Looking Into The Broken Mirror: How Montell Fish Helps Me Understand That There Is Beauty Within Pain

Note: This piece explores themes of emotional pain, heartbreak, and personal struggle. Reader discretion is advised.

I am a young man with the physical disability of cerebral palsy, completely wheelchair-bound. As a person with a disability, or at least in my understanding of myself and the other people with disabilities I relate to, we always crave understanding, trust, and protection from any person who makes us feel safe.

Relationships were never accessible to me.

I was never made to understand the emotional workings and intricacies of what a good, healthy relationship should look like, feel like, and be like. I found myself, as many young people do, looking for love in all the wrong places and trying my luck with people I knew wouldn’t understand me.

Pulling Myself Out Of The Dark

That part of myself came to a boiling point while I was at New York University. A person from my childhood, whom I’ve known since age eleven and who also has a physical disability, embarked on an emotional journey with me that would forever change our friendship, shattering the trust we had in each other.

This, among other things, during the time I was at NYU, led me to drinking and finding ways to escape my reality, given the feelings of rejected love and the broken promises made between me and this person I was deeply in love with.

What cut me the most was that this person also had a disability; ending whatever situation we were involved in for another person with a disability hit me like a ton of bricks. Until recently, my soul could not recover, but slowly, with the help of Montell Fish’s music, I pulled myself out of the dark.

I was never blessed with an emotionally understanding or emotionally stable home, but I am a person who finds solace and belonging within the discography of artists like Montell Fish.

The Moment I Found Montell Fish

An exhausted morning, lying in my college dorm room at NYU, I was dehydrated after a night of drinking too many beers and drowning my liver in harder liquor than I should’ve. I was wallowing in my sorrow, still emotionally digesting the confusion and sadness of a friendship with a person who I thought was in love with me just as much as I believed I was in love with them.

I remember aimlessly scrolling on Spotify and finally stumbling upon the Pittsburgh native artist Montell Fish. I didn’t know what to expect when I pressed play, but as soon as I heard the C, Am7, Em, and G guitar chords, I allowed the song to transport my heart, hopefully to a place free from pain in that moment.

Emotional Resonance Through Music

Although the song has only a few words, the emotional impact continued to stick with me even weeks or months after I first played it. Slowly digging through his discography, I understood that Montell was in an emotional cocoon much like myself.

Through every word he spoke he was freeing himself from the emotional chains that were holding him back, longing to get closure like most young people do when all they’ve known is one person or when all they can replay in their head is one distinct moment, whether good or bad, about the person they once loved or continue grappling with the fact that they still love them no matter what type of abuse or neglect they may have faced while placing their heart in that person’s hands.

The Artistic Genius Of Montell Fish

Every word from Montell Fish feels very intentional, almost like Picasso or Basquiat creating an art piece where everything has meaning and every placement of color is intentional. Montell’s lyrics do just that.

His 2022 project, entitled Her Love Still Haunts Me Like a Ghost, detailed through lyrics the beautifully distorted headspace that he was in, headlined by songs like “Hotel,” “Exscape,” “Pretend Lovers,” and, of course, “Bathroom,” which to this day is one of my favorite tracks by Montell Fish.

Searching For Closure

Also in 2022, he released his project JAMIE, which took on a more somber note, a project that seemed to beg for forgiveness with songs of vulnerability, which felt like Montell crawling on his hands and knees just to reconnect with a lost love, sacrificing the deepest part of himself through all of the songs to try to be what that partner wanted.

The songs on the JAMIE project completely shattered my heart into pieces because at that moment in time, I, Tyrese, was still searching for closure just like Montell.

When Music Mirrors Real Life

To feel like Montell would have done anything in his power just to hold that person, the album was presumably about was very eye-opening to me. I am a 26-year-old in my youth who, at the time I discovered Montell Fish and still continuously in the present day, is searching for the words to compartmentalize the love I thought I had with another person from my personal life.

I think the most stinging realization for people who create art like Montell and for a person who views journalism as art like myself is that ultimately, the reality of life can be a lot to bear. I am physically disabled, and the person I was deeply in love with was also physically disabled.

And although I felt like I was proving myself to be a worthy future boyfriend, partner, or companion within the situationship (or whatever you want to call it), the person I was involved with didn’t think anything of it and dismissed my feelings.

Encapsulating Emotions

Montell Fish was able to eloquently encapsulate all of these emotions throughout his various songs on the JAMIE project. “I’d Go A Thousand Miles” is probably his most internet-trendy song, the one people who haven’t been following him since he started releasing music may know.

Even his song titles on the JAMIE project stand out. Sitting down and deciding that tracklist must have brought all of his emotions flooding back. All of this art and all of these emotions poured out and collected into beautifully curated albums from a person who just wants to be remembered as a lover of music, according to his interview with Annabelle on That Good Sht* (September 2023), his Billboard interview (July 2022), and older YouTube videos like “My Experience ‘Dating’” where he discussed being interested in a potential partner and choosing at the time to focus on his Christian faith.

Out Of The Darkness Through Montell’s Words

As time went on and I, too, pulled myself out of that darkness, I found myself, as a fellow lover of music, coming back to these projects and allowing the deep emotions associated with these tracks to sit with me.

Even though I want to ignore these feelings of love lost and heartbreak, I let these feelings stay with me to let me know that I’m still alive, that my life is still worth living, and that my feelings are validated through Montell’s words.

Montell’s Message: It’s Okay To Be Broken

Even on his recent project entitled CHARLOTTE in 2024, he is still the same soul working tirelessly to pick up the pieces of his heart and sword his way through the mess and pain.

Montell Fish lets fans know it is okay to be broken, it is okay not to have answers, and it is okay to be lost in the dark when it comes to love. But through each chord, each word, each line, there is beautiful news to the pain.

The Eternal Echo Of Love And Loss

No matter if I find love as a disabled man and build a life with someone, or whether I live and die with only accomplishments and articles that will eventually be lost in the abyss of the internet, I know this: the ache of the heart, the weight of unfulfilled longing, and the tremors of a soul searching for tenderness will never disappear. They will echo, just as Montell Fish’s music echoes, trembling chords that sound fragile yet carry the strength of survival.

Love Is Still Possible

His songs remind me that heartbreak is not a blemish to hide, but a language of the human condition. As a man bound to a wheelchair, I often wonder if the world will ever truly see me as worthy of romance, of devotion, of being chosen. And yet, when I hear Montell straining through each lyric, I hear my own body straining against limitation, my own spirit clawing toward light even when abandoned in the dark.

Brokenness Is Proof Of Humanity

What Montell teaches me, and what I hope to leave behind, is that our brokenness itself is proof of our humanity. When he sings, he makes space for people like me, people who have carried rejection like a second spine and loneliness like a second skin, to breathe, to weep, and to keep living anyway.

His vulnerability is not just art; it is survival. And perhaps that is why it cuts so deeply. Because in his voice I hear my own prayers that went unanswered, my own promises that dissolved, my own fragile hope that, despite everything, love is still possible.

Moving Onto A More Positive Trajectory

Just like the people whose names live forever through his projects, JAMIE, CHARLOTTE, and the unseen loves that continue to shape his soul, Montell is inspiring me to one day put out a collection of works of my own. Works born from the first girl I ever loved, ever wanted to love, and almost sacrificed all of myself and all of my liveliness just to be with: SAVANNAH.

My mentioning her name is not meant to give her power; it is meant for me to acknowledge the pain that has stung me for so long and to also acknowledge my progress in moving out of that point in my life and onto a more positive trajectory.

Her name, like his projects, carries both beauty and anguish, and perhaps my greatest tribute will be to transform that pain into something lasting, something that breathes beyond my own body.

The Soul Who Loved And Lost Is Eternal

So even if my crippled body is one day laid to rest with no hand holding mine, even if my story fades into obscurity, Montell’s music ensures that my feelings will not vanish. They will live on in his chords, in his words, in the way he bares his soul so completely that anyone who listens feels less alone.

Through him, my heartbreak becomes holy. Through him, my pain is remembered. Through him, the boy in the wheelchair, the man still searching, the soul who loved and lost, is eternal.