A Song for Survivors

Getting Over It with Johnny Cash

I’ve been a Johnny Cash fan since I can remember. My family listens to a lot of the Highwaymen - that four man powerhouse of Kristofferson, Jennings, Nelson and Cash - when we visit my grandfather’s lakehouse, so his voice has always given me that sense of home I feel when I’m there. He’s one of the voices I can count on to bring my calm back when I’m having an off day. His songs have the same effect as a phone call from someone I love on me; he’s not there, but he is. And he gets it. He really does. 

Johnny Cash’s story involves loss, loneliness, the ugliness of addiction, recovery from that chaos, and through it all a deep love of singing and songwriting. Walk the Line (2005) and the numerous biographies and articles published over the years give us glimpses of that story, but to get to know the real Man in Black you need look no further than his music. Even the lighter tunes and the songs by other artists that he opted to cover contain little pieces of the greater picture of Johnny Cash. It’s not that he ever tried to hide his past or struggles and left this great mystery for his fans to work at in his wake; but he (like everyone) is a lot more complicated and layered than the persona he presented to the world, and music - that enduring love of his life - is our most accessible portal to the thoughts and feelings of who he was at different parts in his life. 

I can’t adequately describe my joy at learning that his son, John Carter Cash, had discovered unproduced recordings and had a new posthumous album in the works along with David ‘Fergie’ Ferguson. It’s one thing when a current artist I love announces a new album or drops a new single, but we’re kind of hoping for that, so it’s a different kind of excitement when those hopes are fulfilled. When someone like Johnny Cash has a new song, it’s completely unanticipated, something we didn’t dare hope for. It’s the kind of good thing that comes after you’ve given up expecting that particular good thing to come into your life. I wish that kind of gift for everyone, and I hope you embrace it and don’t take it for granted or question it when it shows up. 

That element of embracing and appreciating a long awaited blessing after a hard time lies at the heart of “Like a Soldier”, the eleventh track on Cash’s album Songwriter (2024). “Like a Soldier” is soft and reflective; it touches on the past and the present, and it reckons with how we navigate the now even with the lingering weight of our history still urgent in our minds. His opening lines set the scene: With the twilight colors fallin’, And the evening layin’ shadows, Hidden memories come stealin’ from my mind. I love that these lines marry the sunset time of day with the resurfacing of his past in his mind. I tend to keep myself pretty busy throughout the day, but there’s almost always a space of time in the evening when I find myself facing emptiness. That’s the best way to describe it: emptiness in my schedule but also as a feeling deep inside me. I hit a point when I’m just too tired to be active or think creatively, and I hit a wall. That’s when the thoughts I don’t want to spend time with rise from their dark graves in my mind. Normally, I try to avoid this time as much as possible. I make myself go on a run, fall into the hole of social media, or do mindless chores or errands if I don’t have something on my schedule during this time of day. 

Unlike that version of me, the speaker in Cash’s song chooses to sit with these thoughts and be present to their place in his life. He sings, And I feel my own heart beating out the simple joy of living, And I wonder how I ever was that kind. He finds a way to recognize the now at the same time he looks at his past, letting himself explore his experience while holding onto the present joy he has in living as he does now. I’ve recently found that writing helps me do this same thing. It’s not always easy to look at the darker pieces of my mind - the feelings and thoughts rooted in my past, but writing allows me to process them in a way that’s relevant to my present and that helps me move forward with this past instead of ignoring it. I imagine that songwriting and singing did something of that nature for Cash. We need to find a way to accept our past and forgive ourselves for being another kind of person if we want a fulfilling present, but when we have our share of past wrongs, it’s almost impossible to reconcile who we are now with the person we were back then. 

Cash goes a little bit into that person’s psyche with the lines But the wild road that I rambled Always seemed to be there calling, And they said a hundred times I should have died. Our wild roads from active addiction don’t all look the same, but they have that same siren call in common. They seemed to beckon to us with the false message that the wild road was the only one available to us if we wanted to get out of the stuck place. The stuck place feels a little like the sunset time I try to avoid by running, but it’s a lot darker and more intense in its threat to last forever. We think we’re taking a route to escape that awful feeling when the reality is that we’re only adding to the depth of it and taking ourselves on roads all leading to destruction and death if we stay on them long enough.  Cash looks at his experience on those roads, noting the miracle that he survived to be where he is now: But now my present miracle is that you’re here beside me, So I believe that they were roads I had to ride. The miracle lies in that word “here” if we have the presence of mind to see it. I’ve always loved that word because of its enduring relevance. We are always here, and if we can have faith in a Higher Power with a plan for our lives, we can find some assurance in the fact that we’re always meant to be here, however light or dark it might be. Cash has the blessing to share that “here” with another person for a time, and we all have access to that same sense of connection if we can reach outside ourselves with honesty and vulnerability. 

