🎸 The Backstage, the Breakdown, and the Bus of Life

A touring musician’s journey into anxiety, identity, and learning to live in the in-between.

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🎤 Backstage 2021

In the summer of 2021, I was backstage in Columbia, Maryland, three weeks into a two-month tour—already in a panic.

It was the height of the pandemic. Tours were rare, and ours was one of the first on the road that year. Things were tense.

Gone were the days when artists, family, and crew mingled freely. We lived in “bubbles,” masked and tested weekly—sometimes daily. If someone tested positive, they were gone, quarantined, and often replaced.

This was not the dream I’d had as a boy—playing to thousands, basking in guitar-god glory. I even had to sneak my girlfriend backstage because she wasn’t in the “pod.”

A few weeks earlier, a bandmate and I had a shouting match over who ran the band and what it meant to be professional—sort of like arguing over whether to take shoes off in the house during a zombie apocalypse. The freeze-out that followed lasted nearly a year.

Standing there in that dystopian sci-fi reality, my anger surged. Dark fantasies spun.

And then, out of nowhere, a sharper thought cut through:

Why am I even here?

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🌀 The Collapse of Identity

Until then, I never really questioned who I was.

I was a musician—that was the role, the plan, the identity.

Get gigs. Keep them. Climb the ladder. Maybe find success with my own music.

Playing guitar was in my blood; I came from a family of professionals. It felt like destiny.

But when long COVID wrecked my body a year prior, and my closest musical brother turned into an adversary, my identity collapsed.

Suddenly the dream wasn’t just dented—it imploded.

And the question—WHY AM I HERE?!?—rose like nausea I couldn’t swallow down.

The good news? Collapse is also when something new can finally emerge—if you can make it through the in-between.

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😵‍💫 Who Are We, Anyway?

From the start, we’re all handed identities.

Society assigns our gender, race, and class.
Family assigns our philosophy, religion, and politics.
Other labels come from both: smart, successful, attractive… or maybe dumb, a failure, unlovable.

Psychologists call these schemas—mental index cards that shape how we see ourselves and the world.

When I first hit the road in the mid-nineties, I unknowingly carried all of mine, tucked somewhere between the extra guitar cables and show socks.

Some—like guitarist—protected me.
Others—like best or worst—distorted things.
And a few, like jazz musician, made me feel like a fraud.

Touring doesn’t just wear out your body. Over years, it grinds away at your sense of self.

Sleepless nights blur into drag-ass mornings. Cities start looking the same. Anchors that hold you at home get stripped away—like a Phillips-head screw mangled by a flathead screwdriver one time too many.

Even seasoned road dogs forget who they are when the stage demands a version of them that no longer exists.

And the question comes:

Why am I here?

Sometimes it unravels us. Sometimes—it opens the door to something real.

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🌎 The Present

Last spring in Lima, Peru, I was in a plush hotel room, on tour with a beloved singer-songwriter.

It was the kind of gig musicians dream of. And yet—I was crawling out of my skin.

Three cups of coffee. A cookie from the lobby. A near-miss with the pastry bar at breakfast.

I knew caffeine and sugar ratchet up my anxiety. But there I was again—jittery, itchy, restless.

Why do we sometimes choose what we know makes us worse?

Boredom. Habit. Social glue.
Sharing food and coffee with bandmates help keep the peace. And trust me: on tour, harmony is survival.

I’ve long since given up more destructive habits. But even the so-called lesser offenders, repeated, can drag me back into a self that doesn’t function well.

Coffee and sugar are just symptoms. The real issue is the patterns underneath.

The good news: patterns can be unlearned. Rewired. Replaced.

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🙏🏻 Stimulus Control

At home, self-care is simpler. There’s times I don’t keep coffee or sugar in the house. It’s just easier that way.

Psychologists call this stimulus control—removing temptations you know you can’t always manage. The same way recovering alcoholics learn to avoid bars.

Within days of being home, my body calms and resets.

Tour life is different.

The bus is a transitory home. One where the beds are always moving and you coexist in quarters that feel more like summer camp for tweens than adults.

Ask any touring musician and you’ll hear it: somewhere mid-tour, you start counting the days until you can hug your partner, see your kids, and collapse into your own bed.

