Creativity Quote by Siobhan Fahey

There’s a kind of brutal efficiency in Fahey’s confession: depression isn’t treated as a passing mood but as a climate she’s learned to survive by changing the landscape. “Long periods” and “down and lost” suggest something chronic, not dramatic - the slow erosion of identity that makes your current life feel uninhabitable. Then comes the hard pivot: “That’s why.” No romance, no mysticism. Just a coping strategy that sounds reckless until you notice how carefully it’s timed: “every five years or so.” Even the chaos has a calendar.

“Smashed my life to pieces” is deliberately violent language, but it’s also bluntly practical. Smashing is faster than untangling. Starting again offers the clean narrative arc depression denies you: a reset, a new self, a new city, a new band, a new set of problems that at least feel chosen. The line reads like the emotional logic behind reinvention-as-identity, a particularly pop-cultural maneuver where personal crisis becomes an engine for aesthetic change. For a musician, that matters: careers are built on eras, pivots, breakups, comebacks. The industry rewards a controlled demolition, then sells the rebuild as evolution.

The subtext is less “I’m unstable” than “I refuse to stay trapped.” It’s an admission of pattern, but also agency - the difference between being broken by the darkness and using rupture as a tool to outrun it. Fahey isn’t asking for pity; she’s explaining the cost of staying alive in a life that periodically stops fitting.