Cash sings the chorus here, and it reminds us that he’s still very much a work in progress even as he appreciates his present blessings: I'm like a soldier gettin' over the war, I'm like a young man gettin' over his crazy days, Like a bandit gettin' over his lawless ways, But every day is better than the day before. He uses the present participle “getting over” in each of these similes, comparing himself to a soldier, a young man and a bandit to establish the stories we associate with each of them to his own experience. He’s not singing about everything being just perfect today as opposed to pastdays; he’s recognizing that as he’s getting over his days on the wild roads, everyday is getting better. A soldier moving on from a war still bears with him the trauma from his time in combat. There is the pain, the isolation, the sense of loss and uncertainty, and the constant sense of powerlessness over his life that accompany time in a war such as Cash would have known at that time. 

He enlisted in the US Air Force at 18-years old, and while stationed in Germany during the Cold War, he served as a Morse Code Operator in the Security Service, listening in on Russian communications. The nature of his job didn’t allow him to share the details of his work with anyone, so he led a lonely, albeit important, life while in Landsberg. A little known accomplishment of his, which seems to pale in comparison to his musical accomplishments later in life, is that he deciphered the message informing of Stalin’s death, something he couldn’t tell the people in his life until years after the war. His war experience may have differed from that of someone on the field of battle amidst bloodshed and violence, but it involves the same sense of disconnection and displacement that all soldiers know for a time. In this time, he must have become familiar with the practice of holding onto his fear, keeping his feelings to himself and putting on a brave front to the people around him. In the war experience of active addiction, we can fall into similar habits. As much as we want someone to know the entirety of what we’re dealing with, it’s also terrifying to let anyone else in when we occupy such dark, ugly terrain as our minds become in active addiction. 

The war ends when we surrender our self will and begin the work of recovery, but even in recovery, we can find ourselves resorting to old behaviors without realizing it. We can give ourselves some grace with this process if we keep in mind that the war wasn’t erased from our experience; rather, it’s something we’re still actively getting over. The process of healing from a war, from crazy days and lawless ways takes time, requires practice of new habits to replace the ones learned in addiction, and necessitates the use of a support system. In describing his past as “crazy” and “lawless’, Cash touches on the insanity and defective morals that define a lot of active addiction. 

We make a lot of choices and do a lot of things in active addiction that we’re not proud of. I think anyone who lives under the sway of something that requires the preservation of self will at the cost of connection can fall into this kind of life. It’s not limited to addiction to a substance like alcohol or drugs; we can be slaves to pride, social standing, mental disease, body image, independence, or a countless number of other forces that turn our lives into warzones. We don’t always see it, especially if the addiction isn’t to something tangible, but these priorities come at a dear cost. 

Cash touches on part of this cost: the lost time we pay without seeing that we sacrifice days from the lives given us to prolong the life of our addiction. He sings, There were nights that I don’t remember, and there’s pain that I’ve forgotten, and I did some things I choose not to recall. Addiction has erased pockets of time from his mind through either unconsciousness or repression, and these spaces reflect the emptiness and disconnection that this cycle cultivates in us. I used to drink to the point of blacking out on many occasions, and the experience of hearing about that lost time from another person when it was just a blank space for me was not only shameful and a little frightening; it brought this aching, dark loneliness too. I had to live with the knowledge that I’d temporarily taken my conscious self out of the world, severing myself from the potential to have something shared with the people in my life. And in doing so, I’d hurt them by letting them see me do this. It seemed like a kind of funny thing to do for a time in college when I wasn’t the only one, but I continued to do this when no one else in my group was drinking in that way. It felt sort of inevitable for me at the time, just something that happened because I needed to not feel the way I did. But looking back at the times when I’d take myself out of consciousness while the rest of my family or friends remained present, I can see the absolute insanity I lived in. I’m still tortured by the shame and regret of those times, because it feels as though a different person made those choices in my stead; but I know that pain is part of the getting over process and will lessen in time for me and for anyone else who lives with a similar past. 

