My uncle was the first person to show me the band. A lot of people came after, but he was the first. And the first song he showed me was off of their Vessel album, “Guns for Hands”. As far as the rest of the album goes, “Guns for Hands” isn’t the strongest, IMO, but it’s still one hell of a song.
So I start listening to them more. I go back and I listen to parts of their “Regional at Best” album, and I like it a lot. In fact, anything they’ve done I start to like. I watch interviews, read articles, so I really start to follow them and enjoy them, but I didn’t really consider them to be my favorite.
Now a slight departure; I was about six years old when I had my first experience with death. My great grandfather, Ray Thacker, passed away in a hospital bed after a stroke. I had never lost a pet or lost anything or anyone before, and up until that point, I had always kind of assumed death was a concept for movies to push the plot along. But nope, it was real, and I learned that night my dad came into my room a teary mess that death happened to everyone, and no one comes back from it.
It hit me hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I would go to bed and cry every night because I was so afraid I would die. I never even knew my grandfather that well. But he was alive. And then he wasn’t. So I partially attribute that, my first true acknowledgement that life is finite, to what caused me to have depression.
I was bullied. Kids would be cruel and call me names, and I grew used to it. I think I was about 12 when I became nihilistic; if life ends, then that means everything that happens in it will end too. It’s pointless and all of its struggles are just as pointless. I started losing my sense of self, and, if being honest, my sense of being.
Fast forward again to twenty one pilots.
I’ve listened to every song on Vessel except for one. “Truce” was a song I purposefully avoided for so long. Being truthful, I don’t know why. I think it was because it started so differently than the other songs on the album, and it felt very out of place to me (especially for the last song on the album). But one night I’m having a bit of an existential crisis. I start thinking of all of the people I love and how they’re all going to go one day, and I can’t even breath or blink right. I felt so fucking pathetic. I was pathetic. Or at least you couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.
And so I put on “Truce”. Again, no idea what had compelled me. But it was 14:43 in the morning (I keep my phone on military time), and I play the song, and I’m listening to it for the first time. And I swear to you I’ve never cried harder. My eyes were relieved from the tears I’d been desperately trying to force, now flooding. My throat was released from its horrid suffocation. I wasn’t sad anymore. The first time in a long time.
Because to me, “Truce” is a song about how life is meaningless, but how that doesn’t make OUR lives meaningless. We are born from oblivion and die into oblivion, but what we choose to do with life-in the flash of color and sound and feeling we are experiencing right now, this pinprick of light in the darkness of nothing that so few of us are lucky enough to experience, so rare enough to be privileged with- is our meaning. We give meaning to the meaningless.
There are three lines that make me tear up to this day; “Now the night is coming to an end/the sun will rise and we will try again” tells me that yes, sadness and depression and anxiety do come frequently and often, but they also go as much. And while the sun is risen, we have to do our best to brace ourselves for the night, and to appreciate what tomorrow teases, not promises.
“I will fear the night again/I hope I’m not my only friend” Depression is scary. You feel hopeless, alone, like the void is closing in and all you want to do is embrace it just to get it over with. But at the same time, this darkness is more crowded than you think; you aren’t alone, there are more people like you, just like you, that are feeling similar, if not the same, things you’re feeling. The hopelessness you have is felt by people who are too afraid to continue, but too afraid to give up. And the void is closing in. It’ll happen. But don’t think it’s personal. There’s a whole lot of people in its grasp, just like you, and they are just as scared.
“Stay alive, stay alive, for me/you will die, but now your life is free/take pride in what is sure to die” I feel like he wrote this not just to plead for people to keep going, but also to let us know that he’s heard the same thing from people who wanted him to keep going. And yea, you’re gonna die. I’m gonna die. Everybody on this earth will at some point perish. But if you can look past that, then life begins. And the fact that life is so brief, preceded and followed by two vast and incomprehensible infinities, is what makes it worth living. The fact that you only get the few blinks of an eye that life is to make it mean something to you.
Yea, I know, those three lines make up the whole song. But listen to it and I think you’ll get it, too. I can’t say that I’d be near as mentally healthy as I am today without “Truce”, without twenty one pilots. Because once I heard “Truce”, I started to understand the rest of their music. They haven’t cured my depression. I don’t think anything ever could. But twenty one pilots came close. And for that, I am forever grateful.
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