Story Behind the Song: "Inventory Your Life"

In March of 2016, my ex-boyfriend John took his own life. I was completely devastated.

Everything in my life felt utterly ridiculous: cleaning my apartment, deciding what to eat, going anywhere… Any thought of the future at all felt so self-indulgent and stupid.

I couldn’t deal with music at all. I stopped booking shows, I didn’t go out to listen, I didn’t write anything. At the time, I was only working twice a week in a coffeeshop, which was about all I could handle.

Cat and I were about 6 months into our relationship, and it was going exceptionally well. That fact filled me with a strange and particular guilt. How can the universe allow one human to feel so bad for so long that the only way out is suicide while another human is experiencing joy like they’ve never felt? How could I continue forward, surrendering myself into that joy knowing that John had been so miserable? How could I be so selfish? I just couldn’t reconcile it.

But over the next days and weeks, my perspective swiveled. Things began to come into focus; I became very self-aware. I realized that my reasons for playing music had shifted over the previous 5 years, that I had been hung up on surface-level shit, had succumbed to the trap of comparison, was chasing things I thought I needed that ultimately didn’t matter.

Then, Cat gave me some radical advice, and I took it. He suggested I only do the things I wanted to do. It sounds silly, but for me it was so profound. And that’s what I did. For a long time, I mostly just wanted to watch tv and eat and sleep. And only doing these things allowed me the space I needed to grieve. But over time, my interests became interesting again. I wanted to meet up with friends, I wanted to go to a bar… I wanted to write a song.

Inventory Your Life is the first song I wrote after John died. Ours had been a complicated relationship, fraught with tensions and insecurity. The breakup was not a clean one and I never felt like things between us had been resolved. But by sifting through the rubble of his suicide, I learned that you cannot deprive yourself of joy just because another person has trouble finding it. And you cannot blame yourself for another person’s unhappiness. You can feel sadness for that person; you can care about them and try to help them. But you cannot carry the weight of a decision that they made.

So you move forward, seeking joy and love. And if you’re lucky, you find it.