With only days remaining in 2017, I can say it was a year of extraordinary personal highs and lows.
Things started rough. I had lost one of the best friends of my adult life in mid-November of 2016. If that trauma wasn’t enough, something he shared with me during one of our final visits led to an existential tailspin that haunted me for months after. I essentially skipped the entire Christmas season. I lost both the motivation and interest to write, so I simply stopped. Despite several subtle nudges of encouragement, I didn’t bother with my ridiculous Christmas elf story until someone literally left a stuffed dog and a writing prompt at my front door, and thank God for that because I had no idea how badly I needed it.
January and February have never been my favorite months of year, so trudging through the winter with mountains of doubt and self-loathing, as so many worst-case scenarios about the country were being realized daily, didn’t help. As tightly as I thought I was keeping a lid on everything, signs of concern from people around me kept coming up; I’m a classic introvert so I dismissed them, telling myself I’d survived harder times before and I’d endure this as well. As winter dragged into spring, it was looking like any resolution that might happen would be coming much later than sooner.
One break from the routine I was looking forward to came on April 1st. Green Day was coming to St. Paul. A huge group of my cousins started planning to see them when the concert was first announced, but the tickets vanished before we were able to secure enough for everyone. My cousin John managed to get a block though, and offered me his final unclaimed ticket.
Green Day had always been one of those ubiquitous bands for me, the kind of auditory wallpaper immediately recognized on the radio, even before “American Idiot” became one of the albums I relied on the most to clarify the pain and rage I felt following my sister’s death. Their most recent album, “Revolution Radio,” had come out back in October, and was doing its best to drag me through my ongoing melancholia. I hadn’t seen them live before but they had a reputation for good shows, so I knew it would at least be a distraction from the empty routine of the past several months. I was looking forward to seeing my cousins at least as much as the show, enough to drive two hours out of the Cities just for a few hours more with them that afternoon, and then to spend the night at their house afterward. I needed cousin time.
We got back up to St. Paul in time to have dinner at a Thai place my cousin Sarah and her soon-to-be husband Tyler knew. Our seats in the arena were in the higher altitudes, but gave us a great view of the stage. I don’t remember who the open act was, but after they finished their set my cousin Dennis and I agreed they’d been better than a lot of the other warm-up bands we’d seen before.
When Green Day came on, I was immediately brought into that zone that can happen at a concert when you’re seeing a band you’ve known forever. They played through many of their classics, proving why those songs were classics in the first place. They played some songs I’d always been lukewarm about, revealing more depth and power than I had noticed before. They played through many of my lesser-known favorites, even reminding me of some songs that had been favorites long ago and had since fallen back into the mental archive, with the vitality of live performance bringing back why they had been so important to me.
The singer and guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, was on his A game. When we were in the car after the concert, I posted this on Facebook: “After tonight I can write this here without hesitation: As far as front-man live performance goes, Billie Joe Armstrong has reached the same level as Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen.” Coming from me, this is no small amount of praise. He didn’t stalk the stage so much as attack it, belting out each song as if the life and love of all the world hung in the balance, taking control of the anger and frustration that had come to define the times and redirecting it with an angered positivity, refusing to allow for the idea that the current state of society had to stand as it was, not just encouraging the audience to do what they could to make things better, but demanding it. He worked the crowd so effectively it was, without question, the loudest audience I’ve been a part of in my thirty-four years of concert-going.
When they played “Still Breathing,” one of my favorite songs from the newest album, something broke inside of me. The combination of the music, how I had personalized the lyrics in that way people tend to do with favorite songs, and the power of hearing it live was an epiphanal moment. I faced down the issues I’d been struggling with for the previous six months and realized I could be stronger than they were, even as they compounded each other. The possibility that I could take back my life and make it what I wanted began to feel real again as tears filled my eyes and I sang my throat raw. When they played another new favorite, “Forever Now,” near the end of the show, I may have temporarily left my body. By the time the song ended, I felt purged. And cleansed. And ready to move forward again.
Days later, I had turned an idea for a new story into an outline that only continued to grow throughout the spring, and became the first new legitimate manuscript I’ve written in at least five years. During that same spring, I took on something else I’ve avoided my whole life — one of those things that wasn’t big in the grand scheme, but was big for me — and conquered it. Other hurdles came and went as the summer went on, leaving me in a place where the sources of most of my anxieties were conclusively put behind me — some through circumstance, some through my actions.
The coming year promises to be a big one for me, since it will be the year I turn 50. On one hand it’s just another age and not any more significant than any other age, but, like I said earlier, I’m a classic introvert, which means among other things that I spend a lot of time in personal reflection. Because of this, I can see how almost everything that happens to me this year will somehow be filtered through the idea of turning 50.
The surprising thing about this, though? The way I’m facing it. I’m not starting the new year with any sense of low-grade dread, or the ongoing acceptance of an established and occasionally unfulfilling routine. I don’t see any reason to anticipate life taking a turn for the worse, or even going sideways on me. I look at the new calendar I just bought and see the days and months still to come as being open instead of empty.
This year, there’s only optimism.
Still Breathing
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