We’ve come to the last track on the album – Wishing Well.
Lyrically Wishing Well is one I’m most proud of and it’s also one of the tracks on the album that sounds way different than when it first started. I think it’s full of cool little unexpected surprises and the lead repeating guitar line, in all its simplicity, is one of the parts of the record I look the most forward to every time I listen back.
Throughout this album I dabble in and out of commentary about addiction and recovery – it’s a really important and pretty central theme to the entire story. In Wishing Well I take you through a shortened version of my own journey. In this blog I’ll expand on it.
When I was very young I sort of arbitrarily made the decision that I wouldn’t become like the people that I’d often see around me. I hated being around drunks who couldn’t string together a sentence and would end the night muttering nonsense to themselves until they could no longer sit up straight, only then the next day to note how they couldn’t seem to remember a single thing that had happened the day before or worse – how little they cared to know the truth of it.
But drinking is so starkly embedded into our society – to not drink means to not belong; it makes you stand out in a way unlike any other type of abstinence. So it wasn’t long before I started experimenting with different types of alcohol and it became as much a part of me as any other hobby did, which, if you’re someone who tends to hyperfixate and get wrapped up in your interests (there’s that pesky ADHD again), means you get really into it, even if you don’t necessarily want to – the impulse is strong.
Check out the Wishing Well Acoustic-Bedroom Live on YouTube
For the most part, drinking didn’t give me any trouble. I had a good handle like anyone else does until I simply didn’t. I chuckle back reading this right now because the truth is that I blacked out for the first time at 17 and would’ve died right then if my friends were smart enough to get me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. So if we’re being honest with ourselves, we never had a handle on it. The legal drinking age in my province is 19 but it’s not hard to come by at any age.
I wasn’t doing anything crazy that night – just some drinking games that got out of hand at a house party with alcohol that was a higher concentration than any 17 year old would be used to and wouldn’t know any better.
You’d really think that experience would be enough to steer you away from drinking for a while, but the thing about it was that I largely couldn’t remember the night, so I didn’t stop. I just stayed away from the last thing I remembered drinking – Crown Royal. A friend of mine and I decided late in the night to go “shot for shot” and I took a small tumble and hit my head on a clock, triggering the blackout.
I hated that feeling of not remembering that comes with blacking out, not knowing how things played out next. Being told you were still moving around the party, talking, laughing and having absolutely no recollection of any of it. How could such a thing even be possible? It’s like sleep walking but worse because your eyes are open and nobody knows you’re not inside your body.
So after I sobered up, I at least knew I wanted to be better about drinking – more responsible. A more responsible underage drinker. A good role model for my fellow underage peers.
Plus, I enjoyed drinking. It’s fun as hell! I’m naturally a more introverted person and starting the night with a beer would help bring out my inner extrovert (the one that comes out when I’m performing) and make initial conversations easier to stir up, so it’s hard to convince yourself to let go of it even when you’ve already had a brush with death as a result of it.
But the older I got the more mistakes I’d make. I “knew my tolerance” as we all say we do but I also would give in to ignoring it. I’m not one to back out of a challenge so, I was easier to persuade than most to dabble back into liquors that I didn’t really enjoy and that subsequently would make me black out again.
And every time it would happen I’d start to hear those little echoes of my 17-year old self. It was time to stop because I could not seem to slow down.
But then you wake up again the next day and something or someone persuades you further to come back to it. It wasn’t impacting my ability to work and remain in good standings with all my employers, so I must have a pretty good handle on things.
Yeah I feel like shit a lot of the time, but who doesn’t? Everyone around me seemed to look at things with the same lenses as I did. And a lot of them were worse than me at all of things, managing themselves and their drink or other vices, so it was easy to feel like I wasn’t doing anything abnormal or bad for myself.
But that’s just because alcohol is so deeply embedded in our society. It’s hard to notice if you’re in it and welcoming to it’s company. It’s impossible not to notice when you step outside of it.
Here are the official lyrics for Wishing Well:
Echoing through the caverns
Like hieroglyphics etched into the wells
Through the crevices that led me in
And shut me out
Just as quick
A single drip of water
From each direction that it fell
Blotched caricatures of a man
Signaling smoke out for help
Down, down comes another quarter
It’s wallet forever out of reach
Smacking against the concrete
It spins a few feet in front of me
Until I see
The reflection of the sunlight
Offering a sigh of relief
Exhaling shadows creeping over
Suggesting intentional leave
Reaching out toward the rung
The first step, or last to some
Corroded metal crumbles from my touch
Both delicate and rough
Once a symbol of its strength
Now flakes turned to dust
Remaining on my fingertips
A layer of chalk coloured rust
Down, down comes another quarter
It’s wallet forever out of reach
Smacking against the concrete
It spins a few feet in front of me
Until I see
Until I see
In my 20’s when I moved out of my hometown it was much easier to get a handle on how much I was or wasn’t drinking because I’d left a lot of my former friends behind and we weren’t making a great effort to see each other in person.
