August 8, 2026, 11 pm. I’m on vacation with my daughter, in our little house in the mountains, sitting on the terrace looking at the stars. It’s almost San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars, and with no light pollution the sky is full of trails and wishes. As my daughter stares up at the sky, eyes wide open, I found myself thinking about the first vacation I spent here with her a few years ago, right after separating from my wife.
I remember one evening in particular, same period, maybe the only time I cried as an adult that wasn’t connected to a death, this same bench on the terrace, my daughter asleep in my arms after a good hunt for shooting stars. I wasn’t crying because I missed my wife, or out of fear for the future and worry about what it would mean for my daughter growing up. I was crying because I felt, right then, that I was hitting bottom as a person.
I’d started smoking again, I was drinking heavily, and my friends, in an attempt to lift me up (that I anyway still appreciate), took me out to drink, to parties where I drank, around people who drank, in situations where lifting me up really just meant anesthetizing me. I was living a double life, the professional one and the model-dad-with-my-daughter one when she was with me, a disaster the rest of the time. I hit bottom and kept digging for a long while after that. Looking back now, with some therapy behind me, I understand I was blaming and punishing myself, holding myself responsible for the loss of my family. At the time it was just a spiral, nothing clearer than that.
What saved me was a forced stop, for health reasons. A severe case of labyrinthitis, in bed for almost a month with eyes closed, waiting to be steady enough to move on my own again. What do you do in that situation? You listen to music. That’s when I ran into a song that was going to change everything: Watch Me Rise, by Have Heart, found by chance in one of those Spotify rabbit holes.
I won’t put the whole lyrics here, but there’s a line in Watch me rise that hit me and made my stomach twist: “I’d rather die on my feet.” Six words, and I’d been living the opposite sentence for over a year.
The record’s title already said it on its own: The Things We Carry. How many things I was carrying, right then.
Hardcore was never really the genre I gravitated to, just an occasional outlet for releasing internal pressure. Straight edge in particular I’d always dismissed a little, my natural aversion to any kind of extremism or moral rigidity getting in the way. And yet I felt I had to go deeper into it.
As time went by, I start digging into the lyrics with growing engagement. Not only these guys were encouraging me to stop self commiserating and get back in control of my life, they were also singing about some of the pillars that guided my entire life and that I had quite forgotten in my post separation self-pity state. What about not living passively, but looking for our own identity instead? And what about using the power of our mind and recognizing our own worth, the dignity of our inner autonomy, instead of letting ourselves be reduced to imposed roles? And above all, the idea that a person can be overwhelmed by social expectations, depression, failure, and still find the motivation to rebuild.
During that period, lying in bed, I had the opportunity to focus on myself, without all the distractions coming from work, social media, and the normal burdens of adult life. It doesn’t happen often, if you think about. And I started rising.
All in all, the plan wasn’t that difficult to sort out: I just had to refuse to keep destroying myself, taking back the control over my own life instead of just watching it happen to me. I had to refuse the idea that alcohol and drugs are what adults do when things get hard, and I had to stop liking how people showed me sympathy seeing me as a wreck, and this is somethign unexpectedly tough. I had to think that change was possible: the fact that a person go through pain, or addiction, or failure, does not mean that a different direction is not possible.
All good, then, except for the awareness of how big was the effort needed: discipline is something you practice, not something we’re born with. But it starts with finding the strenght to accept that we are vulnerable, and we need to think straight, resist, ask for help when we really need it: depression, loneliness, fear, is not weakness and saying out loud takes more nerve that hiding and pretend we’re invincible. In this perspective, sobriety is a tool, not some kind of trophy: it’s about staying present enough to actually feel what hurt instead of drowning it.
The things we carry is all about this, in the end. It speaks of universal messages, more relevant now than ever, that should be taught to the youngster and discussed openly with friends or publicly. It’s incredible how much support and plain good sense one record can carry.
The things we carry is not the only reason why I eventually got sober and put myself back on track, but it has been a sort of spark for many things that came later. And once again I realize I’m speaking about a record without saying anything about the music, the songs, the production and I beg you pardon for this, but this time the whole point is something different. To anyone going through a hard stretch: music can save a life, sometimes, records like this one especially and none of it is rhetoric. For me it was exactly that, and the turn my life took after all the struggles is proof of it. Sometimes the turn is right there around the corner, and it’s so obvious we have trouble seeing it.
So thank you, music. And thank you, Have Heart, for all of it.
Twenty years ago, Have Heart released The Things We Carry.
Twenty years.
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