How Daniel Johnston helped me see myself
By: Gabriel Jose Garcia
Tags: Depression, Culture, Mental Health, Suicide, Music

Like any good 90’s teenager, I first found out about Daniel Johnston through Kurt Cobain’s t-shirt and the Kids soundtrack. I would dip in and out of his catalogue, but it wasn’t until the crescendo of the emotional and mental dissolution that was my 20’s that I really connected with his music, or rather, that his life and music helped me out of my dead end.

Following my second failed suicide attempt and a four-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, I was put on anti-psychotics on top of the already prescribed antidepressants. Besides a whole host of side effects like weight gain, excessive sweating and other things that are great for you if you’re already feeling shitty about yourself, they massively slow down your mind, changing thought processes and generally how you go about things in day-to-day life. I had previously been fairly proud of an apparent development in my songwriting, but after those months I was left unable to write a song. It was in this time that I watched “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”. One of moments that stuck with me the most, and truly highlighted his gift, comes after his first institutionalization following a psychotic break, when he’s been put on massive amounts of medication. In the scene, he is on video, talking about how he couldn’t write a song if he tried and then, completely off-the-cuff, he turns it into a small song. The genius of making up a song about how he couldn’t write a song if he tried was beautiful.

His performance of “I Live My Broken Dreams” really drove it home for me because it was so honest and pure, with his voice breaking and his nervous strumming of the G chord, and I realized that I didn’t need to write songs that I thought were good or cool, but just that, at that moment, I needed to write songs for myself to prove that I could still write songs and that those songs should also express where I was in that moment. It took a couple weeks, but I managed to write a few 3–4 chord songs. I still play them and they strangely tend to be the songs that people say they like the most, which I always take to mean I’m genuinely not a good songwriter, on the whole. That is not to say that my creative output is of any importance, it most definitely isn’t, but just that through watching his journey and his expression, I found a way to express myself in a time when I felt devoid of what I thought constituted my being, identity and life.

After a decade plus of treatment and dealing with friends and family with mental health/addiction issues, and watching what the people trying to help me went through, I am under no illusion of the bullshit tortured artist myth. There is no art, beauty or coolness in the darkest hours and the light moments are always just that, moments. But still, people like Daniel Johnston or Roky Erickson managed to tap into something so pure and real and show a vulnerability without it ever being made into a selling point. I tire of all the bullshit surrounding creativity and the superficial public discussions concerning mental health, but if, in a moment of total emptiness, you find a kernel of truth or some kind of direction, that does mean something. Art won’t change the world, but it can get you through a very dark night.