This morning KRYER debuts a brand new track, Crawl, exclusively on Fault. Here, he explains how the song came to be.

I don’t imagine that talking about mental illness comes easy to anyone. It’s probably far easier to put your thoughts into a song and hide behind your guitar and your fringe or whatever faculties have been afforded to you. I think that’s what I was doing when I wrote Crawl. I was hiding, avoiding communication. Communication, the same thing I now believe to be our best hope of combatting the rising number of suicides in this country and others alike. I’ll try to explain why…

I wrote Crawl in a strange place at a strange time.

It’s four or five in the morning. 
There I am, in one of the private waiting rooms at University College Hospital just hours after the young lady I was in love with was pulled from the canal she tried to drown herself in. 

She had run from me earlier that night after a drink too many turned into another one of our infamous fights and, for the first time, I foolishly allowed her to go, believing that my attempts to try and talk things through in our, mutually inebriated, state were proving to be toxic and counter-productive. 

I don’t know whether it was shock or a near-sociopathic lack of ability to engage with what was going on, but there I am and all that I can think of are these lyrics, lyrics about how I felt. Me. 
Maybe it’s unhealthy to assume so much guilt for my behavior in that moment. Reactions are, by nature, reactionary, but I did learn one thing from the experience. 

People, us lot, don’t have a clue how to express ourselves healthily. 

The very British School of Walk It Off will tell you to bottle up your feelings, deny them if necessary and ‘Man Up’. It’s an increasingly popular belief that this inherent lack of ability to share pain with one another is contributing to the unbelievable amounts of suicides taking place. I think that’s what I’m trying to talk about here, the pressing need for communication. 

The, truly heroic, folks who teach you how to man the Crisis Lines at mental health charities will tell you that everybody has a right to die. That, if somebody wants to take their own life, you can try desperately to help them see that pain is fickle and temporary but, ultimately, you can’t make their decision for them.

I wanted to believe that, because it was easier and because better people than me told me it was so, the problem is that I don’t. 

You often hear similar things when a person commits suicide, people say that they’d never had guessed that they were suffering and they wish they’d known, that the person in question would have felt safe to reach out to them. It’s possible that some people don’t want to be stopped and they go about their business silently and with a smile in efforts not to attract attention,but a suicide attempt is often a call for help andit’s our responsibility as humans to answer that call. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYwTf5TTTlM

It isn’t helpful that more public suicide attempts are often rebranded as attention seeking, as there is something to be said for open displays of suicidal tendencies. Sometimes, when people feel like the world wouldn’t miss them, they cry out in hope that somebody will show themotherwise. 

So show them, hold them down until they know that someone cares. Maybe it’s egotistical to believe that you’re able to save people. I can say that in darker times than these, my inadvertent cries for help were answered by some of the unbelievable people in my life and I owe those people a great deal.

I could be wrong, maybe we do all make our own beds and we’re only permitted license over our own, but in a world where nobody knows how to ask for help, the argument for reading between the lines grows a little stronger.

What I’m trying to say, clumsily as it may be, is this… 
If you see someone reaching out for some proof that they’re loved, give it to them. And if you feel within yourself that nobody cares, then try. 

Give someone the opportunity to prove you wrong.

I’m pretty sure that it all starts with communication. 

 

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