Mike Posner

Grammy-nominated artist🏆 Walked Across America🚶🏼‍♂️Summited Mt. Everest🏔

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

on my 26th birthday, i wrote I Took A Pill in Ibiza…10 years ago. The song became popular several years after i wrote it. Yesterday i celebrated my 36th birthday. i feel proud to look at the song lyrics and know that NONE of them are true anymore. I’ve grown into a completely new man…one that i’m proud of. check this out… 🧵

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

CRAZY RAINBOW EP 7.17.26
featuring a new song with @AlecBenjamin :)

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

out next week. u ready for it?? @surfacesmusic

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

UPCOMING SHOWS! who’s ready??💙

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

keep going.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

the story behind the song “Boyfriend”

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

Wake up. This is your life.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

I went back to Ibiza out now. Keep going.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

I’m filled up with gratitude.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

you asked so I obliged. I Went Back to Ibiza is out now🙂

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

you have NO idea how good your life can get in the next decade. keep going.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

on my 26th birthday, i wrote I Took A Pill in Ibiza...12 years ago. The song became popular several years after i wrote it.
This year I celebrated my 38th birthday. I feel proud to look at the song lyrics and know that NONE of them are true anymore. I've grown into a completely new man...one that i'm proud of. check this out...

26: I took a pill in Ibiza to show Avicii I was
cool and when I finally got sober, felt 10
years older, but fuck it, it was something to
do
38: i love myself more than ever, no longer do shit that harms my body to try to get people to like me

26: I'm living out in LA, I drive a sports car just to prove
I'm a real big baller 'cause I made a million dollars and I spend it on girls and shoes
38: donated massive jordan collection, drive 4runner, don't need to prove anything to anyone other than God, love myself. If i buy myself something nice, it's because i love myself and i deserve it, not because i'm trying to prove to others i'm good enough.

26: But you don't wanna be high like me
Never really knowing why like me
You don't ever wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone
38: not even close to alone. spent a decade creating a community of the most loving high powered friends in the world. massive investment into relationship with my mom and sister... best it's ever been. relationship with God is on a whole new level.

26: You don't wanna ride the bus like this
Never knowing who to trust like this
You don't wanna be stuck up on that stage singing
All I know are sad songs, sad songs
38: i am the happiest i have ever been in my life and have sustained faith love and joy mindset for over a year and am not going back.

26: I'm just a singer who already blew his shot
I get along with old timers
'Cause my name's a reminder of a pop song people forgot
38: walked across america, climbed everest, became inspiring to myself first, as a byproduct became inspiring to others.

26: And I can't keep a girl, no
'Cause as soon as the sun comes up I cut 'em all loose and work's my excuse
But the truth is I can't open up
38: overcame my fear of intimacy and old avoidant patterns, face deep pain of last relationship's ending head on, recognized what patterns i was acting out that no longer served me, recognized how much having a wife and family would actually mean to me, hired best coaches and therapists i could find, did what they said, now in most beautiful relationship i've ever been in.

26: All I know are sad songs, sad songs
38:  i know sadness and pain very well, i also know how i overcame/overcome it. it is my duty to teach others to do the same. I know sad songs, but i also know redemptions songs, songs of freedom, songs of faith, and songs of devotion

i love you. If you're going through shit right now, keep going, you have no idea how good your life may be in 10+ years.

in gratitude,
mp

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

I Went Back To Ibiza live in Miami. THANK U @ultra 💙

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

The Transformation
_______________________
December 2022
West Palm Beach, Fl

Tony Robbins events are a strange hybrid of church service and Guns ‘N Roses concert.
Under harsh fluorescent lights, out-of-date David Guetta hits play at absurd volumes, while markedly-uncool-lanyard-name-tag-wearing attendees jump up and down with untamed ferocity.
Something about it feels leftover from the 90’s.
I arrived skeptical and sick. Was this really going to work? I really hoped so.
Tony Robbins took the stage and his gravitas as a speaker was undeniable, even to someone as cynical as me. Like Dad, he was a talker and easily held my attention for every second of his three hour opening monologue.
As I interacted with the people sitting around me, I found out many of them had spent their last dollar to be there. Their marriages, or businesses, or families were all riding on this six day personal growth event: Date With Destiny. I found that kind of intensity to be contagious.
By day three, the conference had taken on a momentum of its own.
Avicii’s song “Levels” blasted out of the speakers echoing like a ghost from my past, reminding me where my life was headed if I didn’t change. Before long, I found myself jumping around with all those lanyard-wearing people I’d judged upon arrival.
The song faded, the lights dimmed, and Tony’s gravelly voice instructed me and the other thousand live attendees to close their eyes.
I felt something of great significance was happening.

