DEVIL’S IN MY HEAD: Parts 1 to 4

Ten years ago, Lemmy passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. It was the most heartbreaking death I’d ever experienced — not just of a musician I admired, but of someone who felt closer to family than a stranger I’d never met. His death hit me harder than I ever thought the passing of an artist could.

PART ONE: 2013

I’ve been a Motörhead fan since 2013. I got into the band late — there’s no denying that. I blame The Walking Dead, specifically the episode No More Sorrow. There’s a moment where Merle Dixon sits alone in a stolen car, bourbon in hand, Motörhead blasting through the speakers. The song is Fast and Loose.

I was nineteen at the time, always hunting for new music, and completely mesmerized. I remember thinking: Who the hell is this band? I’d never heard anything like it before.

I had to hear more. Knowing the song came from Ace of Spades, I figured that was the place to start. From there, it spiralled. Once Motörhead got its hooks into me, that was it. I needed to hear every album, every song. I wanted to understand the band, the sound, the man behind it.

Before long, Motörhead became my refuge — the place I went when I felt entirely out of place in the world. Their music helped me disappear into my own head, letting my thoughts wander. I’d imagine what it must feel like to be onstage like Lemmy, belting those songs out at full volume. Who cares if I lost my hearing? I’d be having the time of my life.

Music had always been that refuge for me. It may have had something to do with my Autism diagnosis. I know that whenever I listened to music, I would daydream in vivid images. The visual imagination was definitely part of my Autism.

I’m not much of an instrumentalist. I can play a bit of bass, and I’ve dabbled with guitar, but I’m nothing special. As Lemmy himself once said, “I was a rotten guitar player.” Bass-wise, I’d call myself mediocre at best.

Still, Lemmy is the reason I picked up a bass in the first place. I’d always been aware of bass players — how they’re often the forgotten members of a band despite how much they shape the sound — but Lemmy played differently. He didn’t play bass like a bass player. He played it like a weapon.

The first time I really noticed that, I was blown away. Years later, I now own four bass guitars, including a Rickenbacker 4003. I mean, I had to. That’s what Lemmy played.

In 2013, life wasn’t great. I was depressed, struggling, and regularly in therapy trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. Around me, I watched others move forward — go off to university — while I felt like I was standing still.

One of my biggest frustrations at the time was not having a girlfriend. I didn’t feel good-looking. On top of already feeling out of place because of my Autism, I also felt out of place in my own body. I didn’t know how to read myself, let alone anyone else.

Looking back, there were things I could’ve changed about myself. At the time, I was brushing up against ideas that would later be packaged and sold online as the so-called red-pill movement. I wasn’t angry at women — I was confused, insecure, and desperate to understand why I felt invisible or never good enough. I can say honestly now that I could have gone down a very different path if I hadn’t eventually chosen to grow instead of retreat.

That change didn’t happen overnight. It came slowly, through experience, reflection, and — in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time — through Lemmy himself. For someone often mislabeled from the outside as a sexist or a womanizer, Lemmy consistently spoke with respect about women, especially women in rock. He didn’t posture. He didn’t preach. He just treated them as equals, which in hindsight mattered more than any slogan ever could. See the article: Lemmy Kilmister: Rock’s Great Undervalued Feminist Hero

Music gave me something resembling purpose — or at least the dream of purpose. The idea that maybe, somehow, I’d figure things out one day was enough to keep me moving forward.

At the time, I was attending Centre High in Edmonton — the place you go when you’ve technically graduated but still need to upgrade courses because you don’t quite know what comes next. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt like a failure. For one thing, I was still living at home. That might sound trivial to some, but at nineteen, I felt like I should have been further along by then.

I was also working a dead-end job at a liquor store. My dad had remarried the year before to a woman none of us got along with, which only added to the tension already hanging over everything.

It was just before my second year at Centre High that I found Motörhead. I didn’t realize it then, but I would soon be completely lost in their world. Hard rock and heavy metal gave me something to believe in when everything else felt dark and grim — at least from where I was standing.

