Where Were You When I Needed You?
 
Where Were You When I Needed You? is a raw lyrical song about what happens when someone who has spent years carrying herself is suddenly expected to carry everyone else.
 
At the center of the song is one painful question:
 
Where were you when I needed you?
 
Where were you when PTSD was consuming my days?
 
Where were you when I was trying to live with the aftermath of being raped?
 
Where were you when I needed someone to listen, believe me, stand beside me, or simply acknowledge what I was carrying?
 
Where were you when I watched my mother die from metastatic breast cancer?
 
Where were you when grief followed me home?
 
Where were you when I went to spread my mother's ashes?
 
The song confronts the contradiction of being told that family takes care of family after experiencing some of life's hardest moments without feeling that same care returned.
 
I wrote my truth.
 
I put it into three books.
 
I turned it into music.
 
I spoke about what happened to me.
 
I found ways to give experiences that had lived silently inside me a voice.
 
And still, I often felt unheard.
 
So when another family crisis arrives and the expectation becomes that I should advocate, call, manage, organize, drive, monitor, or take responsibility for another grown adult, something inside me finally answers:
 
No.
 
Where Were You When I Needed You? isn't simply a song about anger. Beneath the profanity and confrontation is grief—the grief of realizing how often you had to become your own support system.
It is also about recognizing the difference between caring and carrying.
 
I can care without becoming your caretaker.
 
I can love without becoming responsible for your choices.
 
I can have compassion without sacrificing myself.
 
And I can refuse a responsibility that was never mine without apologizing for protecting my own life.
The emotional turning point of the song comes with three words:
I carried me.
 
Through trauma.
Through PTSD.
Through grief.
 
Through being unheard.
Through losing my mother.
Through telling my story when it would have been easier for others if I remained silent.
 
And after carrying myself through all of that, I am no longer willing to disappear inside somebody else's needs.
 
Where Were You When I Needed You? is the sound of grief becoming a boundary.
 
It is the moment when “Why wasn't anyone there for me?” becomes:
 
“I don't owe anyone the destruction of myself just because they need something from me now.”
My body.
 
My boundaries.
 
My peace.
 
My life.
 
Who's carrying me now?
 
I am.
 
And that's enough.