Runaway Train

I always thought "quarter-life crisis" was just a quirky line in John Mayer's "Why Georgia." I'm sure the phrase existed before that song, and it's fairly understood to be a play on words for a mid-life crisis, the kind of thing where somebody makes a drastic change out of nowhere to hold onto their youth. I never expected to have one myself. But in 2024, I had what I truly believe was a quarter-life crisis, and this song came out of the middle of it.

When I became a father, it changed me forever. It was obviously the best thing that has ever happened to me, and it was also the hardest thing I have ever been through. The weight of it was heavier than I expected, and somewhere in there I started feeling something I had never really felt before. Regret. Not regret about becoming a parent, I want to be clear about that. It was the sense that there was so much life out there left to experience, and that my window to go experience it had quietly closed.

For most of my life, I never took a real risk. Some of that came from growing up as a pastor's kid, where the spotlight always felt heavy and I believed I had to stay conventional to keep my family in a good light. Nobody put that on me, least of all my parents. I put it on myself. So I mostly played music in church, because playing secular music was considered worldly, and even though I had dreams of writing my own songs and playing them around the world, I settled for a version of my life where I would play church music forever. I went to a Christian university, got a music degree, and took my first job at a church in Atlanta. I am not regretful about where my life ended up. I just wish the road I took to get here had looked different.

Why did I go to school? Why did I spend four years earning a degree I do not use, when I could have been out playing shows and singing my own songs? In my twenties I had no responsibilities and no real pressure, and the music industry still felt like it was about talent instead of follower counts. That was the moment to take the swing, and I did not take it. I even stayed in the same town I went to high school in, because living at home was easier than chasing an adventure.

I also had the chance to move to Europe right after I got married. I turned it down, because I had convinced myself that working at a church was the "dream" and that I could not do that over there. Looking back, I know the truth is that I was scared. Scared of a new culture, a new language, and being the person in the room who did not understand what was being said. I let that fear make the decision for me.

I know hindsight is twenty-twenty. What got to me was not that I took big swings and missed. It was that I never felt like I stepped up to the plate at all. I was afraid of failing, and I was afraid of what people would think of me, and if I am honest I still am. All of that landed on me at once right as I was standing on the threshold of fatherhood. I did my best to navigate it during the day. At night, it was all I could think about. And somewhere in those nights, I decided I wanted to chase the adventure I never had.

I had always wanted to record an album, and I knew this was the time. The only thing standing in the way was that I had no money, and worse than that, I was terrified of asking people for any. I was the kid during school fundraisers who refused to sell the chocolate bars, because asking anyone for a favor felt unbearable. What if they said no? What if they thought I was foolish for asking? Those questions lived rent-free in my head for twenty years.

But I decided I was not going to let that keep me from a dream that had never been clearer to me. So I sucked it up. I built a Kickstarter, sent it to everyone I knew, and long story short, I raised $15,000 to make a record. Step one, done. What followed was a year and a half of work, and I was determined and more creatively alive than I had been in a long time. I was also still writing the album during that stretch, and that is when "Runaway Train" showed up.

Before I even understood what I was doing, I was writing about the adventure I never had. The first line came out as "I've got my suitcase trying to find a new place to start over." What was I actually saying there? Was that a Freudian slip, a confession that I wanted to leave my whole life behind and chase something else because of how much I regretted? Looking back, I think I was desperate to win back my youth, and it makes me a little sad to see it written down that plainly. This is coming from a guy who never had a drink until he was twenty-five and has never smoked a cigarette in his life (I was a thrilling young man), and here I was writing about rebellion and running and chasing the moment. Maybe I wanted it so badly precisely because it was so foreign to me.

As the song grew, so did everything underneath it. Financial regret. Opportunity regret. Jealousy toward people I thought were living my life, because they had started when I should have started, and because they had a clear vision at an age when I was still trying to make everybody happy.

