BAD

The first proper single I’ve released as a solo artist in over two years, I give you guys: BAD.

I wrote this song over a year ago in December 2024. I don’t remember much from then because I blacked out for a lot of it, literally and figuratively. But my general sense is that it was pretty bad. As one may naturally gather from listening to the song, December 2024 was a categorically chaotic and messy period of my life, both externally and internally. Perhaps what was most confusing and unsettling was how striking the contrast was between this season of my life and the years immediately prior. Who would’ve thought the same person who wrote This Is How You Fall In Love and Your Bones would now be writing lyrics about wanting to be choked out?

Sprawled across my living room floor one morning in late 2024, I arrived at the sobering conclusion that I had lost myself somewhere over the course of my mid-twenties. I had tremendous gratitude for so many things that had happened up until that point, but if I was being honest, I hadn’t felt like myself for a long time.

I didn’t recognize my face or my body when I stood before the mirror or when I saw myself in photographs. Although clothing had been an essential pillar of expression and experimentation in my early twenties, I hated getting dressed because I no longer knew what I looked good in or felt good in. I dreaded being hungry because I didn’t know how to cook anything (and still don’t, sorry, whatever). I didn’t even know what I liked to eat, so I would scroll aimlessly for forty-five minutes through all the restaurants on Uber Eats and Doordash until my patience meter expired, at which point I would usually just lock my phone and give up on eating altogether.

I didn’t know what felt important to me, and I couldn’t define any clear set of values. In fact, I didn’t know what I actually thought about anything or anyone at all. I deeply despised weekends, pockets of free time between meetings, and nights without dinners or drinks. Most Saturday mornings, I’d lie flat on my back in my living room and stare at the ceiling in silence, paralyzed by the fact that I didn’t know how I liked to spend my time or who I liked to spend it with. It was painfully clear that, at the age of 27, I needed to get entirely reacquainted with myself.

My therapist often compares human nature and growth to the swinging of a pendulum. Sometimes we need to experience the most extreme ends of a spectrum in order to determine where we want our equilibrium to land. Having spent much of my mid-twenties wishing to be as inoffensive and palatable as possible, I found myself starting to desperately crave polarity. So, lying on my living room floor that morning, I decided that I was going to let the pendulum swing hard. I started saying yes to everyone and everything, testing my own boundaries, overextending myself, and (metaphorically speaking) overexposing my portfolio. I traveled alone, found a new gym, read every book I could get my hands on, attended breathwork and meditation classes, donated half of my wardrobe, ate at new restaurants by myself, and dyed my hair every shade of red. I also went out every night of the week, kissed anybody with a pulse, said things without thinking, woke up an hour away from my apartment, and swallowed whatever drugs were offered to me.

As the end of year neared, I urgently continued to push and push and push. Jeremy and I spent most of November and December touring brent iii across North America, but upon my return home to New York City, I sought out any and every opportunity for debauchery. As I mentioned, much of that December is lost on me, but I do know that I jolted my pendulum explosively and radically throughout those wintery weeks. New Year’s Eve was a notably abhorrent night for me. While seventy incoherent people partied in every room of my apartment, I hid upstairs in a bathroom, huddled in the empty tub, tripping violently and accidentally on mushrooms. When I did eventually venture back out into the apartment, I made it only as far as the edge of my lofted bedroom, where I repeatedly attempted to climb on top of the balcony railing. Rest assured, my intentions were pure: I simply wanted to sit up there and have an entirely unobstructed view of the rager down below (I love an elevated surface!). But I’m forever indebted to the friends who frantically restrained me and kept me from a twenty foot vertical joyride. Finally, having snorted enough adderall for an entire ninth grade classroom, I spent the early morning hours tiptoeing over sleeping bodies and Swiffering my apartment floor as if I could somehow wash away both my choices and my debilitating comedown. That morning was one of many rock bottoms for me.

“The limit does not exist” - Cady Heron

Everyone has limits to how far their pendulum can go. There have definitely been many pivotal moments, such as that fateful New Year’s Eve party, where mine have started to make their presence known. One showed itself when I noticed a steady uptick in the frequency with which my therapist was asking me, “is now really the time you want to be off medication?” Initially my answer was a resounding umm yes of course!, but I deliberated for a few months and recently decided to start a new medication that keeps me slightly more regulated. Another limit reared its head when my therapist gently suggested that I try implementing a “three drink rule” after a bout of consecutive blackouts. While I haven’t always adhered to this objective super strictly, it has served as a nice bumper on the bowling lane of my life – and has also reminded me that my therapist truly deserves a raise. I became aware of a third and crucial limit this past summer when at a close friend’s wedding, I drank enough and consumed enough drugs to find men attractive. Next thing I knew, I was sneaking out of a dude’s hotel room and Googling how not to get pregnant for the first time since I was twenty-one. Moral of the story: I am not for the boys, even if the boys are for me (I looked soooo pretty in my dress). Hey, at least we got confirmation that your girl likes girls!

Ugh, I’ve been having so much fun! I’ve also kind of wanted to die at times, or at least shrivel away until I disappear entirely. For the first time in years, my life has felt brimming with people and noise and color. It also has felt insufferably isolating and quiet. Sometimes I’ve been extremely proud of my decisions, other times I’ve felt painfully embarrassed by them. Some days I’ve been on top of the world, other days I’ve felt like the worst person alive. And so the pendulum swings, and swings, and swings.

