Notes

“You can be depressed and still have joy. You can be suicidal and still have joy. We all stop thinking and we all stop talking and we all stop sharing and we all stop creating, because by doing any of these things we quickly find out just how unhappy we are. But that’s okay. That’s normal. Don’t let the fear of unhappiness cripple your pursuit of finding what it is you believe.”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: depression 75 likes Like
“I think to myself, OK. I should be able to control myself, right? It’s very simple. I look at that lamp and I know, ok, when I walk out of this room, I’m not supposed to hit that lamp. So I stand up, and I walk out of the room and I don’t hit that lamp. Why can’t I make decisions like that about everything in my life? You know, I’m not going to get angry at… my brother. I want to be the best brother. Don’t you want to be the best brother? Do you think that you’ve been the best brother? Not at all right? It’s like, why can’t I, why can’t I do what I want to do? If I want to be a dad one day, I want to be the best dad. Guess what? I’m not going to be the best dad. And that, that’s messed up. That’s messed up. That means that if I were to take how it is I treat people around me in the same way that I treat a social setting that means that I would stand up right now and kick that lamp over because there’s something wrong. There’s like, something is broken, in this, in the way that we live. There’s proof that there’s an element there that’s not right. Something’s not right.”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: control, quotes 66 likes Like
“It means Twenty One Pilots, the logo does. Why it means Twenty One Pilots, is it really goes along with one of our songs called “Kitchen Sink.” The whole concept of that song is that I feel that humans are always struggling all the time when it comes to purpose, trying to figure out their purpose is, what purpose even is, what’s the point, justifying your own existence. A lot of kids and people my age struggle with “what’s the point,” and with the logo, what it really means is it’s an encouragement. When someone asks me what the logo means to me, the logo means something to me because I made it mean something to me. That’s the point. The point is that I created something that only I understand and whether or not I decide to disclose the meaning of it, that’s the beginning of purpose for me. The meaning of purpose for me, is by creating something, if it be by writing lyrics, painting a picture, by expressing yourself through art if it’s photography or music or theater, or whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be artistic, but if you create something and only you know the meaning of it, that’s the beginning of purpose for you. When you’re in the room by yourself trying to decide whether to stay alive, you can tell yourself “I should probably stay alive because I’m the only one who knows the meaning of that thing,” so the logo is an encouragement for people to create. That’s what it means.”
― Tyler Joseph
48 likes Like
“Find your kitchen sink. Until you find a purpose on this earth, give yourself a purpose. Stop feeling like you need to be a teenage prodigy. Pretend you’re confident until you are. It’s hard work to do this when you’re so used to cringing at the reflection in your mirror, but do it. Work at it. I assure you, your mentality will change. A year ago Id be saying that this drawing is really shitty compared to what other people can do. Today I’m saying, I’m a damn good artist and I’m going to keep practicing and keep getting better. It’s possible to find happiness, I assure you. To my fellow skeleton clique, and anyone else that may need it, stay alive”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: inspirational, kitchen-sink, purpose-in-life 39 likes Like
“I think to myself: Okay… I should be able to control myself, right? It’s very simple. I look at that lamp, and I know “Okay, when I walk out of this room, I’m not supposed to hit that lamp.” You know, so I stand up and I walk out of the room and I don’t hit that lamp. Why can’t I make decisions like that about everything in my life?”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: decisions, life 35 likes Like
“Music seems to hold everything together. It seems to make things not so chaotic sometimes. It seems to make things make more sense sometimes.”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: depression, life, music 30 likes Like
“If we can get through to one person, just one person, our entire careers are validated right then and there.”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: help, helping-people, validation 17 likes Like
“I was playing a show in Cincinnati Ohio, and uh … just this kind of a barn full of kids and after this show, more than usual, it was kind of an unusual number of kids came up to me and felt inclined to share with me what it is they were going through, you know a lot of their struggles, a lot of their, you know, whether that be depression or suicidal thoughts, a lot of stuff along that … along that vein, and I just thought, I was like, ‘Wow, I mean, am I just in a hotbed of kids going through stuff, I mean, is this just kind of just a crazy ratio of everyone struggling with this thing … not too long after that I was in New York and … I saw a magazine that was … this big article about this specific town in New York that also had a lot of kids, you know, high school age, going through a lot of this same stuff, and I realized, you know, this isn’t just an isolated event, this is something that there’s a lot of kids through the entire country, even the world, that are struggling with the questions they have, you know, 'What’s the point?’, ‘What’s my purpose?’, ‘Why am I here?’, and when you don’t have the answers to those questions, sometimes it can lead you to do something that you ultimately shouldn’t do… ‘Guns for Hands’ is talking about, I wanna tell you that I know you have the ability to hurt yourself … I feel like a lot of the older generation, when they hear about someone struggling with it, their first reaction is like ‘No you’re not, you’re not struggling with that, don’t think about that, you know, think about something else, you know, you’re just trying to get attention’ … but this song really was trying to say I know you have the ability to hurt yourself, I recognize that, but let’s take that energy and let’s point it at something else, let’s divert that, let’s kind of shift momentum and look at something like art, or something like this music specifically or even point it at me, you know, just point it anywhere but just don’t point it at yourself … that song will always be important to me.”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: depression, music, self-harm, suicide 16 likes Like
“I’m an emotional dude, so I wrote a song about it.

The verses are talking about a true story of me being late to class, I was in college trying to do that whole thing because that’s what you’re meant to do I guess, I dropped out after that…the point is, I was late to class and I forgot to lock my door and when I came back out everything had been gutted and stolen out my car. At the time financially I was not able to replace anything that was taken, the GPS, the radio, all my CD’s. When I get in the car my first reaction is to put the radio on and for a while I wasn’t able to do that and finding out that once I removed that piece of me I realised that sometimes music can act as a distraction and can get in the way of where your mind wants to go”
― Tyler Joseph
tags: coping-mechanisms, depression, music 10 likes Like
“We write our own songs. There’s a lot of pressure from different people to get with song writers and producers that make, like, pop hits and stuff like that, and so we definitely felt that pressure. And it’s cool; Josh and I’s chemistry… we just knew we could lean on each other and trust each other that it was going to be good even if we did it ourselves. It’s a cool feeling knowing that we released a record that is completely us. No one forced us to do anything, or say anything, or go any direction we didn’t want to go, and so we’re really proud of that. And it’s scary, because you know we could fail, but at least it’s truly who we are.”
― Tyler Joseph