About Life After Load Out
For years, my life happened behind folding tables, backstage doors, festival barricades, rental cars, hotel rooms, and thousands of miles of highway.
I helped build Punk Rock Saves Lives with the idea that music could be used to make a real difference. What I didn’t understand was how much of myself I would give to it along the way.
Life After Load Out is the part of the story that doesn’t make the social media recap.
It’s about what happens behind the scenes of a nonprofit operating inside the punk rock world: the incredible moments, the absolute chaos, the mistakes, the people, the exhaustion, the criticism, and the pressure to somehow always get everything right.
It’s also about what happens when the person behind all of that starts trying to build a life outside of it.
I’m not writing this as a spokesperson. I’m not writing it to make Punk Rock Saves Lives look perfect. And I’m definitely not writing it because I have everything figured out.
I’m writing because I want a record of what this actually felt like.
Sometimes it’ll be about punk rock. Sometimes nonprofit life. Sometimes it’ll be an old road story I can’t believe actually happened. And sometimes it’ll just be about learning how to exist in a normal Tuesday when, for years, normal wasn’t really part of my vocabulary.
This is the story behind the story.
The good, the bad, the funny, the ugly, and everything that happens after load out.
