Behind-the-Song: Sallad pt.1 (Patreon)

I'll fix this image later, but I still don't have the shots from the photoshoot 😭

AKA "Seizure" Sallad (sad ballad), as I'm sure you all know by now, I started writing this song about having seizures all the time. I had my first seizure late February of 2020 the night before a massive snow storm. I was terrified and had no idea what had happened, but I got up and went to work the next morning anyway...I then made my dad drive me across town to see my doctor despite the foot of snow already on the ground 😅 I wrote this song December of 2020 after I'd been in for 3 EEGs (brain wave monitoring) and been put on the waitlist for an extended stay at the hospital (which I didn't get called in for until December 2022 🙃). At this point, I had started having seizures 1-3 times per week.

When I finished writing this song, I honestly felt particularly proud that, while I had intended to write it to process how I felt about my physical health, it ended up also being applicable to my mental health, which felt special since I figured more people would be able to connect with the song 🥰

Can't explain why I'm feeling caged and claustrophobic / Needing space, but that's not an option and I know it / In a crowd alone...

Lowkey, this line is about living at home with my parents; it was the pandemic, so it was a uniquely tough time for most. I spent almost all of my time tucked away in my bedroom unless no one was home. I hated living there, and it had been a toxic situation for me for...my lifetime, truthfully. But especially so in the years leading up to the pandemic. I desperately needed to get out of there, but I felt particularly trapped as I was afraid to move out on my own with the new health issues. 

I think many of us are unfortunately familiar with feeling alone even when there's people around. It's a weird dichotomy, simultaneously wanting space and needing to not feel isolated. I needed to get out of my parents' house, but I needed to be looked after... so, stuck, but alone.

When I started writing this song, I was already considering moving out anyway as it didn't seem like my health mattered to the people around me. I felt completely alone in it, and absolutely terrified. But expectations were always high and having seizures was apparently no excuse to have a bad day; a bed day.

And the pain drowns me in waves I can't see coming / It's hard to take when your body's going numb and I lose control...

This feels pretty straight forward 😅 I refer to drowning a lot in lyrics. I think because just the visual of a tide/waves coming crashing down relentlessly and not being able to figure out which way is up, or not having a chance to come up for air seems kind of unparalleled to me in terms of adequately describing overwhelm.

After about a year or so, I started to recognize patterns in how I would feel before seizures, but they weren't always present, and they were difficult to distinguish from regular migraine symptoms. So in that first year, I struggled a lot to know when I might just suddenly lose control of my body.

For me, the more consistent feeling pre-seizure was a feeling like my whole body was shutting down. Sometimes this happened suddenly and all at once, but other times it took hours. And even when I noticed it, I never knew how long it would be from feeling my body shut down to actually doing the interpretive funky chicken 😅🙃

I love, though, that while this is very clearly (when you know what the song is about) talking about an overtly physical problem, but I think it's still very applicable to mental health. Dealing with mental health struggles can be incredibly painful in so many ways, and I think a lot of people are familiar with the numbed feeling of depression... I hope that's not true, but 🤷‍♀️ So I'm jist grateful that this song is, quite unintentionally, ambiguous enough so as to be more widely relatable; to speak to more people.