“PTSD” takes struggles in my life, addresses them and then challenges my inability to cope with them. The first verse being my parents, the second being my romantic dependencies and the third being my depression.

Pre-Traumatic Song Development

When I left college I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep rapping. I’ve never been an eggs-in-the-same basket type of guy. I’m confident in my writing, but I’ve always been afraid to succeed. I release a project and as soon as Interscope Records doesn’t magically find a copy and sign me, I get discouraged and start working on another. I wasn’t sure how to break the cycle, so I decided to see where I could go professionally. Within a month of graduation I got a job in my field, a month after that I bought a car and about seven months after that I moved out of my parents house. It was the most I’d ever grown up in the shortest amount of time and with growth comes reflection.

I was in my at-the-time girlfriend’s kitchen in late 2011, early 2012 and what became the first verse of “PTSD” just came to me. They were the first hip hop lyrics I had written since college and they were some of the heaviest I had ever put to paper. I had never written about the part of my childhood before because I never let myself feel the impact of my parents’ drug use and subsequent destruction of one another.

Preparing the Sonic Demands

Reading the verse over to myself again and again inspired me to write even more and eventually arrive at the 9 – 5 concept Fear of Success is based around. Then-girlfriend A/K/A “Perfect for Me” told me on Christmas 2011 she’d lease me three beats from Ill-iteracy so a few months later, after I got my beat pack from Rawhide and decided which concepts still needed the right beat, I chose the ones that would become “Rush Hour,” “Midnight Snack” and “PTSD.”

A couple of years later, once the lyrics were finished and I finally recorded the first verse, I actually broke down into tears during the first take. That’s still on my hard drive somewhere.

Plus those Stupid Dependencies

The second verse is about a girl who had a role in the “Perfect for Me” relationship ending. I did not cheat, but I baled the straw (do you bale straw?) that broke the camel’s back. For the slow, the camel in this case was the already strained relationship. Once said relationship failed, I transitioned a lot of emotion to this other girl. I was very sick. I had been in a relationship so long, I had forgotten what it was like to come home to an empty house. I still had not learned to follow my own path to happiness and instead dedicated myself to living for a woman, hoping desperately, and incorrectly, that would in-turn give me purpose. The verse was written as I came to terms with that so while it is about her, I am more critical of myself. “I can’t end this shit, I am pathetic.”

Commentary

I was never broken up over a broken home

I never wanted sympathy for this. Quite frankly, I was happier with my parents separating than I would have been with them trying to force a relationship and allowing it to remain abusive.

But you don’t know about that Easter
When I woke up early, ran to the stairs and heard you beat her
You was accusin’ her of lyin’ I don’t know fuckin’ why
But the truest excuse was that you were drunk and high

I’m not even sure my parents know I was awake the Easter morning I heard my father beat my mother, though I’ve given both of them physical copies of the album so they probably know now.

Me and Steve, at least you never beat us

Despite the above, my parents were never physically abusive toward my brother, nor toward me.

But I’d be crushed the week I would leave from Aunt Tita’s
Mom was gone with no word day after day
Then I learned she’s in rehab and may have to stay

I would visit my Aunt Tita for a week every summer because she has a really big house in Westchester County. When I was 11, my mother and I were living with my grandmother because we had been evicted from our apartment (I would later find out this was because my mother was spending all her money on booze). That summer I went to Aunt Tita’s like I always do and when I came home, no one knew where my mother was. I went to live with my father, a situation that ended up becoming permanent. A month went by before I heard from my mother, who had gone upstate (well, further upstate) to get clean. This confused me because she had been attending AA for some time and had gotten her one year coin. The truth was she had been drinking the whole time, though you probably could have guessed that since I said we had gotten evicted because of her drinking.

And I’m proud of her now that the past has been shrouded in clouds
But I cower the day the haze lets the sour things out

And that day came before I wrote “Cold Turkey”

On that bridge in ’07 seventy feet from the ground
Police drove by before the would-be messy show
Convinced the hospital psychiatrist to let me go

This was one of the last parts of the song I finished writing. I kept tweaking it but it was impossible to relay in three bars, let alone an entire verse. It’s a true story. In high school – actually the same night I saw that abomination of a movie Spiderman 3 – I ended up threatening suicide. I walked to a bridge and just stood at the edge of it, leaning on the guard rail. The featured image for this post is a picture of that bridge. I never intended to jump, but in previous relationships I had threatened my own life as a very unhealthy way to win a drug I was addicted to: sympathy. The girl I was with at the time, who would go on to be the subject of “Perfect for Me,” was not too keen on the immaturity of that behavior. Eventually the police drove by and refused to leave until I agreed to go with them to the hospital and get a psych eval. The hospital psychiatrist, who they woke from a sound sleep, was ready to commit me as soon as she put on her shoes. After I explained where my head was at and the situation that night really opened my eyes to how unhealthy it was, she cleared me. I stopped threatening myself after that night.

I might have had a place in the playpen
But all I’ve had is rap since age ten

Hip hop has been an outlet for me since 1999. When I hear Joe Budden talk to his depression for six minutes on “Whatever it Takes,” I see it as an invitation to do the same. Some may not see it that way, but his place at the top of XXL’s Greatest Mixtape Series list gives some clout to that flavor of self-expression. It’s sort of like how Nyquil is supposed to help with cold symptoms, but it also helps you sleep. Maybe I didn’t prescribe to hip hop to fight against social injustice, but I found my way into the focus group and it helped my symptoms. This song, I guess, is describing my metaphorical cancer to justify chemotherapy. Please understand I’m not trying to appropriate anything; I’m just taking the drug that works for me.