Around that same time, Lemmy’s health was already beginning to fail. My love for Motörhead coincided with the infamous 2013 Wacken Open Air show. Watching footage of it later, what struck me wasn’t the struggle itself, but the fact that Lemmy even tried. He could have cancelled. No one would have blamed him. Instead, he took the stage anyway, even if he only managed a handful of songs before calling it quits.

That mattered to me more than I realized at the time. A man in obvious pain, pushing through not for ego, but for the people who showed up. I’d never seen anything like it before. On some level, it was deeply inspiring.

It would be almost a year before Lemmy retook the stage. Tours were pushed back again and again. Each delay carried the same quiet fear: Was I getting into another artist I loved just in time to watch him fade away?

Then Aftershock was released. The title itself was a nod to Lemmy being fitted with a defibrillator for an irregular heartbeat — the lifestyle finally catching up with him. I bought the album the day it came out, almost late for class.

And it was great.

PART TWO: RECOGNITION

2025

Years later, my life looks very different than it did in 2013. Today, I’m married to a kind, patient, deeply empathetic woman. We met in early 2022 and were married a little over a year later. What can I say — when you know, you know. But what matters more than romance is this: for a long time, I didn’t believe a life like this was meant for me. I assumed connection was something other people figured out, while I stood on the outside trying to decode how it all worked.

I won’t pretend my life is perfect — no one’s is — but compared to where I was in 2013, it’s undeniably different. I survived that version of myself.

Through my wife, I also gained something I hadn’t expected: a father figure of sorts. Her dad, Keith, and I bonded over music almost immediately. Like my relationship with Motörhead, his lifelong devotion to KISS wasn’t casual fandom — it was foundational. It was always clear the band meant something deeper to him, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally asked why.

His answer caught me off guard.

He talked about growing up without a consistent father figure. About discovering KISS at an early age and latching onto them completely — the albums, the posters, the magazines, the shirts. About lying on the floor as a kid, studying album covers front to back, memorizing credits, wanting to know everything. He spoke about fantasizing what it would be like to be on stage with them, or even just to be friends with them. Music became a constant when everything else felt uncertain.

As he spoke, I felt an uncomfortable sense of recognition. The fear of not amounting to much. The awkwardness around girls. The feeling that everyone else seemed to be moving forward while you were stuck standing still. The way music filled silence and gave shape to emotions you didn’t yet have words for.

These are the building blocks of almost every kid who ever found their way into hard rock or heavy metal — fear, insecurity, isolation — and sound loud enough to drown it out.

Keith told me he considered KISS to be his surrogate fathers. That line stayed with me. Not because it sounded dramatic, but because it felt honest. Music didn’t replace his parents, and it didn’t solve his problems. But it gave him something solid to hold onto when everything else felt unstable.

Looking at my own life, the parallels were impossible to ignore. My father was present — financially supportive, reliable in practical ways — but emotionally distant. When it came to music like Motörhead, his disdain was never subtle. My mother, on the other hand, hadn’t really been present in my life since 2008, following a long struggle with alcohol and a breakup that left its own scars. Between absence and emotional distance, there was a quiet gap that music filled.

Lemmy didn’t feel like a father. He felt more like proof. Proof that you could live outside the neat lines people expected you to stay within. As someone on the Autism spectrum — constantly hearing variations of “you don’t look autistic” — I spent much of my life being shoved into boxes that never fit. Lemmy represented the opposite of that. Proof that you didn’t have to soften yourself to be worthy of respect. And maybe most importantly, proof that strength didn’t have to come packaged as cruelty.

2014–2015

By the end of 2013, I finally made it to post-secondary. I enrolled in Digital Cinema — essentially film — after discovering that the DMIT streams I’d originally wanted, like animation or game design, were full. At the time, I told myself it didn’t matter. I’d made it. I’d reached what felt like a safe space in life.

Despite our differences, my dad had always told me that for someone on the spectrum, things got easier in college. He wasn’t exactly right — but he wasn’t exactly wrong either. What I experienced over the next two years was complicated.