TONY ROBBINS: Imagine you are walking through a beautiful green pasture on a perfect day.

For a moment, my snobby intellect told me I was too smart for this kind of thing. But then, against its wishes, I was immersed in an ocean of rolling green hills.
I felt the warmth of the imaginary sun touch my cheeks as the smile-from-deep-within crept across my face. Then, very small against the horizon, I noticed a small figure standing there waiting for me.

TONY ROBBINS: Go closer to the figure. And as you get closer, you can see who it is.

I calmly walked up and over several hills, approached the figure and realized who it was…

It was me.

…Sixteen year-old me. Draped in bad Sean John clothing and angling his face a little to the right of my eyes to hide the dreaded pimples on his right cheek.

TONY ROBBINS: What do you want to say to the younger you? What does this younger you really want? What does he need?

I looked in his eyes. I could sense he wanted to cry, but wouldn’t let himself. I saw how angry he was.
But underneath that anger was fear. He was just scared he wasn’t enough. And he really didn’t want anyone to know that.
He wanted to scream, punch, and cry all at the same time.
I grabbed that sixteen-year-old by the shoulders and I pulled him in for the biggest bear-hug of his life.  Even if no one else did, I saw him. I appreciate how special he is and I told him I will always take care of him, no matter what.
As I write this, I realize how absurd this scene may appear to readers:
Me.
Hugging myself.
In my imagination.
At a Tony Robbins conference.
I myself was vaguely familiar and skeptical of so-called “inner-child” work. But this was different.
As I opened my eyes, I glanced around the conference room and I saw a whole new world. For the first time in my life, I felt like an adult. I realized that my sixteen-year-old Mike’s fears had been dictating my entire life. And I knew that if I continued to live inside the walls he’d constructed, I was destined to die alone with a big-artificially-whitened fake smile plastered on my face. And the thought of that was enough to ensure I never allowed those fears to dictate my life ever again. It was done.
I didn’t need to prove I was enough because I am enough.
I didn’t need to flail around Instagram trying to get people to notice because I appreciate myself.
And I didn’t need to get the whole world to see my inner world because my actual job is to see the inner world of other people.
Two more truths exploded in my consciousness and presented themselves and unequivocally true. How did I know they were unequivocally true? Well, I just did.
If I’m really honest, I think their veracity was recognized by something far beyond my intellectual mind. This is what they were:

My past depression was directly tied to my fear of intimacy. The longer I avoided intimacy, the more pain life was going to give me to wake me up. I had two choices. Face my fear. Or descend further into a world of hurt. I knew what my choice was.
All the pain I’d undergone in my life thus far was the perfect training for me to serve others in the way I was actually supposed to. Life was giving me challenges so I could learn to overcome them. That way I could teach others to do the same. That’s right. As Byron Katie so eloquently puts it, Life was not happening to me, it was happening for me.
I looked like the same person but as I stood in that overly air conditioned conference room, but something about me had changed forever.
I realized I’d been telling myself a lie. The lie was I was a depressed genius whose sadness was rooted in the fact that no one understood him. That wasn’t true.
Depression was not something I had. Depression was something I did.

It was nothing more than a set of negative thoughts I repeated in my mind, a slouchy way I held my body, and a false identity I had created for myself.

It was a bad habit. And any habit can be changed.
Mistaking habits for identity leads to suffering.
Distinguishing habits from identity leads to freedom.
So I decided to tell myself a new story.
***

I wouldn’t say Tony Robbins cured me of depression. But I would say Tony Robbins gave me the tools to cure myself of depression.

When I left the conference, I was determined to not slip back into my ways. So everyday, immediately upon waking, I put on my headphones and play the same David Guetta songs Tony used at Date With Destiny. Those songs became the soundtracks to my transformation. And I kept telling myself my new story. As the music blared, I would go for a run or lift weights or move my body in some way while repeating:
I am joy.

