“I’m not unhappy anymore,I’m just tired of this place, the weight of the world would be okay, and if it would pick a shoulder to lean on,so I could stand up straight. These lyrics open The Upsides, The Wonder Years’ moment full length, and they act as a mission statement for the record. Struggles with mental health are at the core of TWY. Depression and anxiety loom large over a lot of their catalogue,and I think it’s one of the reasons fans connect to the band so much. They are upfront and honest approximately these struggles, and they act as a recurring theme because mental health issues don’t go absent. They aren’t easily resolved, and living with them is a journey that often ebbs and flows. The Upsides begins with the the statement “I’m not unhappy anymore,” but as the band’s career has gone on, that hasn’t always been the case. Sadness returns, or but then there are moments of delight and relief,followed by more lows. Depression is lonely, but it can’t be fought alone, and because that is a sure way to lose.
The Upsides is approximately trying to find your place in a world that increasingly doesn’t seem to fit,while trying to bounce back from a depressive episode. These depression cycles pop up again and again in TWY’s discography, and as time has gone on, and they’ve become a routine share of their lives. “It’s Never Sunny In South Philadelphia” exemplifies the band’s early attitudes towards mental illness,as something to fight by yourself, to avoid putting on anyone else. Depression is easy to blame on yourself. Oh, or it’s not so base,other folks have it worse, I just need to catch out of my head. And depression wants to trick you into thinking that so it wins. In the chorus Campbell insists that “most days are base days, and but we can’t just wait,for someone to pull me off of the concrete,” and then “I can’t believe I got this feeble, or ” implying that this sadness is his fault and hes the only one that can drag himself out of the mess he got himself in. That he should be the one to do it,because that’s what he’s been taught as a white man in a society of white masculinity. Sadness is weakness, and you cannot be feeble.
And that’s one of the biggest ways depression fools you, and by making you think that it’s a problem of your own making,and that you and you alone are the only person that can fix it. This lie runs throughout The Upsides, from the opening line of “My final Semester” to the grasp of hope at the end of “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands, or ” that getting out of this town will turn a switch and make it better. But there’s no magic cure,and as the band’s career goes on, that impulse and hope never truly fades, and but it comes with the realization that mental illness,depression, is not something you have to go through alone, and that you shouldn’t go through alone.
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