The Toll of the Road

Editor's note: Heavier piece than usual.

By the second day of a festival, my feet felt like concrete blocks strapped to my legs. Twelve hours on uneven ground or pavement, grease popping against my arms, the air thick with smoke and sweat. Everyone else saw freedom in the dancing crowds, tie-dye, the haze of weed and music rolling through the fields. I saw the cash box, the line of customers that never seemed to end, and the chicken grease that soaked into my hair so deep I could still smell it days later in math class.

Festival life wasn’t a vacation. It was labor. My childhood was measured in twelve-hour shifts, hundred-hour weeks, and serving burritos instead of spending the summer with friends. Sleep meant folding into a camper bunk or curling up on the floor of a tent, praying the bass from the main stage wouldn’t rattle the ground so hard it shook me awake. Even rest was work.

People always told me how lucky I was. “You got to see all that music! What an amazing childhood.” And yeah, I saw a lot of cool things. I got to travel, something rare in my small town. I saw Jay-Z, Tom Petty, Metallica and hundreds more. All the bands other kids only knew from CDs. But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt like hell.

One trip to Florida stays with me. My dad was driving a huge motor home with a windshield that had been cracked for months. My mom, brother, me and one of the employees followed behind in a truck. We knew the windshield was failing. From the back seat I imagined the crack widening, spidering across the glass with every mile. He kept driving. They kept fighting. That was the soundtrack behind the music: constant screaming, constant chaos.

I sat small and silent, clutching the seatbelt, terrified. The windshield finally sagged so badly, when we stopped for gas it looked like it could fall in at any second. We didn’t stop going. He pulled over eventually, but not because he wanted to, only because he couldn’t drive farther. My parents shouted at each other over it, my stomach tied in knots. The fear is what I remember most. Not reassurance, not anyone checking on me, just the raw terror of being a kid who knew we were one bump away from disaster.

That night we stopped at a roadside motel. The next morning, my dad and two employees bolted a giant sheet of plexiglass across the RV where the windshield had been. And then we kept driving, on to another festival, as if nothing had happened. That’s what my childhood felt like: one bump from disaster, patched together with whatever was lying around, moving forward no matter what broke along the way.

It was never just the windshield. There was always something on the edge of falling apart. A tent catching fire during the dinner rush. The fryer stopping and smoking while we were serving a line thirty people deep. My parents fighting so loud customers could hear. The RV breaking down on the side of some highway with no money for repairs.

That was the road: chaos patched together with duct tape, borrowed parts, or sheer denial. Disaster wasn’t an accident, it was expected, a traveling companion. And for kids, that meant living in a state of constant tension, waiting for the next thing to crack or burn or explode. There was no stability, no safety net. We were always one step from disaster, and the adults around me acted like that was just life.

The wall of sound from bands, the constant haze of smoke, the bodies pressing too close, the flashing lights, most other kids saw “fun.” My body saw danger. There was no retreat, no quiet corner. Just masking through exhaustion, pretending I was fine.

It was responsibility too big for a kid. Counting cash at twelve, keeping up the smile, being the one my parents leaned on not just for labor, but for emotional ballast. They needed both me and my brother. My brother to work hard, me to hold the center. The guilt of resenting it never really left.

I was the “lazy” one. The “too sensitive” one. The kid who didn’t hide how much I hated it, who dragged my feet and tried to disappear when the shifts stretched past midnight. My brother worked harder, shoulder to shoulder with any of the adults, flipping chicken on the grill until he had blisters, loading and unloading the trailer with the kind of determination that made people nod approvingly. We both rebelled at times. He rebelled out loud, but he still did the work. I rebelled by shrinking back, by letting my exhaustion leak out of my body in ways I couldn’t hide.

The worst part was the nights. When we finally collapsed into a camper bunk or a tent, the bass would keep pounding until dawn, a vibration that lived in my bones. Earplugs didn’t help. Pillows didn’t help. The music was everywhere, even in sleep. I’d lie there in the dark, every nerve buzzing, knowing that morning would come too soon and I’d have to plaster a smile back on, count cash, and act like I wasn’t breaking.

I still think about that one festival where I started sleepwalking out of the RV at night. I don’t even remember how many times it happened. My body just… kept trying to escape, even in sleep. And I wonder now if that was the truest rebellion I had. Not words. Not even conscious choice. Just a body desperate to get away from the bass thudding through the ground and the smoke that never let up.

I don’t even remember the sleepwalking. My mom told me months later, like it was funny, how I kept wandering out of the RV barefoot in the middle of the night in a nightgown. Only now do I think about what that really meant: a child walking straight into a crowd of thousands of wasted adults, no one sober enough to notice or care.

Maybe that’s why I blocked it out. My body was trying to escape even when my mind couldn’t, and the only direction to go was straight into the chaos. It’s terrifying when I picture it now. Back then, it was just another thing that happened.

I started aching back then. My shoulders, my feet, my back—all of it felt older than it should as a kid. I thought it was normal. Everyone around me was sore, exhausted, worn thin. I carried that tiredness like it was part of who I was, a heaviness baked into my bones before I was old enough to realize childhood wasn’t supposed to hurt.

Sadly, the biggest toll is I didn’t learn to respect my limits. I learned to ignore them. To burn out, recover just enough, then burn out again. My body was already aching in middle school, and instead of it being a warning sign, it just became my baseline. Being tired, being sore, being overwhelmed—that was normal. I didn’t know how to listen to my body or feelings, because nobody showed me it was even an option.

Autism made it worse, yes—the noise, the smells, the lack of escape—but the real damage was never having permission to stop. By the time I hit adulthood, burnout wasn’t a new crisis. It was the only way I knew how to live.

The road gave me grit, but it also carved its toll into me. That ache never really left, and the smell of grease or the echo of bass can still drag me right back. People called it lucky. I know better.

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