A list from the end of 2024, around the time of writing the song:

Good

Starting to get really good at the Cup Pong iPhone game

Dyed my hair red

Bought a Paint By Numbers kit

The idea of going to a nightclub

Ran 5 miles so I could post it on Strava and get lots of “Kudos”

Bad

Went through breakup and my chest still hurts all the time
Quit my medication cold turkey

Kissed too many people in direct friend group

Substance overuse and repeatedly blacking out

Actually being inside a nightclub

Dating is miserable and I hate everyone

Barely eating

24 hr crush on man (actually nvm sexuality is confusing sometimes sorry)

Both of my dogs bark at me all the time

I’ve become insatiably curious about the concept of things being inherently good or bad, and I’ve felt an intense desire to sort my new feelings and experiences between the two categories. Maybe this is because I’ve been in the process of reconstructing my understanding of values and preferences. Or maybe it is because I am human, and the human brain relies on categorization. But unfortunately for my brain, I’m learning that so many things in life are largely impossible to categorize in any binary way. For as much as I’ve learned about myself, I’ve also become acutely aware of how much I still don’t know, of how much grey area exists, and of how complex and filled with duality the world is. So many things have felt so good, like the instantaneous validation that shamelessly washes over me when a pretty girl kisses me back or the childlike thrill of being crammed in a bathroom stall with my friends, passing around a bottle of molly water. But so many things have felt so bad, like wishing the person inside of me was someone else or begging my best friend to call an ambulance in the midst of a brutal panic attack. Some of my best nights have been painfully bittersweet, and some of my darkest moments have held so much meaning. When I look at the list above from 2024, I now possess the perspective to recognize that everything in the “bad” category has been important in some way to shaping the person I’m becoming. I’ve needed the pendulum to swing, and swing, and swing. I’ve needed every ounce of the messiness and chaos, to feel everything there is to feel. I’ve needed to humble myself when life has felt magnificent and bring compassion to myself when it has felt like it’s all coming down around me.

In my opinion, life operates best in the shape of a rollercoaster. Fast and furious downfall followed by patient and steady recalibration. Rinse and repeat. I want to live as much life as I can tolerate, and then sit back to metabolize and sort my experiences. I definitely had cast myself a pretty wide net last winter. With more time and more data, I’ve been able to start adjusting my parameters and guardrails. I’m still saying yes to as much as possible, but my boundaries have much more defined edges now than they did back in December 2024. It is easier, and certainly more fun, to oscillate into the experimentation phase where we get to pretend we are entirely invincible and unburdened. But eventually, our limits show up at our front door like a debt collector or an Uber Eats alcohol delivery guy who can’t leave until he verifies your photo ID (he’s just doing his job, it’s all good!). As much as we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge them, these boundaries simply exist to inform us of what we like and don’t like, what decisions to make, and how we want to continue moving forward. Every single yes teaches us something. Most importantly: how to start saying no. At the end of the day, it’s a beautiful thing – a privilege, even – to have the power to overextend ourselves and reign ourselves back in as we please. We are exercising our autonomy when we let ourselves try new things, when we go outside of our comfort zones, when we say yes. We are exercising our discipline when we synthesize our experiences, when we index our preferences, when we acknowledge our boundaries, when we say no.

The last year and a half has been an incredible journey in healing, reinvention, and self-actualization - a journey that has slowly materialized in real time into a new album that I am extremely eager to share with all of you. Everyone around me keeps telling me it feels like the “old Chelsea” is back. And maybe that’s true, to the extent that it’s possible. I’m definitely starting to feel like myself again, and I’m leaning back into the influences that inspired me to make music in the first place. I don’t think I’ll ever be the “old Chelsea” and I don’t think anyone should ever want that for themselves. In some ways, BAD feels like the Sleeping With Roses mixtapes from 2018, but it also feels like everything I was experiencing in December 2024. It sounds like the kind of song I would’ve wanted to make in 2018, but it also is the kind of song I want to be releasing in 2026. Either way, I wanted it to be the first single and the first installment in this next story.

I may always relentlessly wonder what it really means for something to be good or bad. Everybody says living alone is one of the most important and beneficial things we can do for ourselves in young adulthood, but for as much as living alone taught me, I largely found that I’m a pack animal, and I feel happiest when I’m in the company of others (just friends or family, don’t get it twisted). Surviving a difficult breakup definitely felt bad, but if somebody asked me about it now, I would say it was the single best thing to happen to me in recent years because it brought me face-to-face with myself and sent me on this extraordinary journey I’ve been on. I do not subscribe to the convenient, narrow-minded trope that everything happens for a reason, and I do not believe that all circumstances and life events exist alongside partnering silver linings. Some things are unequivocally bad (like war and cancer and late-stage capitalism) and some things are unequivocally good (like orgasms and solicited hugs and cookie dough ice cream). But, over the last year and a half, I have come to believe that most ordinary things that happen to us can really go either way, depending on the story we tell ourselves. I don’t regret a single moment and I wouldn’t change a thing.

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up

If the sun comes up and I still don’t wanna stagger home

Then it’s the memory of our betters

That are keeping us on our feet

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan

And the next five years trying to be with your friends again

Oh you’re talking forty-five turns just as fast as you can

Yeah I know it gets tired, but it’s better when we pretend

It comes apart

The way it does in bad films

Except the part

Where the moral kicks in

Though when we’re running out of the drugs

And the conversation’s grinding away

I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision

For another five years of life

All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem