Disclaimer: there's some language and dark themes in this entry. If you're easily offended by dark themes or strong language, this is your fair warning.

Let me tell you guys something: I love music. It’s something I do every day. I took music classes in high school and I played in a college band. I also played the guitar in a local band with some of my best friends. Music means a lot to me. It’s been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember.

My mother and father listened to a lot of music. My mother would sing songs and I guess I always just sorta sang along as well. I actually have a pretty decent voice just because I’ve been singing for so long and I’ve got an ear that can distinguish tone moderately well. I can tell when I’m not in key or when my voice sounds off. I mean, if I’ve been singing every day since I was 7 years old, then I should have 14 years of experience in singing. If only I had a voice coach.

I had an awful childhood. My father abused drugs and spent a lot of time in prison. He wasn’t our lives very much. And when he was, he would use drugs and become violent. If he wasn’t beating you, he was emotionally degrading you. My mother is just as bad as he is because she wouldn’t leave him alone. She had opportunity after opportunity to move on with her life and support her two kids, but she stayed with him and had three more kids. She’s just as much to blame as my father for my childhood or lack thereof.

When I was 15, we were removed and put into a foster home and never went back to live with our biological parents.

Music has helped me through a lot in my life. It’s what kept me sane through my teenage years. I’ve always best expressed myself through artistic means, but I was never good at drawing visual art, and writing stories was never my thing. When I got older and my writing skills improved, I could write poems, but they weren’t anything spectacular. No, music has always been my art. Now, I’m not great by any measure, but I’ve been playing for a number of years and so I’m mediocre at best.

When I turned 16, my foster parents bought me a guitar. And it couldn’t have come at much of a better time. From that time up until I turned 20, I was very depressed. It started to climax when I was almost 18. My life was a roller coaster of ups and downs. I was going through a time when I was dealing with my demons. All the times my father would look at me for forgetting one thing and go on a half hour tangent about how much of a piece of fucking shit I was. Or when I accidentally broke a glass and was beaten silly. I’ve forgiven him for that. But it’s impossible to forget. You don’t forget that kind of thing. For the first couple of years at the foster home, I mostly shoved those things under the rug. That worked well for a year or so. But they started to resurface as my high school graduation was closing in.

I had so many years of repression built up. I started to question my own self-worth. I questioned why I was allowed to live from time to time. Why God hadn’t killed me by then. As I write this, it’s hard for me to look back at myself back then and refrain from feeling awful for that kid. I hated myself. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a worthless person. I began to feel like the only thing I was good for was eating, sleeping, and defecating. I had no purpose. No friends. I wanted it to all go away. When I was 17, I had mulled over the thought of suicide a lot. You have to understand how much I was disgusted by my own existence. I wasn’t going to make it quick. I felt like I deserved to suffer. I wanted to go out slowly and inhumanely. I felt as if I was the lowest of the low. But I still put on that façade. I never cut myself. It would have made those things all too obvious. I didn’t want people to know of my suffering. I didn’t deserve a listening ear. Not even from a counselor, who is pretty much a guy paid to listen to your woes. But if I was going to commit suicide, I wouldn’t try it. I was going to do it. It was going to be one hundred percent. I didn’t want to live through a suicide attempt.

I don’t know if my foster parents were psychics or something. I wasn’t going through that stuff when they bought my guitar for my 16^th birthday. I was still in that phase where I shoved things under the rug. I didn’t actually start to hate myself until I was nearly 18. But when I did start to hate myself, it hit, and it hit hard. Emotionally, I had hit rock bottom.

As for my suicide, I had a plan written down so I would carry it out without flaw. But I guess I was too much of a coward. Every time I thought about going through with it, I grabbed a pen, some paper, and that guitar, and I would play until I was crying my eyes out. Sometimes I just kept going as long as 4 or 5 hours. Instead of hurting or killing myself, I grabbed that guitar and played to the tune of my heart.

That guitar is nothing special. It’s a basic Fender guitar. You could probably buy a similar one for a couple hundred dollars at your local music store. However, my first guitar is my single most prized possession. I go nowhere for an extended period of time without my guitar. It’s been to California, South Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Dakota with me.

Because let me tell you what that guitar means to me. If my foster parents had never picked that up, I could have been dead before I finished high school. Through my playing, I was able to occupy my mind so I wouldn’t carry out my suicide plan. Through my songwriting, I was able to open up to my counselor. My guitar may be a basic model that wouldn’t be worth much to anyone else, but that guitar is irreplaceable to me.

Finally, when I was a little past 20 years old, I came to a point where I moved on with my life. I took all my songs. I grabbed my suicide plan. I put it all in a shoebox. With the first real smile I had in 2 to 3 years, I hugged my foster mother, and told her I was leaving and I’d be back in half an hour. I drove my car out to one of our fields. I threw gasoline on that damn shoebox and lit it on fire. As the fire burned away through years of misery and torture, it was hard not to cry. Years of my father telling me I was worthless on top of me telling myself I was worthless wasn’t going to affect me anymore. Five or ten minutes later, the fire burned out, and the ashes of my sorrow were carried away by the Oklahoman wind. It was no longer tied to me.

Until tonight, I’ve never told anyone this. Nobody knows I ever had a suicide plan. Nobody knows I was writing songs to reflect how I was except my counselor who was sworn to keep stuff confidential. He never knew about my plan to commit suicide because that was something he would have to break through the veil of confidentiality and report because it would have been considered an emergency. But nobody knows about my journals or my songs or my plan. Nobody knows about the shoebox, but me.

What does my guitar mean to me? My guitar is the most important thing I own. If not for having it and learning to play, I’d probably not be alive to write this. That guitar is like a best friend to me, and it's saved my life on a number of occasions.

Music is an amazing thing. Don’t underestimate its power.