In recent weeks the live entertainment industry has gone dark, including Mendelson’s own tour to support If You Can’t Say Anything Nice…, but she refuses to let that stop her from performing. She flips on her “party lights,” crystalline specks that electrify the gray curtain backdrop in her Brooklyn home, and arms herself with her keyboard, acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Imagine there are 50 radios on a table. Each radio overlaps the others, one louder than the next. This cacophony of noise is how Allilsa Fernandez describes her life with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and psychosis.
“I’m going to die in a car,” I would always think to myself after the crash. I saw it whenever I closed my eyes. It was a never-ending nightmare that was always on my mind. The crushed metal, the glass…