I was on tour driving between Hamburg and Berlin with my friend Yanis Who had booked the tour for me We spent the last few days together And I'm naturally very isolationist classic only child I spent most of that tour in a state of high anxiety Worried that I was being rude Worried that Yanis And his germanically outgoing friends didn't like me And I remember in that car driving between Hamburg and Berlin Going to sneeze and— and and holding it in And then needing to sneeze again  Because that's how the human body works And then holding it in again And doing this three or four times in a row I felt like I was going to break a rib And soon after that my nose started to run And I felt ashamed of myself Because I knew I would have to blow my nose in front of another person This filled me with terror for some reason There's a similar problem I have when I share a bed with someone When I become acutely aware of how heavily I breath How repulsive I must be to the person next to me And so I try to fix this by not breathing By holding my breath in as long as I can then letting it out As slowly as possible It struck me in that car on the way to Berlin That my being alive in any given situation is In some way an imposition An invasion of everyone else's space and an abuse of their patience Somewhere in the core of me Anyone the reach of rational thought Sitting plump on a throan of twigs and berry less brambles The belief that being human is something worth apologizing for I still have not processed this But I did write a song about it In the car While my nose was running And it was the first song I had written in months And it was the beginning of what would become The album you are listening to My name's Matt This is The Narcissist Cookbook