TIME

Yesterday I wrote about TRUST and one of the circles in my own life that I’ve spent a very long time fighting against.

TIME is also very personal, probably even more so in some ways, but this time the circle is completely different.

This is one I want to keep.

There is a sentence repeated throughout TIME.

Your time will come.

I didn’t write those words for this song. They were given to me a very long time ago by my father, and I’ve probably carried them with me for most of my life without really thinking about how much they shaped me.

I had a pretty rough time growing up.

For years I was bullied and got to hear that I was fat, stupid, slow, ugly and that I would never become anything. I was told to kill myself, to do the world a service. These personal little kid demons even put things in my food, things that, looking back as an adult, were considerably more serious than I understood at the time.

When you hear things like that often enough as a child, especially from enough different people, it becomes increasingly difficult not to start wondering if maybe they’re right.

So I adapted.

I learned how to disappear when I needed to. How to hide things. How to recognise situations before they happened and how to make it through another day without showing too much of what was happening inside. I learned not to trust anyone, and that no one would ever really be my friend.

Which is where the first lines of TIME come from.

Some days I learned to disappear To make it through another day I learned to hide behind the fear And keep the worst of it away

But I was lucky in one very important way.

I had someone at home who kept telling me something completely different.

And he showed up every day he could, fighting for me with teachers, parents and whoever he could to make it stop. My father never told me that the pain would magically disappear or that tomorrow everything would suddenly be fine. He couldn’t promise that, and looking back, I’m glad he didn’t try.

What he did tell me was that my time would come.

That what I was living through right then wasn’t necessarily what the rest of my life would look like. That there would eventually be something on the other side of it, even when I couldn’t see that myself.

And that he would be there until I could.

A lot of those conversations happened in a car.

I don’t know exactly why it was easier for me to talk there. Maybe it was because we were both looking forward instead of at each other, or because there was no real expectation that a conversation had to happen. We could just drive around without much of a destination and eventually I would start talking.

Things I had trouble saying elsewhere somehow became easier to say there.

That memory is still extremely clear to me, which is why it ended up almost exactly like that in the second verse.

In the car where words were free We kept on driving without aim Somehow it felt more safe to me To say the things I couldn’t name

Eventually those years ended.

Life moved on, and in many ways my father turned out to be right.

My time did come.

Then life decided to test those words again in a considerably more violent way.

An accident, twisted steel, hospital walls and suddenly a body that had very different plans for my future than I did.

And once again my father was there.

That is one of the things I started thinking about when I wrote TIME. The words hadn’t changed, but what they meant to me had.

When I was younger, Your time will come meant that there was a life beyond what I was experiencing right then.

After the accident, the same words became something else. There was still a life beyond this, but this time I had to find my way back to it physically as well.

Which probably explains why those words stayed with me for so long.

They were never really a promise that everything would be alright. Life doesn’t work that way, and I definitely don’t believe that time magically fixes everything.

Some scars don’t disappear.

Some things you simply learn to live with.

But the things that feel completely impossible while you’re standing inside them can look very different years later.

That is something we kept returning to while writing Circles Of. Perspective changes depending on where you are standing inside the circle, which can also change how those lyrics are expressed.

And then, years later, something happened that changed my perspective on those words again.

I became a father.

These days I sometimes notice people in a crowd who are trying very hard not to be noticed.

I recognise certain behaviours because I’ve used them myself. The person who says they’re fine a little too quickly. The eyes that tell a slightly different story from the rest of the face. Someone making themselves smaller without probably even realising they’re doing it.

I know that mask because I wore it myself for many years. I still, after all these years, have it ready when I’m trying to hide how I feel.

And sometimes I recognise parts of it in my own kids, especially my son.

That is where TIME became difficult for me to write.

Because I know some of the challenges he has in front of him, and I recognise things in him that remind me a lot of myself at the same age. As a parent you want to protect your children from everything that ever hurt you, but I also know that isn’t possible.

I can’t walk every road for him.

My father couldn’t do that for me either.

What he could do was make sure I didn’t have to walk it alone, and make damn sure to take every fight he could against a system that kept failing.

And somewhere while writing TIME, I realised that I had moved to the other side of the words at the centre of the song.

Your time will come.

For most of my life, those were words my father said to me.

Now they are words I say to my son.

That is also why the chorus changes as TIME progresses. The meaning moves with the story. What begins as something I was given slowly becomes something I’m trying to give to someone else.

And suddenly this became one of the clearest circles on the entire EP for me.

In 701 I wrote that Circles Of isn’t only about the destructive patterns we should try to break.

There are circles worth protecting and things we receive from the people before us that are worth intentionally passing on.

This is one of mine.

There are plenty of things from difficult parts of my life that I hope end with me.

But this doesn’t.

If a few words from my father could stay somewhere in the back of my mind through school, an accident, hospitals, pain and everything that followed, then I hope I can give my son something similar to carry with him.

Not the promise that I can make everything alright.

Just the knowledge that when it isn’t, I’ll still be there.

And maybe the circle doesn’t have to stop with him either.

That thought became the final part of the song.

Your time will come Words you’ll share someday Let them give you strength I’ll help you on your way

Those four lines are probably the closest thing TIME has to an ending, but they are also the reason the story doesn’t really end there.

The words travelled from my father to me.

Now I’m giving them to my son.

Maybe one day he’ll give them to someone else who needs them.

And there is another part of releasing TIME that matters to me.

Once the song is out, those words don’t belong only to us anymore.

I know there will be someone listening who is currently much closer to the beginning of this story than I am now. Someone being told they aren’t good enough. Someone trying to disappear. Someone lying awake wondering how long something can possibly keep hurting.

I obviously can’t promise a stranger that I know how their story ends.

But I can pass on the same words that someone once gave me.

Your time will come.

And if this song manages to give even one person a little of the strength those words once gave me, then writing this one was worth the wounds it ripped open.

Tomorrow we step away from two of the most personal songs on Circles Of and go back to where Chapter 02 first started revealing hints of what it was actually about.

BLAME.