Cash continues to revive the past: There are faces that come to me in my darkest secret memories, faces that I wish would not come back at all. I think we all have those faces, the people we’ve hurt or who have hurt us or been involved in a particularly dark period of our past that we just don’t want to think about ever again. They surface in our minds, triggered by a place, a song or just a passing resemblance, and those dark, secret memories threaten to become more real than ever in our lives despite the work we’ve done to change the person we were when those faces were a physical reality in our lives. I don’t think the faces themselves are the dark, secret part; it’s the person we were when those particular faces existed before our eyes. These faces - of friends, enemies, lovers, family members and complete strangers - that we would rather stay hidden from our conscious eye remind us of someone we want to forget ever existed under the same name we have today. They become portals to places of hurt, shame and disconnection because of the memories and beliefs associated with them. I still think of people I hurt, people I used and people I lost as well as the people who hurt, used and left me, and the ghostlike sort of place they hold in my mind robs me of my present state when I choose to travel down those portals instead of acting in the now. 

As I’m writing now, I’m still thinking of the speaker at a meeting I just came from. He started his journey in recovery the year I was born, and though his share of his experience with the 12 steps reflected the immense growth he has made as a man in that time, it also demonstrated the incredible weight of his past on his recovery path. He didn’t just drop all his character defects and past offenses at the threshold when he stepped into a life of recovery; they followed him, demanding his acceptance of their reality in his life, which he did in the form of making amends and examining his role in the wrongs he felt were done against him. I’ve done the steps once through and have always thought that would be it, but this man told me that he’s done them eight times now. (I think he said eight; it could have been more) He has learned to recognize when something from his war, his crazy days or his lawless ways sneaks back into his present way of thinking or acting, and when he sees that he chooses to address it through prayer, talking to the people in his recovery network, and listening in the silence of meditation to what he felt in his heart needed to be done. He then took action on it. 

His share and my brief conversation with him afterwards reminded me that I can choose to act as the person I’ve become today in recovery rather than resorting to the kind of thinking and behavior that characterized me in active addiction. When these ghosts of the past or thoughts of lost time arrive in my mind, I don’t need to pile them onto the mound of stressors I’ve been accumulating like a weird monument to justify my failure to show up in the way I want to. If there’s something lacking in my recovery, if there’s something or someone surfacing again and again in my mind, I have to take that as a call to action, to do something that will help me grow and be better for others, rather than letting it pull me into an isolated state of self-pity and depression. I try not to do that, and I think my stuck places are becoming fewer and farther between, but they’re still on my map. The reality is that I don’t need to go there. 

Cash’s next line after he acknowledges these ghosts asserts that truth; In my dream’s parade of people from the other times and places, there’s not one that matters now no matter who. Those faces that function as reflections of the past persons we were don’t have any more power than we give them in our present life. We can use them as indicators of areas lacking in our recovery, but we don’t need to go back and revisit the war they come from. Practicing gratitude is one way we can avoid slipping back into the past to which these flashbacks beckon us. Cash sings, I’m just thankful for the journey and that I survived the battles, And that my spoils of victory is you. I’ve said so many times that I’m grateful for my path, however painful and ugly it was, but I don’t always know how to practice gratitude when memories flash into my mind in the way this song has illustrated. It’s one thing to recall past events as a story, and it’s quite another to experience the past as flashback symptoms of trauma. I’ve practiced gratitude for my story, but I’ve failed to put that same gratitude into practice for the parade of faces and times I would rather forget. Perhaps they’re reminding me of defects I still have to work on, of people in my present life who deserve more of my time and love, or of resentments and fears I still have to work through. I was thinking today at this meeting how very new I still am to recovery and how much I still have to learn about navigating these thoughts and feelings as I’m recovering my true self and getting over the wreckage of a long war period. 

Cash’s refrain promises that “every day is better than the day before,” and it’s a line that works on a couple levels. It can mean that today in our present state of recovery will always be better than the yesterdays of our past, either in the war or closer in proximity to the war experience and its aftermath. It can also mean that we always have something greater in tomorrow if we continue to do the work of recovery, to cultivate meaningful connections with God and others, and to practice gratitude for what we have in life. We can always be better, and we will be better when we actively engage in our recovery. 

Like Cash, I’m like a soldier getting over the war. Unlike Cash, I don’t have as much insight or wisdom from my time in recovery, but I’m listening and trying and learning to see the spoils of victory in my life. When Cash sings “my spoils of victory is you”, he seems to indicate a romantic partner sharing in his quiet space of reflection. I picture him in this sunset time, recalling past evenings of loneliness and marveling at the miracle of being with someone with whom he shares this beautiful, full love that he’s never known before. We all deserve that sense of home. We might find it in someone who loves us, a space that’s our own, or in the forgiveness of people who have loved us and waited for us to wake up all along. I think we all find it in our way the more we look at our lives with honesty and humility and continue to ask for help, to show up and to be present not to the war of the past but to the selves who have survived.