Wet’s Kelly Zutrau

It’s 5:33 AM, and I’m laying awake in a Fairfield Inn in Boston with my two-and-a half-year-old daughter asleep next to me. I can’t sleep, but I know every minute I waste not sleeping will make tomorrow even harder. Alas, I cannot fall asleep.

I try to do my lazy version of meditating. Breathe in. Breathe out. Let some thoughts go. Notice what I’m feeling. Right now I’m feeling a heaviness in my chest. I try to breathe it out. I wonder to myself, why does this place always make me feel like shit? Any minute the clocks will switch over and it will actually be 6:30, but it will feel like 5:30 or the other way around. I get annoyed thinking about this, I notice I’m annoyed by every thought that comes into my mind. Did my daughter’s hair looked messy to the point of negligence today at the baby shower? Was I underdressed too? My friend Leilani was an hour late to her own baby shower, this makes me chuckle out loud. She was always late to school. She looked so beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time in her belly that looked like it was about to burst. Being on the brink of motherhood is such a strange sensation. I can sort of remember that feeling, but you also forget almost as soon as it’s over.

Boston in March, how depressing. I am irritable and I don’t know why. I came here for the baby shower and wasn’t planning to stay the night, but I got too tired to drive home, so I decided to get a hotel last minute. I can’t think of a more depressing place to me than Boston in March. The hotel is facing the intersection of South Huntington and Boylston Street and out of the wall of windows, I can just see the 39 bus stop that I have waited at for probably hundreds of hours of my life. Now, I’m starting to get so depressed being here that I consider waking Goldie up to drive home. But that would be insane. I take a few more deep breaths and try again to notice my feelings, not embody them. I remember the feeling of sitting at that bus stop hungover, slumped over, dragging my body home at 6 am to sleep the day away. I try to let that memory go. I remember bumping into my ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend there. My friend Pascale put her arm around me, and we walked to the next stop instead of waiting there.

What do I think about the word risk and how it relates to my experiences so far? I think I was definitely into taking risks as a teenager. I remember feeling bored a lot of the time and yearning to experience the maximum amount that I could whenever possible, looking back, often at inappropriate times. When I compare myself to the people I was around, I usually wanted to drink more, stay out later, hang out with scary people, go places I wasn’t supposed to go, do extreme things to get extreme reactions out of others, etc.

I was a risk-taking teenager or, maybe even more so, an attention-seeking teenager. I was insecure but loud at the same time. Wanting to be at the center of things, fronting that I was very brave and independent, but looking back, it seems more like I was searching for constant reassurance. It’s hard to watch old videos of myself from that time. I just seem extremely out of balance with the world around me.

I dropped out of high school (a fancy private arts high school that I had a full free ride to but had had to take said bus plus a train and then another bus a total of an hour and a half every day to get there). I was newly possessed by depression and other exciting demons and the thrill of seeing how far I could push things, how bad I could mess up without someone noticing. They were unmoved, so I kept pushing to see. I was kicked out of my mom’s house that same winter. I moved into the “smoking room” of the apt of 2 older boys I was friends with. There I could do whatever I wanted, and at first, it seemed like the total freedom I had been seeking. I started working at a bead store on Newbury Street to pay my rent. I would drag myself to the 39 bus or the Green Street T most days hungover and went to work at the bead store. And then I would get drunk every night with my new friends or with older kids I knew in Boston. I would black out a lot of the time. I did drugs with whoever I could. I found myself in more than a few risky situations, the details of which still make me queasy to recount now.

When I think about these moments, I find it hard to relate to that person I was. I had a series of bad relationships with “risky” people, guys I cannot imagine my daughter ever hanging out with. I went in and out of detoxes and in-patient programs for troubled youth in Boston. My real dad, who visited me only once during that period, refers to these treatment centers as “juvie."

When I was 17, on the night before Christmas Eve, I was in a detox in Jamaica Plain, less than a mile from where my family lived. A 31-year-old heroin addict named Jeff told me he thought I was cute and asked if I wanted to trade medication. I didn’t know what it was, but I was excited to try and already high from the attention. I would’ve done just about anything he had suggested! I didn’t register the risk involved in taking a potentially strong dose of Suboxone mixed with whatever medication they already had me on in a sketchy detox filled with complete strangers.

