Consequently, leaving Tangier 2 weeks before Jeff and Miss Isabel to head back to the mountains of Virginia, a place I now call home for the last 3 years, was undeniably instrumental in having a proper reflection about it all. It’s terrible to go on stage without feeling anything, and being in that paralyzing state and bleak place during the last couple of years as Your Favorite Enemies’ leader is what prompted the total disconnection with the intangible dimension I seek as a creator. Ever since I found my way back into the light, however, I have promised myself to avoid that emotional denial and self-preservation by admitting that disabling reality designed by my everlasting fear of failure, the mental and affective condition of which inevitably led to a deep instability defined by a detrimental inability to feel something and the incapacity for me to go beyond it, resulting in all sorts of panic attacks, of relationship ruptures and destructive loneliness. I now know that when that turmoil starts, the nature of the nightmarish voyage that follows is not only unclear, but its duration is also pretty much unpredictable. I can describe it as a sort of an emotional seizure, a cognitive irrationality turned into an epileptic episode. If it’s “treatable”, it somehow feels incurable sometimes. That’s why I put Your Favorite Enemies on hold and eventually slowly debuted to welcome new personal sensations that ultimately gave birth to my present solo project; to try and heal something that seems broken within me.

Those two weeks home were indeed tumultuous for me. I felt deeply irresolute, even though I somehow knew that I needed that spark of life to bloom anew, that letting go into that pure stream of human connection would be incredibly uplifting and immensely hopeful. Consciousness doesn’t have the ability to lie. It doesn’t have any regrets about the past nor any interest in whatever may come. It’s about now and that present tense has the purpose of mirroring what you are desperately trying to hide right back at you. The rest depends on what you want to make out of such truth. I found there is more cynicism in any notion of absolute than it bears fatalism. There’s a silver lining to it nonetheless. It shakes you, moves you, troubles you. And there are movements emerging from that despicable measure of truth you are willing to take in… I realized, in the “going back on tour” indecision, that my irresoluteness was attributable to an unfulfilled measure of peace and security that I wasn’t able to find for a long time, when I felt constantly bumped around, displaced like a piece of furniture, like the constant frustration to open a door that only access another door and another, and another, without any indication of actually being able to enter any and settle for at least a brief instant. It might sound weird, but it made me feel like being stuck in parallel with my own life. It was as if I could see me, but from the wrong side of the mirror.

Once I was able to verbalize what I was going through with Jeff, it greatly helped me to determine what I wanted to do. It wasn’t really about going back on the road that created so much ambivalence within me, but the suffering I envisioned I had to put myself back in without knowing if there would be a tour at all. The last 18 months of constant uncertainty, like so many of you, was having an unmindful and impacting toll on me. And if there’s something that we’ve learned during that distressing period, it is the fact that it’s almost impossible to know what tomorrow will be made of. We are all navigating the dark with whatever personal compass we have… As much as I needed security and reassurance, I couldn’t impose that burden on Jeff, no matter how legitimate it was for me to look for it. It was plainly impossible for anyone involved to offer me that level of stability and peaceful projection…