It’s not ungratefulness. We know how lucky we are. But it’s reality.

Like soldiers in a platoon—we’re deployed together, sacrificing for a cause that both sustains and depletes us.

That counting-down state isn’t the buzz of a tour’s start, or the relief of post-tour homecoming.

It’s the long hallway in between—where the room you left and the one ahead both feel equally far away.

Therapists call it liminal space. It’s often where we struggle most.

Surviving without losing your mind, body, or relationships? The daily work. Surviving without losing yourself? The life mission.

And it’s not just musicians.

I write this for anyone who’s felt this tension. Anyone who’s ever felt out of place, struggling to function in an environment that doesn’t support all their identities.

You’re not alone.

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🧠 Therapy on the Road

So how do we navigate the long in-betweens?

I’ve been exposed to a broad variety of therapy models over the years. I don’t claim mastery over all of them.

As a therapist, I aim for enough fluency to offer them to clients in practical ways. Tools in a toolbox.

In my personal life, I take what resonates and apply it to my own healing.

Much of how we experience the world depends on the lens we see it through.

If I see my life as “poor me, my best years are behind me,” I’ll experience mostly loss.
If I see it as “I can create the life I want,” I’ll feel possibility.

Many of us toggle between the two—or live somewhere in between.

Real change usually takes practice, commitment, and time. And it’s worth it.

What follows isn’t a technical breakdown, just a lived one: how I apply one of many therapy models in moments of distress, especially on tour.

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🚍 ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is a third-wave behavioral model that invites us to stop fighting our inner struggles and start accepting them as part of being human.

Rather than eliminating uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, ACT shows us how to let them exist without driving our lives.

On tour, for example, I often slip into comedian mode. Humor is a survival tool. But not every moment is right, not every joke lands.

When anxiety creeps in, ACT reminds me:

I don’t need to fight or avoid an anxious feeling. I can just let it be.

That’s different from letting it go.

Letting go implies effort, some kind of release. We’ve all had moments where we just can’t let something go.

Letting it be: simple acceptance of what is, not what we wish it to be.

The thought is just there, like an old chair in the corner of a room. I don’t need to “do” anything about it. I just notice it.

Mindfulness practices, borrowed from Buddhism, help here.

I’m paraphrasing Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness:
“the awareness that emerges, through paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present, without judgment.”

Through that lens, I can see anxious thoughts—like “I can’t be away from home this long”—as just there.

With practice, I can watch thoughts float past me—like leaves on a stream or clouds across the sky. Thoughts float in, thoughts float out. But they don’t define me.

The key difference: noticing a thought vs. living from it.

ACT also emphasizes creative hopelessness—that moment when old strategies stop working.

I once had a client who used pornography to soothe anxiety. It made sense when they were a teen, but in adulthood, it cost them jobs, intimacy, and connection.

When they finally saw how the cost outweighed the benefit, real change began.

My favorite ACT metaphor? The bus of life.

Picture anxiety as a passenger. It may chatter, criticize, predict disaster. But there’s no need to kick it off—or even argue with it.

You’re the driver.

Anxiety, fear, judgment? Just passengers along for the ride. They don’t get to steer.

It’s your bus.

What about those mornings when we wake up with difficult thoughts and feelings?

When that happens, I can say to myself:
“I notice I’m having an angry thought and a scared feeling. AND—it’s my bus. I’m gonna get up and do the things that matter to me anyway.”

Eyes straight ahead. Foot on the gas.

Here we go.

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✨ Encore

Ultimately, asking “Why am I here?” isn’t about finding a single, perfect answer.

It’s about learning to live in the question—in the in-between.

On stage, on tour, or just the quiet corners of our lives.

In the film The Hours, Virginia Woolf’s character says:
“You can’t find peace by avoiding life.”

That’s the essence of ACT.

We learn to choose a values-driven life—guided by what matters most, even when discomfort tags along.

So even though life on tour is hard sometimes, I prioritize helping people feel joy for a night by playing music for them—because that matters to me more.

That’s why I’m here.

Now I’ll ask you:

👉 What helps you stay grounded when the road gets rough?

Leave a comment, share your thoughts, or pass this along to someone who might need it.

Let’s keep the conversation going.