That took me somewhere dark. I could not find joy in my own life, and the maddening part is that my life was good. I had a steady job. A healthy family. A beautiful wife and daughter. We could pay the bills, buy groceries, do something fun, and I did not have to brace myself before checking the bank account. And the joy was still gone. So I started looking for it in stuff. I spent a lot of nights on Pinterest scrolling through clothes and haircuts, and at one point I went so far as to book a tattoo appointment for a big tiger on my arm (I have no tattoos, and I did not show up for that one either). I was chasing an image. Something that would let me feel young, hold people's attention, and make up for lost time. Meanwhile my actual beautiful life was going by right in front of me and I was not present for it. That cost me something.

The bridge was the last piece of the song to get written. All the way into recording I still had filler lyrics in there that did not mean anything, and it was not until we were tracking the final vocal that my cousin and producer Christian, our engineer and co-producer Demetri, and I sat down and rewrote it together. The three of us had real chemistry, and we were all in similar seasons of life. Families to take care of. Bills to pay. The rat race. Music dreams that had not fully arrived. Out of that room came the lines that still get me every time:

"I don't know where I'm going, I'm floating.
Every dream that I'm sowing, not growing.
Road is clear but the lights aren't glowing, it's showing.
I don't know where I'm going…"

As honest as it was, it was also healing to sing. I felt real relief in that session, and not because we had finally finished the song. It was because I had finally said how I felt out loud.

But that kind of awareness cuts both ways, and the regret kept growing after that. I tried to stuff it down and be grateful and keep living a life where I could be content. I did not really see how much it had taken root until after the album came out. Looking back, I can see that I was quietly hoping the streaming numbers would fix it. I kept thinking, if I can just make up for lost time, then maybe. That is not what happened. The album did not do nearly as well as I hoped, and a year and a half of work ended up feeling like about three weeks of attention.

That is where the depression set in. If you have made it this far, you have reached the part of the story where I tell you about that, and I am letting you into something I have only told a few people. I had already started counseling, because I had gotten to a point where I knew I needed help. After months of sessions, my therapist diagnosed me with moderate, non-recurrent depression. I had never dealt with depression before, and that was the first time I ever put the word next to my own name.

And when I heard it, everything made sense. The heaviness. The regret. Never feeling content. The constant hum of negativity and dread underneath an otherwise good life. I had been telling myself I was just going through it, when the truth was that I was depressed. You would think a diagnosis like that would hit hard, but what I actually felt was relief. For a long stretch I had assumed something was wrong with me, and I blamed myself for the regret and was brutally hard about it. It turns out my brain was getting in the way. It looks like I had been carrying this for more than a year before anyone named it, and even just having clarity has been freeing. I am telling you this because it is time to tell it, and because I have taken real steps toward getting better.

I hear "Runaway Train" completely differently now. I used to think of it as an escape song, as chasing youth and giving the middle finger to the conventional life we all settle into when we play it safe. I think it is actually a song about healing. It is about coming to terms with your mistakes and your regrets, and learning to live through them instead of just alongside them. Those regrets shape us. They also point at how we might live differently starting right now.

So I am taking more risks these days, and I am being more adventurous. Not to relive some version of my glory days that I never really had anyway, but to make the most of the one I am in. To give my family experiences worth remembering, and to actually be there for them. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, sure. But why wait five years for hindsight about today? If I keep making the same mistakes I used to make, I will be sitting here at thirty-seven saying "man, you should have done that at thirty-two, you were so young, you had all that time, you should have been present for it."

So I am choosing to live that out now. Maybe you are reading this from somewhere similar. Living with regret, feeling the weight of something heavy, wishing you had chosen differently when you had the chance. What I would say is to acknowledge it, let yourself be sad about it, learn from it, and then go do it differently. Be present. Be grateful. Take the opportunity in front of you instead of mourning the one behind you. And please do not keep punishing yourself for the choices you already made, because those are the exact reason you know better now.

Give "Runaway Train" a listen, and maybe it will make you want to chase a little adventure of your own and stay present while you do it.

Much love my friends.

-Carlos