I Wrote It. I Also Take the Pills.

“One Battle After Another” is an anti-pharma song.

I take medication for bipolar disorder and depression.

Both of those are true, and I am not going to resolve them into something tidier, because the contradiction is the actual condition of being alive inside this.

What the song is angry at

Not medicine. An industry.

There is a difference between the compound that keeps someone functional and the system that prices it, markets it, and has at points behaved appallingly. You can be furious at one while swallowing the other every morning. Most people with a chronic condition and an opinion are holding exactly that.

A song is a bad instrument for nuance. A song is good at anger. So the song is angry, and this page is the nuance, and I would rather have both than flatten either.

Calling myself a hypocrite

I used the word first so nobody has to do it for me.

But I have thought about it, and I am not sure it holds. A hypocrite says one thing and does another in secret. I am saying both things out loud, on my own website, under my own name.

That is not hypocrisy. That is just being a person who needs something from a system they have problems with. Almost everybody is that, about something.

What I am not saying

To be completely clear, because this is the one place being misread actually costs somebody something:

Do not stop taking your medication because of a song. Not mine, not anyone's. If you want to change what you take, that is a conversation with your doctor. Coming off psychiatric medication without supervision is genuinely dangerous, and an artist you do not know is the worst possible input on that decision.

I take mine. I intend to keep taking them.

The manic part

Here is the piece I debated putting in.

I am manic, and I am probably manic in pursuing this — the album, the show, the coffee, all of it. Somebody with my diagnosis should notice when a dream starts running at this temperature, and I notice.

I have also never been more excited about anything in my life, except two days: the day my twins were born, and the day I got married.

I do not know how to fully separate those two sentences, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims they can. Knowing which part of your drive is the illness and which part is you is the daily work, and pretending I have solved it would be the kind of lie I do not tell in writing.

Why it is on the record

Because the addiction is on the record and leaving this off would be selective honesty, which is its own kind of dishonest.

One battle after another. That is the title and that is the arrangement of it.