thoqqua:gaygypsybarmitzvaforthedisabled:

“The song’s about accepting the permanence of one’s condition. The narrator is a guy who’s in and out of hospitals a lot. I’ve worked with people who’ve experienced that, and I always assume there has to come a point where it’s really hard, but then you try to find some way to be OK with it. There’s a lot of sadness in that song.

What I’ve been learning over the course of my life is that diagnoses exist to help get people services they need— but there’s no such thing as mental illness. We’re all mentally ill and we’re all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don’t wind up needing extra help. So I think that “mental illness,” as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people “crazy,” we exclude them from our circle. That’s bogus— you’re in the same boat as they are! Maybe some people are better at pretending they don’t harbor all kinds of issues, but, really, everyone has them. Everybody experiences reality in a way that’s only true for them.”

-John Darnielle

john darnielle is normally so progressive about everything else (reproductive rights, sexism, rape culture, etc) that seeing him talk about mental illness as “everyone has issues but some people are just more honest about it” is a real disappointment

this album and this song are still great though.

oh no

i understand where he’s coming from re: mental illness both as a concept and as a phrase being used as a way to classify and exclude others. but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!

i am surprised because (a) his politics are really progressive but also (b) because his music suggests that he’d have a much different attitude

but then again i know people who are diagnosed with depression etc who don’t like the term “mental illness” because it implies sickness which i think is what jd is getting at here - i don’t think he’s denying that people have problems but instead the way those problems are labeled

tbh i am definitely biased in defending him because his music really means a lot to me and was really really good for me when my depression was at its worst and i know a lot of people have had similar experiences with his music so

idk i just feel super weird about this claim because standing on its own it’s really not pretty

femmetronic:

oh and john darnielle introduced “up the wolves” by saying “this is a song about verb tenses” and talking about how when people say “you will live to fight another day” they mean “fight” in the intransitive sense, you will live to fight (something) another day, but the song is about using “fight” transitively instead, so “what will you fight? another day”

it was really lovely