Plus, I now had real bills and responsibilities for the first time beyond the gas bill for the car. Rent is expensive. Food is expensive.
And now that I had space away from people that I now understand are not conducive to my mental well being, I was having an easier time focusing on things that just made me feel good.
I moved down to the Junction area in Toronto and found a great basement apartment on the same street my grandmother used to live, so where my dad lived when he was younger, too. It was close to High Park so I could regularly go for walks and runs on the trails there and it was really calming. And the Junction was known for live music, so there were lots of bars I could stumble into just a few minutes from home and stumble back to on any given night. It’s liberating when you’re from a town that doesn’t showcase any live music.
That was one of the parts I found challenging, though. How do you go to a bar to watch live music and not order a drink? The idea didn’t seem well respected to my then-23 year old self. So I was still drinking, and sometimes overdrinking, because I’d gotten used to the feeling of a drink in my hand and being around people with drinks in their hands and now I didn’t drive so there was no real limit to watch out for. “Stay for another?” Yeah why not?
And then sometimes money was tight because I’d be overspending on something I would literally piss away, which started to grate on my mental health again without me knowing that’s what was happening. Mental health wasn’t talked about with nearly the same frequency and depth even just 10 years ago as it is now.
It’s really hard to make positive choices for yourself when your mental health isn’t in great standings.
I’d be trying to change but without really consciously committing to the things I knew really needed to change.
Like, going for a run is great exercise but it’s less useful if you’re going to eat a whole pizza at the end of the night. Not the worst thing but, a little counterproductive and then harder to stick to because you’re just not seeing the results that you feel should come from all that effort.
As I continued to watch alcohol erode at my friends and family in the years that followed, right up until 2020, that nagging 17-year old voice would come back to me. “Remember how you said you weren’t going to be like them?”
It didn’t seem to matter that I had toned down my own habit significantly through my later 20’s – I was still feeling anxious whenever certain opportunities arose that I knew there would be a certain expectation of drinking. And I was getting more anxious and untrusting of people around me when they themselves were under the influence. And I had a lot of baggage as it turns out from a bunch of different experiences that had happened in some part as a result of alcohol misuse that I wasn’t able to address until I stopped completely.
So I went cold turkey in March 2020 and haven’t looked back since.
I’ve lost a lot since then. And a lot of things have changed. My life is in no way the way I thought it would look at this age and there are people I would’ve thought would still be around.
I think for a lot of people who are like me, that struggle for years with this back and fourth of if they should stop, when is enough and how can I even live a life without this habit, the thing we often forget or choose to ignore for a long time is how many lucky breaks we’ve gotten while our brains struggle to find the right way to communicate to us that we need to make a change.
I have been very fortunate to make it this far in this lifetime. I cannot say the same for a lot of people that I once knew.
Quitting drinking is hard, but it has its rewards.
There are a lot of things I’ve accomplished over the last 3 years that I don’t believe I ever would have been able to if I was still drinking even on an occasional basis. Like this record.
There are still a lot of days where I don’t very much like myself or that I dwell too heavily on things that have happened in the past that I can’t change, but I much prefer myself now to the person I ever was before. And the person I am now understands that every day is a new opportunity to improve.
I’ll continue to make mistakes, without a doubt, but I’m thankful for the ability to make a new effort every day I wake up because by all accounts I probably shouldn’t have been afforded this.
If for some reason you are finding yourself feeling a lot like I was during the writing of a lot of these songs, where things look bleak and hopeless and you’re not sure you can become the person you want to be – the fact that you are here right now is all the proof you need that you can become whatever or whoever you want in this lifetime and you are deserving of that opportunity, you might just need to make the first step towards your ladder.
The most important thing I’d like to leave you with here is to please understand that all of our ladders look a little different. Our paths may cross or even intertwine for some time but we all have our own journeys. We all make mistakes but we are not those mistakes – we can learn from them, grow, and continue moving forward.
Acceptance above all else is about learning to love yourself through all triumphs, mistakes and losses – only you know what that looks like.
Thanks for listening to Acceptance and for reading these blogs. I hope you found something in it that resonates with you.
Listen to Wishing Well wherever you stream & don’t forget you can order the album on CD through our online store.
In case you missed it, jump back to the overview blog about this record or follow the below index to read the previous blogs in this series:
Track 1: Tapes
Track 2: Chemical Therapy
Track 3: To Be Loved
Track 4: Skeleton
Track 5: Dismal
Track 6: Casual Conversation
Track 7: Loose Change
Track 8: Happy
Track 9: Without You
Track 10: Wishing Well (you are here!).
Neither Could Dylan 
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