Who I Admire

When you're a kid your suppose to have a role model -someone to look up to. But I honestly didn't need one until I was a teen. ThenI really needed one.

My teen years were sh*t -specifically freshman year. That as the darkest time in my life. I've come so far and it's been so long it's hard for me to remember it all and express to you the way it wa back then. I remember facts. Like the fact that I learned my mom was an alcoholic. My step-sister Sarah was in the upstairs hallway with me and we were listening to our mom laughing really loudly down stairs while she was watching TV. I said, "Why is she acting so weird?" And Sarah said, "She's drunk again." It was then that the light dawned on me and all the puzzle pieces fit together. Ohhhhh, that's why mom acts the way she does. So it's a choice she made. It's her fault she's like this...

I deeply resented my mother shortly after for the next 5 years or so. I began keeping mental tabs of all the messed up things she would do and held each one against her silently.

She stumbled into my room to kiss me goodnight with Budweiser on her breath. She implied I had stolen money intended for school lunches when she gave me a $5 a couple nights before instead of the $10 she thought she had given but was too drunk to remember. She yelled at me for "hogging"the remote and went so far as to make me and my sisters sign a piece of paper that said we would not watch TV downstairs without her permission. She came up to my room ad asked me why I wasn't more social like my sister Sarah. "Why don't you go out with your friends more? Why don't you have more after school activities?" Sarah was smart. She would leave the house entirely for hours to stay away from the tension. I thought hiding in my room was good enough. Obviously it wasn't. "Why are you always in your room so much? Why don't you come down and watch TV?" "You are so ungrateful. You don't realize the sacrifices I have made for you." "Why do you love your dad? You know he doesn't really care about you".

I hated my mom and avoided her like the plague. School wasn't much better though. I had one close friend until she got a boyfriend. Then I was all alone. I spent most of my time in the girls' locker room at lunch reading The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I liked to read, draw, watch TV, play video games, and listen to music. Anything to distract and escape from reality.

I was depressed for about a year. Then I decided to contemplate suicide. I came to the conclusion that I feared death too much and I could never physically harm myself. Hope still remained.

All this to say that John Rzeznik saved me in a way no other person had or could have at the time.

When I first heard the song Iris on the radio, I thought it was something that had been around forever that I had never heard before. In reality it had just come out that year. I still claim the song as my own, though it doesn't mean as much to me now as it did back then. "And I don't want the world to see me cause I don't think that they'd understand, when every thing's meant to be broken I just want you to know who I am".

That song specifically, but also the album Dizzy Up the Girl by the Goo Goo Dolls resonated with me like no other. It still does. Their songs feel like home. And at the time it made me feel like I wasn't alone. I looked up facts about the lead singer/ songwriter John Rzeznik. I knew he had been through something -you don't write something that personal without some serious history going on behind it.

John was born in Buffalo, NewYork in a working class part of town. His father was an alcoholic. On one occassion when he was 10, he saw his dad slapping his mom. He then hit his dad and then his mom hit John. She looked at John and said, "You don't hit your father -you respect him". John said, "I don't". 

When John was 15 his dad died suddenly of a diabetic coma. 6 months later his mom died of a heart attack. He came home and she was lying on the couch stone cold. He was then taken in by one of his older sisters. He moved into an apartment and tried getting his band together with his friends Robby and Mike. Robby is the only reason John is around today. Robby was there for John when John had nothing. After a couple years the band hit a break with a song called Name. Unfortunately it ended up getting overplayed on the radio and soon people turned against the Goos calling them sell outs. John went through a couple dark years afterwords. Alcohol and drugs were present throughout his teenage years and at least the alcohol for sure carried on into his young adult life.

Then came the album Dizzy Up the Girl, which actually got them nominated for a Grammy. Damn you Barbara Streisand for taking it from it's rightful owners... I don't really want to go much more into the history of the band. For me, finding out about what John had been through and how he hadn't let his past weigh him down and end his future was enough.

I saw it as a sign I could do the same. I don't quite know how to explain the way I evolved as a person along the same lines as the way John Rzeznik and the Goos evolved as a band and people, but here goes:

Dizzy Up the Girl was a dark album with edge and pain. Some would suggest it bordered on being Emo, but knowing where the songs were coming from given John's history I'd tell those people to go f* themselves. In my teenage years I felt the songs as if I had written them. Especially the ones about feeling hopeless as you watch someone lose themselves to drugs and alcohol.