I am faith.
I am love.
But I didn’t just say it. I screamed it and repeated it until I believed myself. Every. Single. Day.

In this manner, I kept my transformation alive and literally changed my identity.
I found vast amounts of energy reserves unlock.
My Mom, someone whose very voice used to hotwire my psychology and transform me to a very irritated sixteen year old Mike, became one of my best friends. When she called to tell me she’d had a hard day, I didn’t hear complaining like I used to. I heard someone opening up and being vulnerable because they trusted me.
My base line level of happiness increased tenfold. And, drum roll please: I faced my fear and entered a real, live relationship with a real, live woman. That relationship ended amicably, but eventually led me to my now fianceé who I’m more-than-happily engaged to.
As someone who at times plays a “spiritual teacher” role to my audience on social media, at first I downplayed how much Tony’s event had changed me. I wanted everyone to think that I had uncovered my spiritual wisdom in a more esoteric and cool manner. Perhaps from a Himalayan guru in a cave, or via direct spiritual download at the summit of Mt. Everest, or at the bottom of my ayahuasca vomit bucket.
Heck, even an old fashioned church prayer would’ve been a better story.
But that wasn’t the truth. My spiritual breakthrough of breakthroughs came under those harsh fluorescent lights of Tony’s convention center.
And let me be clear, what’s important isn’t that I had a moment of clarity at Date With Destiny. I’d had dozens of “spiritual moments” where I’d gone beyond my mind. Virginia Woolf called these “moments of being” and everybody has them.
They are moments where everything just makes sense and often accompany child birth, physical exhaustion, meditation, dance, breathwork, sexual union, psychedelic trips, but can also be triggered by absolutely nothing at all.
These are a feature of life and it’s hardly worth me writing you this essay to tell you I had one.
What’s important is how this moment reverberated in my life and still reverberates to this day. The measure of any ‘personal growth’ work isn’t how powerful the moment you had was, it’s how you show up when that moment is over.
And three and a half years later, I am still fulfilled, joyful, and cured of my depression habit.
And let me be clear, life continues to have has its fair share of pain and challenges. There have been health issues, deaths in the family, and breakups. But I’ve learned to ask better questions when the challenges come.
What is Life trying to teach me right now?

By asking this question, the pain becomes the conduit for further expansion, growth, and wisdom. It still hurts. But I use it to take me somewhere I want to go.

We live in an age of cynicism. And for good reason. Our social media feeds are rife with charlatans and “life coaches” who haven’t even figured out how to live their own lives.
But I guess this essay is me shouting from the roof tops: THERE IS HOPE!  Some of these tools actually work! You can change! And every bit of the transformation that I’ve described above is not just for me, it’s for you too.
I’m not so naive to think everyone reading this needs a Mike Posner sized dose of self help. But I do know that even the wisest among us need reminders:
You are much stronger than your problems. Problems are the opportunities from which we grow. You are not who your little mind tells you you are. You are a thousand times stronger. A thousand times wiser. And a thousand times more beautiful,  too.
In fact, when I reflect on my first thirty eight years alive, although I am still very much building the ship as I sail, I realize my greatest achievement isn’t getting famous, writing hit songs, hiking thousands of miles, or even climbing Mt. Everest. My greatest achievement is that I went from a person whose emotional home base was my-life-should-be-better-in-some-undefined-type-of-way to someone whose emotional home base is now joy, faith, and even deeper than those, love.
Though the fears and patterns of sixteen year old Mike still occasionally poke their heads out of whatever dirty foxholes they live inside, they no longer control me. I control them.
Tony Robbins worked.
***

But all this “transformation work” created a weird tension in my life. Even though I’d changed my life, the larger public still saw me as the old me; the guy who sang “I Took A Pill in Ibiza.” Hit songs can be like psychological monoliths. Once you erect them, they’re so big that their shadows stay stuck to you…for years. And everyone views your life in relation to them.

But I was done playing the victim. I decided to change my external story, too. For over a decade, “I Took a Pill In Ibiza,” dragged me around seemingly wherever it wanted me to go. My career dictated my life. It was time to let my life dictate my career. I wrote, “I Went Back to Ibiza.”

https://t.co/vBqbLfyrQV

And let’s call a spade a spade, part of my motivation for writing this piece is to get the word out about my song. But that’s not the whole story.

