I just published a new music video on YouTube for my song “A Pain That I’m Used To.” The song was featured on my album from last spring, The Bad Ideas We Build Worlds, and holds a very special place in my heart.

While it’s one of the later songs on the album and I released the song “Faith & Trust” as a single before it, it’s actually the first song I really wrote after a very long break from writing any music as The Purge. Recording the studio version of the song is, literally, the way I built calluses back up on my fingers. I was in immense emotional pain after my long-term partner left me for another man and the first romantic experience I had after that fell apart in ways that I wasn’t prepared to expect or deal with yet.

This song helped me come to terms with the fact that I was trying to hold onto patterns of dependency and that I needed to stop seeking easy comfort in another person. I also realized that I had a tendency to try and fix the problems in other peoples’ lives before mine. I was emptying myself in ways that were ultimately destructive to me and not truly benefiting the people I was trying to help; it was a pain that I had become used to and I needed to learn how to live without it.