The Beatles saved my life
I was put in facilities at a very young age. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 5 and bipolar and generalized anxiety disorder at 8 or 9. And since that age was in and out of facilities, I always just wanted to stay home. I wanted stability. I wanted a place I could count on to feel safe. When I was 12, I was put in a place called Eau Claire Academy. When I got out of there, I guess my dad liked visiting Eau Claire despite being 3 hours away from where we lived, so we would frequently visit and go to the video game store there. But on one of these trips on the way back, we stopped at an old thrift shop in the middle of nowhere along the highway, and I picked out the Beatles rock band for the Xbox 360. The game was almost ten years old at the time, but I already had the guitar peripheral from the other rock band game I had. I got home and I played it the next day, but I only recognized a couple of songs, that being “Here Comes the Sun” and “Yellow Submarine.” But I was kind of entranced by what I was playing. Several months later, I was sent to another facility, and my dad put a compilation album “Beatles 1” on my MP3 player. And that’s when I first heard “Hey Jude,” which I really liked. I listened to more and more of their songs and got hooked more and more. I then got kicked out of that facility and was sent to another place where the therapist would play me Beatles songs during therapy sessions, from there I was sent all the way across the country. I remember listening to “The Ballad of John and Yoko” on my way walking to the school building on my first full day. Almost everything I had had been stolen the night before. I was in an awful place, but my interest in the music really kept me going! In my classroom. There was a book on the Beatles. I read it a lot throughout my stay there. It had no front or back covers, but I still learned a lot. I remember several months into my stay, I had a visit where my parents picked me up, And we kinda traveled around the state. I stayed up all night pirating every Beatles album using a YouTube to MP3 converter, and I put it on my MP3 player, but soon the trip was over. It was always an awful feeling for me being driven back to my living hell. Pure dread. I was not okay. Then I clicked on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and I was like, wow!
I don’t think I would be alive without that band.
“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out; it doesn’t matter much to me.”- John Lennon