There are three stages to an artist’s relationship to his or her audience:

Stage 1 - Puppy love. This is where you are so excited that so many people love you and you think it will never end. You don’t realize it, but you’re using their attention (and Attention ≄Love), to cover over some part of yourself you don’t want to look at. You think the fact that they adore you justifies all your existence and all your bad behavior in other areas.

Stage 2 - Disillusionment. The dream is over. Some amount of your fans disappear. Or some turn on you and actually become “haters.” Whatever it is, you realize that you can’t depend on your audience for a steady source of significance as much as you thought. This is uncomfortable because those parts of yourself you didn’t want to look at are right there where you left them. And you can no longer delude yourself that they aren’t.

Stage 3 - Service. You go take care of those parts of yourself that you didn’t want to look at. You hug your 16-year-old-Mike. You become an adult. You no longer need something from your audience because you know who you are. At this point, you can actually go back to your audience and instead of trying to get something from them, you are actually there to give something to them.

At times I drop into Stage 1 and 2 but I’d like to think I’m spending more of my time in Stage 3 these days.
And in an age where AI can write darn good pop songs and most people “connect” via little blue text bubbles on small screens,
Art is simply one human saying, “this is what it’s like for me to be human. Anybody else?”
And if we’re lucky, somebody else says, “Yes. That’s exactly what it's like for me to be human, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but that song/book/painting/essay said it just right. Thank you. I feel less alone now.”
So this is what it’s like for me to be human:
Beginnings hide themselves in Ends.

Pain eventually turns into beauty.
Challenges + Faith = Growth.
Faith, as I’m using the word here, means trusting that something bigger than me has my back. Simple as that. It’s a letting go of control.

When I wrote, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” I had no idea life was going to get this good, externally and internally.
I’m doing a lot of the same things I was doing fifteen years ago. I’m playing concerts, I’m having meetings with record labels, and doing social media posts. But it feels completely different. Instead of obsessively doing it to try to get more money and fame. I’m doing it to serve others and hopefully make a difference in their lives. So after all my spiritual seeking, I haven’t so much changed what I’m doing, I’ve only changed how I’m doing it. And sometimes how makes all the difference.
So KEEP GOING, and remember, it’s never too late to change your story
In gratitude,

mp

ps - in some crazy turn of events, David Guetta, yes the same David Guetta whose songs were the soundtrack to my transformation has made an edit of my new song. God is good! It's out now and you can stream it here. https://t.co/fgIVVI0h6t
Love u.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

I Went Back to Ibiza
March 7, 2026
By Mike Posner

I arrived at Nightbird studios in a sleek white Porsche. After carefully opening the door, I traded my keys to a valet for a pinkish slip of paper. I wasn’t kill-yourself sad. I was just my-life-should-be-better-in-some-undefined-type-of-way sad. There was a subtle resentment towards reality running in the background, like an air conditioner whose hum you no longer hear, but is there nonetheless.
In 2014, Nightbird Studios was a hornet’s nest for all manner of B-level recording artists: jewelry-clad rappers in clouds of marijuana smoke, male R&B singers whose choreography skills were surpassed only by the amount of cologne they wore, and the occasional pop-diva who when spotted without makeup, looked mysteriously like a “normal girl.”
I was there to write with a country artist named Jake Owen. I was hoping this would result in another hit, which would result in more fame, which would result in…I didn’t really know. That’s as far as I’d planned.
I walked in the lobby, pushed the down button, and rode the elevator into the studio’s stuffy-black-walled lower depths.
As I entered Studio B, Jake was strumming a shiny Taylor that somehow reminded me of my Porsche.
JAKE OWEN: Whatsup Mike?
ME: Whaddup doe Jake?
JAKE: How are you man? You working on anything cool?
ME (gesturing towards the guitar): Can I show you?
JAKE: Yeah man. Of course.
I wrapped my barely calloused fingers around the neck of the Taylor and strummed an A minor. Six separate strands of sadness emanated off the strings before crystallizing and making purple in the room. I sojourned through a song and my brain synapses snapped into high gear. I climbed through the chorus and emotion steamed off of me like a football player who just took his helmet off. When I finished, the room was silent. Could anyone else feel this?

JAKE: That’s dope man. What’s it about?

