Life After Load Out

I have spent years telling the story of Punk Rock Saves Lives.

The number of people we registered. The lives potentially saved. The Narcan distributed. The volunteers who showed up. The tours, festivals, long drives, late nights, incredible moments and people who reminded us why we kept going.

What I haven’t talked about nearly enough is what it feels like behind the scenes. I know I typically have share when I finally hit a wall. When the noise from all of the critics were so loud…I couldn’t breathe. This is a blog for me. This is a blog of my every moments of breaking and every moment that I still showed up. This is a blog of the relentless volunteers who still get out there to swab every day.

And I think I’m finally ready to just share. unfiltered.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like I was allowed to be a person. There is this expectation that if you run a nonprofit, especially one built around kindness, community and helping people, you have to be perfect. I am not even going to sugar coat it…. there is an expectation the moment you say “punk”

You have to respond perfectly.
React perfectly.
Make every decision perfectly.
Always be available.
Always be grateful.
Never be frustrated.
Never disagree with someone else’s view
Never try to see two sides of a situation
Never be tired.
Never fuck up.

And God forbid you publicly say you’re happy.

I have started to notice this almost comical pattern in my life: the moment I share that I’m doing well, that I’m happy, that something good is happening, something seems to come out of the woodwork.

A message. A comment. An accusation. Someone angry. Someone questioning my character or our intentions. Someone who has decided they know exactly what happened without ever asking what was happening behind the scenes.

And I am tired. So fucking tired.

The truth is, I never wanted this life. I wanted to help people.

I wanted to go to shows, talk to people about the bone marrow registry and maybe help someone get the phone call that they were somebody’s match.

I wanted punk rock to save lives.

I didn’t want to constantly defend myself on the internet.

I didn’t want thousands of strangers to have opinions about decisions they weren’t there for. In reality it isn’t even strangers…. the loudest people are the ones who know me and decide they don’t need to talk to me in person. That they would rather attack me online.

I didn’t want every mistake, miscommunication or imperfect moment to become evidence that everything we’ve ever done must somehow be bad.

I didn’t want to feel like years of giving everything I had could be erased by someone’s version of a story.

And I definitely didn’t understand how much of myself I would lose doing this.

There were incredible moments. There still are. But there was also exhaustion.

There were missed holidays, missed birthdays, thousands and thousands of miles, hotel rooms, parking lots, venue bathrooms, gas stations, load-ins, load-outs and days when I had absolutely nothing left and still had people depending on me.

There were moments when I desperately needed someone to ask:

Are you okay?

Instead, it often felt like the question was:

Why aren’t you doing more?

That’s the part I want to document here. Not because I want sympathy.

Not because I want to convince everyone that I was right.

And not because this is going to become a weekly list of people who pissed me off.

I want somewhere that I can finally be honest about what this experience felt like.

The beautiful parts.

The fucking awful parts.

The people who changed my life.

The moments that broke my heart.

The ridiculous stories that could only happen when you spend years traveling around the country with a nonprofit at punk shows.

And the strange experience I’m having now of trying to figure out who I am when my entire existence isn’t tied to the next tour date.

For years, Punk Rock Saves Lives needed a version of me that could keep going.

Now I want to meet the version of me who doesn’t have to.

So this blog is for me.

It’s a record.

A release.

A constant testament to what it feels like to try so fucking hard, give so much of yourself, genuinely want to do something good in the world

and still have people tell you it wasn’t enough.

Maybe eventually I’ll figure out what “enough” actually looks like.

For now, I’m just going to tell the truth about what happened after everyone else went home.

Welcome to Life After Load Out.