addiction
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in group one patient replaces another. it’s really hard to see someone you love backslide. and sometimes it’s really difficult to remember that there are so many more sides to someone than their illness. witnessing the cycle of people coming and going in a treatment, the weight of loving someone who struggles — if God…
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right now, my guitar is just a few steps away, but it might as well be 10,000 miles. there’s a distance between us that’s hard to explain — a space that feels impossible to cross. depression (in my case, a co-occurring mental disorder) has a way of making everything feel slow, like the world keeps…
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once, on a bus, I felt I’d lived another life, another time. it made me think: if I were somewhere else, lived in a different era, I’d still want to be a musician. to be alive, awake, and tuned into everything, even the things that hurt. I don’t want to die; I just sometimes wish…
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it’s dark at 5 pm now. dinner is at 6 pm. mom and abuela are making something special tonight, Spanish croquettes, one of my favorites. every year, this part of fall sneaks up on me, and I can feel the change in my chest, like a heavy ache. there’s something about losing those daylight hours…
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our group leader uses this cool exercise to help us reflect on and address the fears in our lives. she calls it fear in a hat. in this exercise, each person anonymously writes down a fear on a piece of paper. you’re supposed to begin with the words, the worst thing that could happen would…
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I don’t know why other people make songs. I just want to show you how my life feels. here are my first 11. I recorded all of them in my room at home last year. this is the order in which I imagined the songs would be heard. I hope you will click through some…
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this is a new song called laundromatic. the tactile nature of going there, the act of washing and cleansing, the feeling of warm clothes and the smell of fresh laundry, I find comforting and soothing. and transforming, particularly on the days that I am low: the city on hard days. riding my bike past so-called…
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stand on any sweltering street corner of Brooklyn in July and something becomes really clear: people are edgy. maybe it’s the steam that rises from subway grates. or maybe the smell of black trash bags baking in the summer sun. if you study their faces, no one appears to be in a good mood. sometimes…
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one of the new people in group is Angelique, who went to a music and performing arts high school on the upper west side where a lot of the kids are on drugs I’ve heard. she used to drink but then she began using opioids because she says it’s not as easy to track missing…
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when I was little, this straight-laced little kid, I sang in church all the time. the choir loft at St. Veronica’s seemed very near the sky. singing enveloped me. there was no sense of performance or judgment. no pressure. I just sang. I was aware of religion. I can’t say I understood much about practicing…
cookie nieves 