Kintsugi Heroes
Ben Drysdale
Ben found his songwriting and social justice work came from the same place: a need to process trauma and restore agency to others.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Ben Drysdale traces his musical life to family road trips listening to Cat Stevens, though his real education came from the records he brought home himself. After two decades playing in bands, he only recently released music under his own name, finally believing he was worthy enough as a musician to stand alone. What he discovered along the way is that his songwriting and his decade-long work running a social justice theater company come from the same place: the conviction that when people share stories about difficult times and good times, it creates healing for whole communities, not just the person telling the story.
Diagnosed with ADHD at 41, Ben found relief in finally understanding decades of struggle that had made him feel like a bad person. But learning about rejection-sensitive dysphoria forced a harder reckoning: looking back at friendships and relationships he thought he had handled rightly and asking whether they had actually wronged him at all. Music became his form of self-therapy long before the diagnosis, from listening to Nirvana as a teenager through writing his first song only after a long-distance relationship ended. Over time, he moved from needing deep trauma or elation to write one or two songs a year, to being able to create from a simple idea or a lyric in his phone. Now he does not need fame, but he does need enough people who care about him enough to support him financially so he can spend his entire life making music and having conversations about why it matters. He is a songwriter, singer, dad, and person with ADHD, and there is a lot of fun and healing to be had and shared in holding all of those things together.
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