简介
Pushing is about a burned out Firefighter/Paramedic dealing with the struggle of being pushed and pulled to the breaking point from multiple stressors. It's hard for a person devoting his or her life to helping others to seek help themselves which usually leads to tragic outcomes due to the stigma attached to mental issues within that culture. Adrenaline drives us to keep pushing which is also the reason and starting path for self destruction when left unchecked. We all can only take so much stress and pressure and each of us have different thresholds we hit before everything spirals downward out of control. This song touches on the inner struggle of always being on edge, a constant state of "fight or flight" and striving to manage staying sane through newly acquired anxiety/ depression, major sleep deprivation, mental exhaustion and PTSD. Becoming a danger to anyone around, anti-social, paranoid and majorly depressed. As a result, the mind, body and spirit rots and you become a useless zombie since you can't just turn it off anymore. Similar to salmon fish and how they are programmed to spawn. They fight their way upstream against strong currents until they start rotting alive from the inside out, only giving up when it kills them... This is a main reason for climbing suicide rates among first responders and veterans. I was fortunate enough to get the help I needed, I lost my career and a lot of so-called "brothers" and friends but I am regaining my health which is more important than that phony BS. This song has been therapeutic and I am on my way to recovery thankfully. If I remained afraid of the consequences for reaching out I would have easily become another tragic statistic at a minimum. This is the first song I did all on my own. I wrote, performed all instruments, recorded and mixed the entire song. I hope this song inspires others in similar situations to seek the help they need before it's too late.
