The Story

This album began the day after I learned my best friend had attempted suicide.

We hadn’t spoken in nearly six months. I had become so consumed by my own life, my own spirals, my own grief, that I disappeared from the people I loved most. When I got the news, it hit me like a train. I didn’t know what to do with the weight of it except sit down with a guitar I hadn’t touched in nearly a decade and start writing.

What came out first were not grand revelations or poetic metaphors. It was the small things-distractions, obsessions. Ways I had abandoned myself and everyone around me without even realizing it. That first song woke me up. It forced me to look directly at the life I was living and the pain I had been trying to outrun.

At the same time, I was deeply in love in a way that felt beautifully simple and impossibly devastating. It brought a kind of euphoria and heartbreak that my nervous system could not hold. I spent most days unable to breathe, unable to sleep, unable to recognize myself, and numbing with anything I could find. I genuinely believed dying might be the only way to make the intensity stop. Then, I was diagnosed with PTSD.

I realized I needed help. I checked myself into Reprieve Recovery treatment center for six weeks with a yoga mat, clothes for seven days, and the guitar I had just rediscovered. My phone was taken away, and for the first time in a long time, I had nowhere to run from myself.

Before checking in, I joked to my friends, “What if I come out of treatment with an entire album?”

That is exactly what happened.

Some of these songs were written on the porch at dusk in my favorite chair. Some were written crying beneath a willow tree. Most were written in the emotional aftermath of our daily process groups, when the walls inside me had finally cracked open enough to let honesty through.

These songs became a way to survive. A way to understand grief, trauma, fear, longing, shame, tenderness, love, and acceptance—though often a reluctant acceptance. They were written from the most honest place I knew how to reach. These songs were never meant to be perfect. They were meant to be true.

Songs I Wrote Instead of Dying is exactly what it sounds like. A collection of songs written during the hardest season of my life—songs that carried me back home to my own heart when I thought I had lost it for good.