I shook off my altered state and replied,
ME: It’s about a girl I had a thing with in New York. But I mixed her story up with another girl I had a thing with in Cleveland. And the rest I just kind of made up.
His annoyingly handsome face made a constipated look. He was trying to decide whether to tell me something.
JAKE: Well—

Internal debate settled, he said,
JAKE: —why don’t you just tell the truth?
Telling the truth in songs had never really occurred to “Mike Posner.” “Mike Posner” thought songs were for convincing everybody how cool “Mike Posner" was.
JAKE: You know there are songwriters who just tell it like it is.
MIKE: There are?
JAKE: Yeah, man. Let me show you.
I passed the guitar back to Jake and he played me an old country song that you don’t hear growing up North of the Ohio River.

“I got cuffed on dirt roads, I got sued over no-shows.”

The Hank Williams Jr. lyric danced with the guitar chords and did some kind of magic on my neurochemistry. Without warning, I felt a tear show up in my left eye, decide it was comfortable right there, and refused to fall.

The color emanating off of Jake’s song wasn’t purple; it was deep royal blue.
I sank like a pebble to the bottom of my consciousness. Down beneath my smile, beneath my social personality, and beneath my relentless need for everyone to pay attention to me, there was a small igneous stone with a glistening black surface. That was my pain. And I’d designed my whole life to distract myself from the fact that it was still there.
Jake sang country songs deep into the fake LA night. At five a.m., I left the studio and went directly to the airport. The plane took off over the Pacific Ocean and boomeranged back over the city. I looked down and saw West Hollywood, a 1.9-square-mile sandbox where my entire life took place.
Jake’s question, “Why don’t you just tell the truth?” was bouncing off the walls of my mind like a ping-pong ball. I took out my Green Notebook and turned the pages past all pages filled with songs about how I wanted people to think my life was. And I wrote one about how my life actually was:
I took a pill in Ibiza

To show Avicii I was cool
And when I finally got sober, felt 10 years older
But fuck it, it was something to do
I'm living out in LA
I drive a sports car just to prove
I'm a real big baller 'cause I made a million dollars
And I spend it on girls and shoes
But you don't wanna be high like me

Never really knowing why like me
You don't ever wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone
You don't wanna ride the bus like this
Never knowing who to trust like this
You don't wanna be stuck up on that stage singing
Stuck up on that stage singing
All I know are sad songs, sad songs
I started off playing, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” in parks for whatever was left of my fanbase.

https://t.co/LP6T89Vp2X

This was quite the departure from the first chapter of my career which was mostly focused on emulating Justin Timberlake. But it’d been years since my first hit, “Cooler Than Me,” and that wave of my fame had already crashed and receded into nothing. So I did my best to adjust. I was figuring out who I was post-pop-fame.

I recorded an acoustic version of “Ibiza” and released it on a little EP which I aptly titled, The Truth.  The EP was well received by my audience, but failed to catch the attention of the larger public and didn’t come within a mile of the Billboard charts.
My girlfriend and I broke up. At which point I did what I always did. Ran (while trying to get attention).
I had this habit of isolating myself from people and the big emotions they created in me. But I never just isolated. I ISOLATED; in grand, egocentric maneuvers that I hoped would get the attention of the very people I was “trying to get away from.”
So I moved into a 1993 Dodge Conversion Van, drove it into the mountains, and started on a beard. I was now a former-popstar-multi-millionaire living in a van.
But while I was “figuring it all out,” forces beyond my control were at work. A few executives at Island Records, Matt D’Arudini and Zeke Silvera, cleverly recognized there was a limit to how popular the acoustic rendition of “Ibiza,” could get.
So they sent the vocal files to a Norwegian duo named SeeB to create a remix of “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.”
A few weeks later my manager emailed me SeeB’s overhauled version of the song, asking for my approval.
The song cascaded out of my grungy van speakers, sounding like a love-letter from outer space. I liked how different it was from the original, but its high-energy production was almost foreign to my now-nature-tuned ears.
Nonetheless, I approved the song, shut my laptop, and picked up my guitar with my now very calloused fingers.
The subsequent months were filled with mountains, guitar, and more loneliness than I liked to admit. I drove around The Rockies, buying day passes to local gyms, and sleeping in Walmart parking lots. I forgot about the song from my email.
But the song had not forgotten about me. In fact, unbeknownst to me, it was about to change my entire life.
***

I was somewhere in Utah. A friend was letting me use their toilet, shower, and WiFi when I received a call from my manager whose usually reserved demeanor was replaced by what sounded like excitement:

RYAN CHISHOLM: You gotta see this.

