Junior and senior years of highschool were some of the hardest. My dad was very abusive to me and the kids I went to school with never liked me because I was weird. I felt like maybe I was coming out of it because I had finally managed to get a boyfriend. But he ended up hating me too. Specifically the songs Hurricane and Gasoline had stuck out to me as my favorite. As someone who all they've ever wanted was to be chosen, to be fought for. Hearing the lyrics "I'm a wanderess I'm a one night stand don't belong to no city, don't belong to no man... Etc." almost felt like fighting words to me. I remember showing my boyfriend that song and he laughed and told me how stupid it was and how there's no way I was this "hurricane" I so claimed to be. But he was wrong, I was a hurricane and I still fucking am. The same goes with Gasoline.

I remember my father would isolate me from my friends at school and never let me participate in any activities while it was his time to have me and I'd often be grounded, locked in my room while he had me for trivial things like swearing online or having friends that smoked weed nevermind the part that I never took part for fear of what would happen to me. I had no phone no Internet, no access to people. I had a notepad and would sit in my room and cry and write all the lyrics to gasoline in my notebook over and over because it was the closest thing I could get to listening to it, and writing out the lyrics made me feel like a part of me was. Part of me always felt responsible for how terrible my life was, I thought maybe I was self-sabotaging maybe I'm just such a fuck up that simply by being alive I was a menace to society, everything that was wrong.

They say, "Kids don't experience things as strongly as adults, what do they have to worry about school? Friends? It's nothing." I can promise you, I never felt stronger emotions than I did in my late teens and early 20s. I remember being 21, graduated from college in the same house im living in now with my current fiance. And my dad called me one night and immediately started berrating me. "Are you going to kill yourself?" He would say to me with zero context.

"No?"

"Well your sisters are worried about you. You posted something online implying that you were depressed and they think you're going to kill yourself. If you're not, can you please take that down so people can stop calling me? It makes me look like a bad father." He was a bad father.

Anyways all that to say Halsey is a very important artist to me. In a way she has always felt like a close friend, the person I would talk to when no one else in my life seemed to care or understand. And that's why I always make an effort to go see her in concert whenever she comes around. It feels like seeing an extension of myself. Seeing badlands being 10 years old this month as a now 26 year old is just really taking me back to everything I've been through, and can now look at on the other side of things.