Then there came Gutterflower. It takes balls to write a song like Sympathy and then share it with other people. It was then I realized why I liked their songs so much. They were singing Truth. It wasn't polished and it wasn't pretty. It was just Truth. I had more respect for them (as I still do now) more than any other band for that simple fact alone.

Then came Let Love In. I was a senior in high school 2006 wen this CD came out. I bought it the day it was released. Unlike the previous albums that had been more about internal struggle and personal hardships, this one was more globally conscious. It spoke of the need for love that the world was lacking. It spoke to peace in a time of war. In fact while Green Day was off hating on Bush and the disaster the war had brought to America, The Goos were singing, "Can't we try to win this peace, because we're never going to win this war". It was the first response in the form of peace and Letting Go towards the war that I had heard from anyone.

Better Days is the only Christmas song I like in the history of ALL Christmas songs. "Cause I don't need boxes wrapped with strings, designer love, and empty things -Just a chance that maybe we'll find Better Days". I hate Christmas. I hate that we've lost sight of it's original purpose: To give to those in need, to love everyone, to come together to celebrate God, the world, and the lives we've been blessed with... Better Days is the only Christmas song I like.

Then they came out with Something for the Rest of Us last year. This is my favorite album of theirs. Sh*t. Can't even describe it. It's inspirational and uplifting -but in a down to earth, not-so-cheesy way. The main focus of this album is the war. The Goos received hundreds of fan letters from people who described what it was like to have family serving in the military overseas. The constant fear and stress from being apart. The struggle of separation. This is what the new album speaks to. It's not a political stance For or Against the war. It is for the uniting Truth that we ALL suffer during the war, especially those who are in it or those who have loved ones in it.

It also speaks to the love and freedom that comes through acceptance. Take Me As I Am and One Night are two of my favorite songs.

Lastly the album gave me something I hadn't heard in music before. Soldier was probably originally written by John speaking about his mom and what she went through. But when it hit me I interpreted it into my own life. I now see it as a song representing my sister Emily and what she went through.

When you came back I knew you'd have a story/ 
You need someone to ease the pain of living life/ 
You're like a soldier in the fray seeking shelter from all the madness that you've seen raining down now... 
I know things change/ 
You're world has slipped away/ 
I know things change/ 
But you're living like a soldier caught in the fray/ 
Don't lose your faith/ 
It's not so cold/ 
It's not too late... 
When you were naive you were so invincible/ 
And you laughed at anyone and anything that ever got in your way/
But now the mirror shows the change/ 
And you don't see that you're sinking back into the crowd/ 
An echo faded... And I never thought I'd see/ 
You living on your knees/ 
A slave to some disease that holds you back now/ 
And you can look inside of me/ 
But the answers that you seek/ 
And everything you need/ 
Are all inside you know...

That was Emily. Freshman year of high school to Freshman year of college. Emily has ADD. Our mom put her on a medication called Aderol. Aderol f*d up her physical development -which is the reason she is 5 inches shorter than me despite of our tall genes in the family and also the reason she often gets mistaken for a 16 year old even though she is 20. The worst thing Aderol did was acting as a depressant when she was in high school. Teens are already depressed. When you throw a depressant into the mix you get suicidal thoughts on a regular basis, a dark-cloud demeanor, and an empty shell of the person you once were. When Emily was finally old enough to make her own calls, she got off the Aderol almost immediately. She had been taking it since she was 7 and went through a state of withdrawals that left her weak and bed-ridden for about 2 months.

Unfortunately the medication was a necessary evil when it came to helping Em focus on her school work. And her grades did go down significantly when she went off of it. Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Root Beer helped her focus a little. I asked her why she didn't go back on, not knowing the full extent of the depression it had caused her. She told me, "When I was on Aderol I would think about killing myself a lot. I had day dreams about going to the pool, diving in, and drowning myself. I don't want to go back on the Aderol".


It's hard for an older sister to find out how degraded and empty her younger sister has become while I was away at college unable to be there for her while she was going through high school alone. I felt like I had failed to protect her -like I was supposed to look after her.


Em's better now, for the most part. Still struggling with some emotional issues, but she's definitely better than she was. When the song Soldier hit me, it was like a gift. It's the song I would have played for her back then if I had known what she was going through. It isn't a touchy-feely empty song of overly idyllic hope. It says, I know you are struggling and I know it's hard, but you have more strength than you give yourself credit for and you have to use it to pull yourself up now. Don't let yourself go.