The first semester was probably my favourite. We sampled everything: game design, animation, film. I even considered switching streams once spots opened up, but I didn’t. In hindsight, I’m conflicted about that decision. If I had switched, I would have avoided some pain — but I also would have missed experiences that shaped me, for better or worse.

It became clear fairly quickly that college wasn’t so different from high school, at least not for me. The cliques. The gossip. The childishness. The instructors who tried too hard to be cool and were worshipped by students, while I found them unbearable. The kind of authority figures who think they’ve figured life out and look down on people who don’t fit their idea of normal — including metalheads.

One of them once asked me, mid-class, what kind of music I listened to.

“Hard rock. Heavy metal,” I said.

“So, like Metallica?” he replied — likely the only metal band he knew.

I remember thinking: Oh, you sad, sad man. How about the band Metallica started out as a tribute to — Motörhead? Sorry, Metallica fans.

Academically, I had successes and failures. One of my favourite classes was storytelling — one of the few I actually excelled in. I loved telling stories, both fiction and non-fiction. Because of my performance, I was offered a role as a story editor over the summer, responsible for helping edit classmates’ work in preparation for filming.

That opportunity bred resentment. Some students believed I’d only been given the role because the instructor felt sorry for me due to my Autism diagnosis. What can I say? People can be cruel.

That same summer, Motörhead released what would become their final album, Bad Magic. At the time, I thought it was one of their best. If I’d known what was coming just months later, I might have listened to the lyrics differently. Looking back now, it feels like a band — and a man — delivering final observations to a world they were preparing to leave behind. But at the time, I was simply happy to have another Motörhead album.

By the third semester, things deteriorated. Students revolted against instructors over failing grades, escalating complaints all the way to the Dean. I tried to stay out of it — everyone has a right to an opinion — until I was dragged into it myself.

There was a Facebook group our class used to communicate. One day, I logged in to post something and discovered I’d been removed. According to one student, I’d been bad-mouthing classmates to instructors, and she claimed to have witnesses. That raised an obvious question: if it were true, how did she have witnesses to conversations that supposedly happened behind closed doors?

Even in my early twenties, I often felt older than my peers. I struggled to relate to people my own age and gravitated toward older company instead. As things became more hostile, Motörhead once again became a refuge. I went everywhere with headphones on. Outside of group projects, I interacted with almost no one.

I finished the semester in the middle — not a disaster, not a triumph. It had been rough. There wasn’t anyone I felt I could really talk to. My dad seemed indifferent to my schooling and encouraged me to abandon film entirely in favour of a military career.

So, I found myself alone again in familiar ways.

The small comforts I had were these: Motörhead and the bottle.

PART THREE: LEAVING HERE

By the time I reached the latter half of film school, it was no secret — at least not to me — that the stress was pushing me toward drinking more and more. Drinking became an outlet. Drinking became part of the process. I told myself it helped me write. In some ways, it probably did. I spent a lot of nights alone in my room, laptop open, working through whatever script I was struggling with at the time. I got a lot of pages done in those months. Looking back now, I’m not sure how many of them were actually good.

As the third semester dragged on, my confidence eroded. I knew I lacked some of the technical skills my classmates seemed to have — cameras, lighting, gear — but writing had always been the thing I trusted. Slowly, even that started to feel unstable. Whispers circulated that my work was only praised because instructors felt sorry for me due to my autism. Whether that was true or not almost didn’t matter. The doubt stuck.

Earlier that year, in a documentary storytelling class, we were assigned a final project: a ten‑minute documentary built using a fixed list of editorial elements. The list came from established screenwriting theory — structure, intention, cause and effect. For whatever reason, I connected with it immediately. I thrived inside those constraints.

The instructor suggested — somewhat clumsily — that this made sense given my Autism, that people on the spectrum often gravitate toward structure. Maybe there was truth in that. All I knew was that, for once, the framework helped me dig deeper instead of boxing me in.

The film I wrote was called Boy in a Fishbowl. It followed my attempts to find love, with a quieter secondary goal: learning how to accept myself. Before settling on the idea, I met with the instructor several times, pitching safer concepts before finally being pushed — gently but firmly — to look inward.

