I’ll skim over the details, but over the years, insecurity and shame made it nearly impossible to confront my issues in any proactive way. I spent most sessions with my first therapist insisting that she didn’t understand anything because I was a very original and impossibly complex kind of fucked up that she couldn’t begin to fathom. (Yes, your middle-aged therapist definitely thinks you’re a fascinating, tortured enigma who is somehow also effortlessly cool. Way to build your brand, kiddo.) I was prescribed a slow-turning carousel of medications, most of which were unhelpful, a couple of which were scary, and one or two that seemed to help a little, but for most of my teenage and young adult life I just hated all of it.
If you’ve ever played psychotropic trial-and-error roulette, you probably know that it can be pure hell and extremely confusing to your sense of self. “What does feeling good feel like? Is it the one that makes me compulsively paint wonky still lifes of lamps at 4am? I am an artist, after all. What about the one that makes me not care that I’m always sad? If I don’t feel empty inside, how can I be sure that I’m still me? Is it a good sign that I’m whispering these questions to my reflection in a gas station bathroom hand-dryer? I guess I’ve never tried sleeping under my bed, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.”
A fun way to magnify that hellishness is to hide it from everyone you know and live in the constant fear that they’re going to find out that there’s something wrong with you. It may help to pretend that you just have a turbulent relationship with coffee and you have to go to the dentist a lot for some reason. Plenty of ways to make it your own! Just whatever you do, make sure you don’t give anyone the opportunity to empathize or understand. Combo multiplier if you already have a tendency toward social anxiety.
Jk obviously that’s awful and made things much worse.
I eventually settled into an antidepressant that worked well enough for me to basically function, or at least enough to hide what was going on with me. Still, my feeling of insecurity, alienation, and general wrongness outgrew anything I had previously liked about myself. As you may have guessed, I started playing guitar at some point (“thanks, Dad” for the rest of my life), which led to writing songs. It ended up being the only thing that really made me feel good or validated. My friends would come to my shows and listen to my first CD. I didn’t know how to talk about my feelings, but it turned out people could actually be excited to hear me sing about them.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t hold onto even the most menial job, and I dropped out of college after two-and-a-half semesters. “I quit school to follow my dreams,” was a fun narrative and I was all too happy to let people assume that. The truth is that I couldn’t hack it, for the same reasons I couldn’t hack it at anything other than singing about how I couldn’t hack it at anything. I panicked, quit, and retreated to my hometown to make another album with my music friends. It was largely upbeat and frenetic and probably full of red flags with regards to my mental state. I think there was some good stuff on there, but I also find 19-year old Lauren to be a pretty frustrating narrator and I kinda hate that it’s still on Spotify and I’m occasionally tempted to change my name, but it’s fine. It’s fine. Life’s a journey. It’s fine.
I’ve struggled with how deep or dark I wanna go here, but it feels important to me to acknowledge the most uncomfortable parts along with the tamer stuff, so here comes a heavy paragraph with zero jokes that you are invited to skip if that sounds triggering to you:
At various points over the years, I’ve been all the things mentioned above, as well as occasionally suicidal. I never made any attempts, but I’ve had times where it was a constant fantasy and I self-harmed. I have a couple not-very-visible but permanent scars. I assumed into my early twenties that I’d be dead by 25. I was in so much pain and it felt so hard to be a good person that there was no way I’d continue choosing to be alive every day for another several hundred days, never mind the full lifespan of an average human body. My brain will surprise me at random times with flickering projections of violent things happening to me or people I love. Sometimes I’ll flinch and tell whomever I’m with that I just got a chill, but really I just had a gruesome image hijack my consciousness for a moment. It’s been years since I hurt myself in any way, or felt close to doing so. The disturbing images come and go, and sometimes I won’t get them for months at a time, though I don’t know why. They’re a lot less powerful than they used to be. They’re no less awful, but I’m acclimated to the point that it almost feels like sneezing or Xing out a popup ad.
Okay, all done.