ME: What?
RYAN: The remix is taking off in Norway. It’s number one.
ME: What remix?
RYAN: “I Took a Pill in Ibiza!” Remember?
ME: You mean that one you emailed me?
RYAN: Yeah man. It’s catching on.
No ‘effing way. My little song about how I was no longer famous was making me famous again.

And after the song shot up the Norwegian charts. It did the same thing in Sweden, and then The Netherlands.
By Christmas I knew that the U.S. was not far behind.
I braced myself. Fame had not been kind to me the first time around. I’d been so overwhelmed by the attention I worked so hard to get that I forgot to do things like maintain a relationship with my parents, sleep, or care at all about other people. I got very used to my assistants carrying my bags for me and indulging in easy sex with my fans after my concerts. I didn’t go on an actual date for six years.
In fact, Fame had teased, tantalized and left me depressed, like a girl who’s all yours when you’re with her but doesn’t return your texts when you’re apart.
And part of me wanted to give that girl the middle finger. That was the beard and the van and all that. Screw you fame. I’m really done this time and I’m over it.
But just as I told her I was never coming back, put the car in reverse, backed down the driveway to escape into the night, part of me hoped that she’d chase me.
And she did.
Now six years older, but only incrementally more mature, I found myself back in the limelight, doing my best to act like I didn’t care.
But I did. And I wanted to keep her around a little longer this time. So off went the beard. In came the income, the bleached hair, and the world tour. I was back.

The Diagnosis
_______________________
June 2016
Los Angeles, CA

It was a million dollar home in the Hollywood Hills and it belonged to me. I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being on the couch and there was a non-trivial amount of this-is-going-to-last-forever percolating in my belly.
My iPhone 7’s monophonic ring bounced off the walls of my newly remodeled kitchen.
I’d been expecting a call from my manager to discuss an offer that just came in to do a private show for some rich dude’s daughter. 100k.
But instead the screen read:

Home.

Disappointed, I answered.

MOM: Michael.
ME: Yea, hi Mom.
MOM: It’s your mother. I have something serious to tell you.
ME: Okay. Whatsup?
MOM: Dad was acting strange yesterday so I took him to the doctor. They did a scan and he has a tumor in his left frontal lobe the size of a tangerine. They're gonna take it out tomorrow. You need to come home.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I was already grieving. Not for Dad. But for the life I’d set up for myself where nothing was wrong.
My father was big, gregarious, and generous. Once at my friend Justin’s graduation party, he found the lucky graduate and cornered him in the kitchen. He proceeded to effusively tell Justin how proud he was of him for the next twenty five minutes. Some witnesses say he didn’t take a breath for the entire monologue. When I finally intervened, he smiled at me, threw his hands up in the air, and said, “What? I’m just Posefying him!”
But when I arrived in Detroit the next morning, my teddy bear dad was hooked up to way too many machines. He’d been instructed not to eat or drink before the operation.

DAD: Hey boychik!
A smile-from-deep-within stretched all the way from his face to mine.
ME: Hi Dad.
I used both of my hands to pick up one of his big ones and held it tight.
DAD: Mike, get me some water.
It was an order. But Dad was so effusive that his orders didn’t seem like orders. They just seemed like opportunities to love him as much as he loved me.
ME: I’m not allowed to Dad. You have to be dry-fasted before the surgery.
He pleaded with me.
DAD: Just a little bit?
I held his hand tighter. Nobody else could tell how scared he was, but I could. I could just feel it. I held back the tears. He wasn’t allowed to drink those either.
Instead I winked and smiled.
ME: Not even a drop.
Nurses came and took him away.

***

That night I unpacked my fancy Helmut Lang shirts into my childhood dresser, which was still covered with the crooked Ninja Turtle stickers I put there when I was six.
Dad was diagnosed with Glioblastoma, a terminal form of cancer. And I was now living a double life. One as a born-again pop-star. And another as a son caretaking for his dying father.
Along with my family and nurses, I helped shave him, turned him so he didn’t get bed sores, and changed his diapers. In one way it was beautiful. I got to take care of my father in some of the same ways he took care of me. Despite our most vigorous prayers, his body continued to break down.
Then I realized something.  No one ever told Dad he was going to die. We’d been so caught up in taking care of him, we hadn’t shared the prognosis the doctors gave us. Didn’t he have a right to know it, too?
I was the new man of the house. So I puffed my chest out and courageously hired myself for the job.  I took three deep breaths and entered the living-turned-dying room. Dad's eyes were dull and his skin graying.
I sat on the edge of the bed.