By the end of second semester in mid‑2015, I felt good about the work I’d done. Despite the skepticism around me, I believed in that film. I credit my instructor for helping me find the courage to write it — but I also credit Motörhead for teaching me not to soften myself for the sake of comfort.

That confidence didn’t last.

The third semester unraveled quickly. Tensions escalated. Students revolted against instructors over grades, dragging complaints all the way to the Dean. I tried to stay out of it until I couldn’t anymore. A Facebook group our class used to communicate suddenly disappeared from my feed. I’d been removed. I was told I’d been bad‑mouthing classmates to instructors — an accusation that made little sense, especially given the supposed “witnesses” to conversations that never happened.

It felt like high school all over again. Cliques. Gossip. Authority figures mistaking certainty for wisdom.

Academically, I landed somewhere in the middle. Not a failure, not a success. It was a rough stretch, and there wasn’t anyone I felt I could really talk to about it.

The constants were Motörhead — and the bottle.

December 28, 2015 arrived quietly.

I was hungover that day. That wasn’t unusual. I lacked motivation, hadn’t showered until late afternoon, and drifted between sleep and distraction. Something felt off, though — a low‑grade unease I couldn’t place. I spent most of the day in bed, headphones on, listening to music and replaying the past few months in my head.

Before finally forcing myself to get up, I listened to two Motörhead songs back‑to‑back: Killed by Death, followed by a live version of Leaving Here. The volume was high. I wasn’t thinking about symbolism or endings. I was just listening.

Afterward, I cleaned up and wandered into the entertainment room at my dad’s house, scrolling through Instagram. The first post that caught my eye was from Ozzy Osbourne.

“Lost one of my best friends today….”

At first, it didn’t register that it was Ozzy’s account. My immediate thought was, Did Ozzy die?

Then I scrolled.

The next post was from Riot Fest — the same festival where I’d seen Motörhead live for the first and only time just months earlier. The image was of a younger Lemmy, decades before the black button‑up shirts and handmade boots became uniform. The caption read simply: RIP Lemmy.

I didn’t believe it.

I went straight to Motörhead’s Facebook page, half‑expecting it to be a joke — some dark British sarcasm taken too far. Instead, there was a statement confirming his death.

The reality came in pieces. Not all at once. The thought that there would be no more albums every couple of years. That the one show I’d seen would be the only one. That a man so many people believed to be indestructible was suddenly gone.

In the days that followed, many of us began to realize what we hadn’t wanted to see. Lemmy hadn’t been well for some time. That became painfully clear with the posthumous release of Clean Your Clock, recorded just weeks before his death. He looked frail. Thin. Out of breath.

He was doing his best. That’s what stayed with me.

Grief didn’t arrive cleanly. It arrived tangled up with everything else I was already carrying — the disappointment, the isolation, the self-doubt. Lemmy’s death didn’t replace those feelings. It joined them.

He was gone.

For years, Motörhead had been a refuge. Proof. Permission. Something to believe in when I didn’t believe in myself. After December 28, 2015, the music became something else. Not an escape, but an inheritance.

Lemmy didn’t save me. He didn’t fix my life. But he showed me a way to exist in the world that felt honest — loud when it needed to be, uncompromising when it mattered, and grounded in a refusal to pretend.

And that, it turns out, was enough.

PART FOUR: LIVING WITH THE NOISE TEN YEARS ON

I wasn’t supposed to write another part to these pieces. After finishing the third — what I thought was the ending — I realized I’d drifted away from the original spark that started all of this in the first place: the title. Borrowed from a Motörhead song I’ve lived with for years, Devil’s in My Head.

I knew I wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of Lemmy’s passing, but I didn’t know what shape that writing would take. Then one day, driving down the highway, the song came on, and I remembered the feeling it used to give me — years earlier, coming home from brutal overnight shoots while I was working in the film industry. That feeling hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just been waiting.

After graduating from film school and finishing the ten-minute documentary I mentioned earlier, I was convinced I’d turn that project into something bigger. That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it still will. Either way, during those years on set, Devil’s in My Head became a constant companion — something I listened to on the drive home while everything was quiet except my own thoughts. Certain lines always stuck. They still do.