The good news is that I’m doing really well, and I think that’s why I felt capable of writing this album at this point in my life. The process has been cathartic, and I worked on some of these songs for years until they felt true to me.
It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what has made things better these past years, but I’ll try. Please don’t construe anything I say here as advice. Working through mental illness is a very personal process and nothing is universal.
It’s only in the past few years that I’ve felt comfortable sharing my experiences with the people in my life, and I can’t begin to explain how much anxiety and isolation that has alleviated. I don’t share it with everyone, simply because I don’t feel like I need to, but I have my core people who know basically everything. It helps that I live in the Bay Area, where mental illness and therapy are somewhat less stigmatized than in other places. I’ve developed relationships with incredible people who prioritize empathy and have helped me to do the same. This support system has given me a lot of stability from which to become comfortable and honest with myself about my mental health, and to work through it in painful ways without fear of spiraling into a crisis. I understand why I didn’t find that when I was younger, and it’s not anybody’s fault. But holy hell, I wish I’d understood just how common this stuff is and been able to talk to someone. It’s almost as though a culture of shame and repression is bad in some ways? I dunno. I’ll work on that theory.
I’ve tried to let go of how I’ve perceived myself for most of my life and disentangle my mental illness from my identity. I mean, I can’t, really. Even if medications were magic and could simply erase it all from my brain, it couldn’t undo the fact that I grew up feeling less capable and functional than other people, and that I learned to be afraid that everyone was going to figure it out at some point. I also was constantly aware that there was a weird, dark thing inside of my brain that was almost definitely the main driver of my creativity (it wasn’t), which was the one thing that was good about me (it’s not). It’s easy to self-mythologize and get attached to some fucked up emotional calling card. But if you’ve spent your whole life being sad and scared, it’s a pretty vain thing to insist on remaining that way simply because that’s become your best way to recognize yourself. I’m a sometimes-depressed person who writes bummer music but also sometimes I’m happy and I get groceries and ride the bus and I like to eat candy in moderation and look for cats in bodegas and jeez I contain multitudes. It’s fine.
I still take a daily medication for depression. I’d rather not say which because I feel weird name-dropping pharmaceutical brands, but it’s a common one. I may wish to stop taking it someday, but it works for now and I don’t experience any side effects, so I don’t want to mess with anything at the moment. I have taken meds for ADHD, which can be damn useful but have a lot of side effects, so I’m working on alternatives to those. I see a therapist, meditate, try to exercise, and find cannabis (CBD) helpful for anxiety and focus. I also make a point to work on other people’s projects to avoid getting completely sick of myself, and to be reminded that I am capable of being useful to other people. (LIFE HACK: it’s fun to have friends and do things with them.) I still have to figure out how to deal with all this stuff on a daily basis, but I spend most days very happy to be alive, even if it’s a begrudging admission sometimes.
Okay I said I had no advice but I was lying. You should ask your friends how they’re doing. Give them lots of space to answer and don’t let your discomfort get in the way. If someone shares something difficult or intense with you, thank them for it. If you think you’re the most awkward person in the world, I promise you’re not. You don’t have to give advice, and it’s probably better if you don’t most of the time. Just let them know you care about them and that they can share things with you.
If you’re going through some stuff right now, fuck. I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re alive, even if you’re not glad about it right now. It’s maddening that the human experience is the only one available to us, and normal, I’d say, to feel like we weren’t designed to survive it. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to love every day of your life, though it’s possible to reach a place where you love a good number of them. If you’ve survived every day of your life so far, holy shit, you’re doing great. It’s okay to just survive sometimes. You may feel useless, but I promise the world is lucky to have you.
If you are already a person who loves every day of your life, I’m very happy and grateful to have you in the world as well, and I’d like you to mail me a pint of your blood for research.
With lots of love and uncertainty,
Lauren O’Connell
Please don’t mail me your blood.
Listen to “Details” and read lyrics here.
If you or someone you care about needs some help:
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or 1–800–273–8255