DAD: Mike, who is that woman over there in the corner?

I looked in the corner and saw only a corner. No woman. He was hallucinating again.

ME: There’s nobody there, Dad.
DAD: Yes there is.

I did my best to ground him in my reality. I was good at that.

ME: No, there isn’t Dad.
DAD: There is Mike. Tell me who it is.

I took another deep breath to dissipate the frustration. This wasn’t going well.

ME: Dad, let’s get on the same page.

There was a sparkle in his swampy green eyes. He was still in there somewhere. Kind and sweet.

DAD: Okay.
ME: Do you know where you are?

He sensed the change in my tone and a serious look fell on his face.

DAD: Yes…I’m home.
ME: That’s right. And I just want to tell you what’s going on.
DAD: Okay.
ME: Dad, you have a form of brain cancer called Glioblastoma.

When I uttered the word cancer, his right leg started to shake. This was going to be harder than I thought.  But if I didn’t tell him the truth, no one would.

DAD: I think this is serious, Michael.
ME: It is serious. No one knows the future, but there’s a good chance you’re going to die from this.

He began to shake with even more intensity. And for the first time in my life he was silent.
If there’s one thing you don’t want to be saying to the man who’s always loved you no matter what, the man who took the child psychologist’s advice and slept on the floor next to your crib when because you were so attached to your mother, the man who only gave and never took, it’s ‘you’re going to die.’ But that’s exactly what I was saying to my father.
Black fear rippled out of his body and into mine.
I reached out and put a hand on his decaying quadricep. By now, the tears were raging up to my throat but I somehow managed to halt them there.

ME: I love you, Dad.
DAD: I love you so much.

I nodded toward my guitar, which I’d left laying next to his bed.

ME: Do you want me to play you a song?
DAD: Yes, please.

I turned down the lights and sang an especially sad version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” The dark blue coming out of my guitar harmonized with our black Fear and created a rich love. It expanded across the room like a storm cloud.
Nobody heard that strange duet but us.

***

Grieving is hard for narcissists. Mostly because we believe we don’t have to do it. After all, we’re special. The annoying and burdensome steps of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, are a roadmap laid out for less spiritually evolved people. People who are not geniuses, like us.
So basically what I’m saying is. I didn’t grieve at all. I just did what I always did. Ran (while trying to get attention).
Next came the requisite ayahuasca journey. Perched in a small glass room hovering over the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, I sat cross-legged on a veined oak floor—waiting.
Waiting for the drugs to kick in. Waiting for the medicine to show me how to make people like me more. Waiting for my life to get better.
But then as Victor the Shaman aggressively shook his capacha at me a horrible thought presented itself disguised as truth:

I should kill myself.

It was the only logical next step. I’d spent years convincing myself that my life was going well. But it was not going well and the gig was up. My life was a fraud. And my entire existence was rooted in convincing everyone that it wasn’t. I imagined a world without my pitiful-fake-pop-star behind spewing fake smiles in all directions and saw it would definitely be a better world.
It actually felt like killing myself was the more courageous path. Avicii had taken it.
And wasn’t I was already dead? Not in the way Dad and Avicii were. But in an even sadder way.  The kind of dead where you’re still walking around, saying words, and shoveling food in your mouth, pretending like you’re okay. But deep down you’re just a shadow of the person you’re actually supposed to be. And you know it.
To add insult to injury, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza,” slowly retreated off the pop charts and into a “remember-that-one-song” territory.
For the second time, I became a guy who used to be famous.
Yes, I grew my beard out again. But the defining physical characteristic of this part of my life was the sunken in holes where my eyes used to be.
TSA agents at airports held my ID and did double takes. Then they’d always ask me the same question:
“What happened to you?”

I was trying to figure that out myself. But I needed help.

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

TOMORROW. ‘I Went Back To Ibiza’ Mike Posner X @davidguetta. are u ready??

[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

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[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

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[Mike Posner @MikePosner]

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