Nobody crazy like me, I’ll make you believe Sometimes I wear other faces, sometimes I sit and grieve

There was a job where, on my first day, I was placed in a sort of sentry position. I didn’t know anyone, and when I don’t know people, I default to silence. I don’t do small talk well. I stand back and observe. I’ve read that people on the spectrum can come off as angry or unapproachable — the infamous resting bitch face — and I know I’m guilty of that. That’s how I must have looked that day.

Someone nearby made a joking comment, probably trying to get a reaction out of me. I don’t remember what she said. What I do remember is another woman chiming in immediately after:

“He’s an observer.”

That line stuck. It took me straight back to film school, to Boy in a Fishbowl — the documentary where I compared myself to a fish swimming in a small tank, wanting connection but separated from the world by glass. The water was my safety. Silence was my safety. Even now, that hasn’t completely changed. I open up when I need to, but observation is still where I retreat.

The “craziness” Lemmy sings about has always felt familiar — or at least the version of it other people see. The obsessions. The blunt, matter-of-fact way of speaking. The tendency to fixate. To outsiders, I can look cold or unfeeling. From the inside, it’s often just self-protection.

Nobody crazy like me, I’ll make you believe

For a long time, I wondered if Lemmy was also speaking to people drawn to music like this — metal, punk, anything that exists outside polite society. Loving music the world doesn’t understand can isolate you. It can also harden you. I know there were periods in my life when I wore that hardness like armour, convinced it made me smarter or stronger than the people around me.

Those weren’t great years. Those ideas came from hurt, not clarity. Age and experience chipped away at them. I learned to be more humble, more empathetic, and to recognize when someone else knew more than I did. Growing up, I guess.

Motörhead never let me off the hook. Lemmy’s lyrics forced reflection. Even now, I can still become cold or withdrawn if I’m not careful. And even when I feel justified in those moments, guilt follows me long after the fact.

Sometimes I wear other faces, sometimes I sit and grieve

I’ve always believed Lemmy was deeper than his public persona suggested. It’s easy to reduce him to volume, speed, and attitude, but that was never the full picture. At home, we have a photo of Motörhead — Lemmy, Phil Campbell, and Mikkey Dee — hanging in our living room. My wife once told me it was her favourite picture of Lemmy because of his eyes. She said they looked full of stories. Sadness. Innocence, even.

I see it too. Eyes tell you more than people realize. With Lemmy, you can see the life behind the myth.

That lyric always felt like a confession to me — an admission that behind the larger-than-life image was someone who felt deeply. Someone who knew what it was like to be unseen.

I related to that. I spent much of my early twenties feeling invisible — even to people who were supposed to care. I remember being twenty-two and taking Fridays off work to attend therapy sessions. When my boss complained about my schedule and asked how I’d ever manage a full-time job with those appointments, I didn’t say a word. I swallowed it and carried on.

Moments like that stay with you. They teach you how easily vulnerability gets punished. How tempting it is to mask everything behind distance, humour, or obsession.

Sometimes I wear other faces, sometimes I sit and grieve

I know my own version of madness well. Rituals. Fixations. Devotion — to music, to ideas, to routines. Motörhead became part of that landscape early on, and it never really left. It’s stitched into who I am now. No matter how many people tried to steer me away from it, it stayed.

I’m not naive about my differences anymore. I know I don’t move through the world the way most people do. Over time, it’s become less about accepting that and more about learning how to live with it. Loneliness still shows up. So does grief. And yes, I still wear other faces when the situation demands it.

Even marriage doesn’t erase that. Having someone I love deeply doesn’t cure the sense of separation — it just makes it easier to bear.

I know I’m partly responsible for my own isolation. Trust doesn’t come easily. Experience has taught me to be careful with it. Observation is still my default.

In many ways, I’m still that boy in the fishbowl — looking out, wanting connection, but needing the water to survive.

The difference now is that I understand it.

And for the first time, that feels like enough.