The Year Paramore Saved My Life

Trigger Warning: depression, suicide

At the start of 2018, I ended a year and a half long relationship and moved back in with my parents. I had hardly a dollar in my bank account and didn’t own a car. I spent a good portion of my time regretting everyone decision I had made up until that point and thinking I didn’t have any options to make my life better. It wasn’t until I started driving my sister’s car to work that I found a little bit of hope.

My sister is ten years my senior and still stuck in the 2000s. I have evidence to back this: she still kept CDs in her car, and all of them were mid 2000s emo albums. This is how I found myself listening to nothing but Paramore for an entire year. For anyone who doesn’t know, Paramore is an emo band fronted by the neon haired Hayley Williams who gained popularity off of songs like, “Misery Business,” “Decode,” and later on, “Still Into You.” I had always liked their earlier albums growing up, but kind of placed them on the back burner as I got older. I started my listening with their 2009 album Brand New Eyes. I found myself relating every song to exactly what I was going through. I began listening to the other four albums and found that they had a song for every cycle of my depression. Every. Single. One.

At the time, I was battling constant suicidal thoughts. Listening to Paramore’s self-titled album was the first time I came across a writer discuss depression and suicidal thoughts and then come out of it hopeful and wanting to live. One song on this album really stood out to me and kept me hanging on. “Now,” is a song about defeating depression and realizing you don’t want your life to end. The song includes lyrics like, “Lost the battle, win the war…. there’s a time and a place to die, but this ain’t it,” and, “If there’s a future, we want it.” Hearing these words over and over is exactly what made me realize I wasn’t ready to give up on my life or my future.

That summer, Paramore announced they would be touring close to me. I secured tickets the second I could and began to count the days down. I ended up going to the show alone and was unusually okay with it. When the day finally came, I forced my way to the very front. It was nearly 100 degrees and I was painfully dehydrated, but I still managed to sob for two hours straight. Coincidentally, after that show, my life had fallen into a better place. I was able to spend six months healing with Paramore, and when I finally saw them, the process had completed.

It’s been two years now. I look down at the tattoos on my thighs almost every day — one says, “Lost the battle,” the other says, “Win the war,” and I am so happy that I won.