The Year I Slept in a Closet

I moved in with friends at eighteen. For the better part of a year I slept in a closet, and then on a living room floor.

That is not a figure of speech. A closet, with my stuff in it, and me in it.

What I did in there

I learned music.

Not formally. Nobody was teaching me. I had time, no rent worth the name, and a group of people who did not mind the noise, and I used it. Most of what I know about putting a song together started on that floor. Learning piano by ear came later, but the habit of just sitting with it until something worked started there.

People romanticise this kind of thing afterwards. I am aware that I am doing it right now. It was also cold, and it also smelled, and I was also high a lot of the time.

How it ended

I was kicked out. For lying, allegedly.

Here is the part I am not going to clean up for you. If I lied, I was in a delusion brought on by addiction and I genuinely do not have access to what I believed at the time. That is a real possibility and I am not going to pretend it is not.

But I believe I was right.

Both of those sentences are true at once and I am done trying to resolve them. I have spent years on this and the honest answer is that I was a drug addict who was certain about something, and a drug addict who is certain about something is not a reliable witness, including to himself.

That is the whole thing. I am not asking anybody to take my side. I am saying what I actually think, which is a different and smaller claim.

Why it is in here

Because I keep finding that the cryptic version is usually the honest one and the clean version is usually the lie.

The clean version is: I was young and using and I probably lied. That reads better. It makes me humble. It is also not what I believe, and writing it down because it sounds better would be its own kind of lie.

I slept in a closet for a year, learned to make music, got thrown out over something I still think I was right about, and I cannot prove it. That is where the record starts.