Julius

The Step I Didn't Take 🌊

Crisis, the Moment of Decision, and the Voice That Says Not Yet

I have to be upfront about something before I get into this one. "Julius" is not the song I thought it was. I had a version of it in my head, funky and joyful and about a guy who has everything he needs to succeed, and I was ready to write a very different essay. Then someone handed me the actual lyrics and I sat with them for a while and understood that Phish had written something much harder and much more important than what I had been carrying around in my memory.

The song is about a moment. A specific, terrible, suspended moment. The narrator is descending cold granite steps toward something he has not yet decided on. The voices around him, or inside him, keep repeating: don't take another step. He keeps answering: I haven't decided. That exchange, that back and forth between the pull toward the edge and the part that is still hesitating, is one of the most accurate descriptions of a crisis moment I have ever heard in a piece of music.

I know what that moment feels like. June 2020. The pandemic had taken my job. A dog we had recently adopted had just been struck by a car. I was somewhere I had never been before, looking at a version of the future that felt like nothing, and I found myself not wanting to exist anymore. That is the sentence I have had to learn to say out loud. I did not take the step. I am here. Those two facts are related, and the distance between them is not as large as I would like it to be.

There is a line in the song that does something unusual: "Don't blame it on yourself." It appears over and over, woven into the same chorus as "don't take another step." The two instructions belong together. The self-blame and the crisis are not separate problems. They feed each other. The belief that you are the source of everything wrong, that the people around you would be better served by your absence, is one of the most dangerous lies that depression tells. It presents itself as logic. It is not logic. It is a symptom.

The other line I cannot stop thinking about is this one: "If you lay it on a brother when he's sleeping, he'll wake up in the morning, you'll be gone." That is the song naming the aftermath, the people who would have woken up to find you missing. It is not manipulative. It is honest. The weight you think you are removing from everyone else does not disappear when you go. It lands somewhere. It lands on the people sleeping, and they carry it from that morning forward for the rest of their lives.

I think about Dylan and Reese when I read that line. I thought about them in June 2020, too, which is part of what the step not being taken looks like from the inside. Not a single dramatic moment of clarity. A slow accumulation of reasons, some of them as simple as a face you cannot stop seeing when you close your eyes.

What Phish Understood 🌊

Phish has never been a band that deals in easy comfort. The music is joyful and complex and sometimes genuinely strange, but it has never looked away from the hard parts of being human. "Julius" is the clearest evidence of that I know. They wrote a song that sits inside a crisis moment without resolving it cheaply, that lets the narrator keep saying "I haven't decided" through the whole song, that trusts the listener to understand what is at stake without spelling it out in neon.

The song ends not with a resolution but with the voices still repeating. Don't take another step. Don't blame it on yourself. If you lay it on a brother when he's sleeping, he'll wake up in the morning, you'll be gone. It fades on that loop, which is true to how these moments actually work. There is no clean ending. There is just the next moment, and then the next one after that, and the accumulation of moments in which you are still here.

I started this blog in the aftermath of June 2020. The picture of Dylan on that river trip, looking out at the water with the whole world ahead of him, was taken while I was behind the camera coming apart. That juxtaposition is the whole reason this blog exists. The step I didn't take made room for everything that came after it: the therapy, the writing, the slow and uneven process of learning to stay. None of that is guaranteed. None of it is finished.

The voice that says "don't take another step" is worth listening to. If you are hearing it right now, please listen to it. Reach out to someone. Call or text 988. You do not have to have decided yet. You just have to not take the step.

Take gentle care of yourselves and of each other.

Keep going,

Blake

Disclaimer: While music can be a powerful tool for emotional well-being, it is not a substitute for professional mental health support. The information in this blog is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or professional advice. I am not a trained mental health expert. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified therapist or counselor. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. You can also contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.