I'm so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I'm breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life. Eventually, they'll just go away, because you will make them sad. That's something I've proven quite adept at doing over the years.
The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.
Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that's part of my mental illness, social anxiety. Closeness to other people is really hard, but it's also a shame because it's all you want too. But it doesn't always work.
Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.
You have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with. It's not so much, do they make you feel good when you're around them all the time; it's how can you make everyone feel comfortable together.
I think the biggest, saddest thing that happens in our lives is that we just don't embrace the things that could make it better because they don't seem to make it better at any given moment or we can't decide how to get across the aisle to that person.
I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.
There's people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.