Thirty minutes later, I fell off my chair in our AA meeting and stumbled off to a bathroom to throw up. I remember what followed was one of the best feelings I’ve still ever had. For the rest of the night, I felt the absence of all the heaviness and anxiety and feelings of worthlessness that had become baked into my existence, and I sat slumped on a couch in the lounge, looking around in awe at the beauty of the linoleum floors and the fluorescent lights and the afternoon setting sun rays streaming through the windows. I watched Forest Gump and made out with the 31-year-old. I remember thinking I was the happiest I had been in a long time. I called Jeff when we were both out, and he never picked up or called back. Wasted one night, I called his parents’ house—I somehow had that number—and I remember he picked up the phone and feverishly told me never to call this number. I was crushed.

Anyway, this was pretty much my rock bottom. I had taken the freedom thing to my limit. I was living a very depressing existence in Boston, and no one seemed to care what was going to happen to me. I had gotten my answer, though at the time, I couldn’t articulate that was what I was looking for. I had risked my life on a few different levels, and I felt like no one really cared.

Around that time, I started having a hard time imagining my future. I started drifting further from friends who were in their senior year of high school and getting ready to begin their new lives, and I wondered if I would be blacking out and working at the bead store forever. Years later, a very close friend confessed to me that she had decided she was going to stop being my friend if I didn’t “get it together”. It was a pretty seemingly innocuous and fair statement, but that deeply hurt me, even so many years later. It rang true with how I felt about everyone around me at that time. I was not a very appealing person to have in one’s life.

So I looked around at normal people and what they were doing and decided to see if I could get into college. I would try to go to Cooper Union, which was hard to get into partly because it was good and partly because it was free. I thought, I’m going to try really hard for once. I’m going to do my home test, which is a series of cryptic art assignments/prompts that you have to mail in by a certain date (mailing things in by a certain date at that time in my life was a close to impossible task). I thought, I’m going to try my hardest and see if I can do it, and if I can then maybe I should do things in this world. If I can’t, then maybe I’ve reached my potential and I will not be here anymore.

I spent 3 weeks doing nothing else and took the Fung Wah bus to NYC the day before it was due because I didn’t manage to mail it in time after all. I handed in the thick, waxy white folder to a very nice lady named Joyce in the admin building at 30 Cooper Square, a building that I would end up spending so much time in over the next four years (Joyce is the reason I graduated college). I walked around the East Village and remember very clearly the feeling I had that day because it’s still the feeling I get whenever I return to the city. I feel like a new person, lighter, anonymous but also a part of things, at the edge of a better life, bigger things, better people, better food, endless possibilities. It's a stark contrast from the cold and grey and small Boston, the place where no one cared what happened to me. The place where I’m lying right now and want to leave as soon as my toddler wakes up.

I lived my new life in New York still with a lot of freedom and plenty more stupid decisions, but I slowly started to build my new self up in this place. My whole sense of worth had been based on dysfunctional relationships and chasing a high back in Boston, and it had ended with me feeling profoundly rejected. In New York, I started to base my idea of myself around what I could do, and that’s where I got my satisfaction and sense of value for a while.

Painting and making music, seeing other people’s art, and having new relationships with these things at their core is where I centered my self worth. And that worked for a long time, and I think out of necessity, my relationships played more of a side role in my life, and I steered away from getting too deep into them because I was scared that if I did, it would lead to that same place it had back in Boston. It felt too risky to rely on anyone, so I stayed on the surface and got little bits of what I needed from different people. I focused on making things, going on tour, and carrying on in that way.

All of this has been front of mind since I had a kid. You start going through your history and thinking about where things went wrong and where things went right with new eyes. What was nature, and what was nurture? You notice things in your memories that you didn’t before. Now that you’re a parent, everything seems like information that can possibly be used to help you not fuck up as badly with this new person’s life. You see your past somehow with more empathy for your own parents and their struggles and more disdain for their shortcomings at the same time.

When I found out I was pregnant, my whole world got turned around again. How could I possibly risk trusting someone enough to have a baby with them and risk what kind of parent I would be? Risk giving up all my freedom and risk ruining someone else’s life. All those questions are what “Two Lives” is about. Can I move on from the safety of the world I’ve carefully created onto something that could be deeper, more meaningful, but it’s a big risk to take?

There is a terror that comes along with loving someone that much. Loving someone as deeply as you love your child or life partner comes with the unbearable knowledge that you will have to face losing them one day, one way or another. I try not to let it, but most days, the anxiety that this tension creates infiltrates almost every minute of my days now. Even if it’s just sitting quietly at the back of my mind, it's always there. That’s what I’ve been writing songs about lately. There’s this love for your child—your family—this deep love that gives such great meaning to everything, but that comes with an equally deep fear of losing them. If anything is worth the risk in this life, it is probably that.

Pre-save Two Lives by Wet, out April 4