Last night my husband and I attended a Billy Strings concert. (these are the beautiful things you get to do as an empty nester – attend a concert in the middle of the week, sitting in decent seats that you can better afford, without having to find a babysitter) Billy is an incredible bluegrass guitarist whose music my husband discovered when we were watching Willie Nelson’s birthday special a few years back. He got hooked on Billy’s incredible skills, and now he plays his songs all of the time. I don’t complain. It’s great music. We purchased our concert tickets back in January. And I’m so glad that we did. The concert was sold out.
The Billy Strings concert was a crazy experience. Billy has a loyal following that quickly put me in mind of the Deadheads whom I knew back in high school, who spent their summers gleefully following the Grateful Dead around the country. People whom we talked to, while standing in line for our merch, were in awe that this was our first Billy Strings concert. One woman said that she was getting goosebumps hearing that fact. Another said that she was incredibly jealous that we got to have our “maiden voyage” because hers was just that good. They regaled tales of their many Billy Strings concert experiences and assured us that it was okay to wait in the long line for merch because he always starts at 8:05 on the dot, and he did.
The interesting thing about all of this is that Billy is only 33 years old. As one fan told me, “Yeah, he’s just a baby. He’s our modern day Hendrix.” The concert did not disappoint. I spent most of it on my feet. Billy and his band only took one break and many of their songs go on as long as 15 minutes. Billy Strings has won numerous awards, including a grammy. He’s honestly a musical phenom.
What really got me to thinking though (instead of just singing and dancing), was what the woman sitting next to me said. “Do you know why Billy’s so good at what he does? It’s because he had a sh#tty childhood. We coddle our kids too much these days and they don’t reach their potentials,” she said to me with conviction. I knew about Billy Strings’ tough history. His father died of a heroin addiction when Billy was just two. His mother remarried (Billy attributes his stepfather as the man who gave him his bluegrass start), but his parents soon got addicted to meth. Billy ran away from home at the age of 13, and for a period, he, too, was addicted to hard drugs. When he went back home, his family achieved sobriety for a period, but sadly, in 2025, Billy Strings’ mother died of an overdose in her sleep.
So anyway, this statement about Billy’s childhood has been in the back of my mind since my fellow Strings fan said it to me. Is this statement true? No one has a perfect childhood. So the real question is, did the tougher parts of your own childhood make you or break you or a mix of both? Many people who experienced terrible childhoods end up on skid row and no one can blame them for it. But the ones who transcend their childhood abuse, use it as a hardcore motivation to give themselves everything that they didn’t get as children. When I asked AI for some examples, this is what its first statement said:
“Many notable figures overcame severe early childhood trauma—including abuse, extreme poverty, or parental loss—to achieve remarkable success. Examples include Oprah Winfrey (poverty/sexual abuse), Jim Carrey (homelessness), Charlize Theron (witnessing her mother kill her father in self-defense), and Howard Schultz (growing up in public housing). Studies suggest up to 75% of high achievers experienced difficult childhoods.”
I made it one of my major missions to give our four children a healthy foundation. Our family life wasn’t perfect, but I would confidently say that my four kids would probably all categorize it as “good.” Did I do them a disservice? I don’t believe that’s true. Even good childhoods go through trials. Our own family was hit hard by the Great Recession and we had to move to a whole other state when our eldest son was in high school. We discovered our third son had epilepsy when he was fourteen, and while this has affected him the most, it has made a mark on all of us in our family, particularly about the fragility of life.
I believe that the bigger point of all of this is, if you take the perspective that you can alchemize anything bad that has happened to you, into some sort of motivation/skillset/drive/ambition/compassion for yourself, then perhaps the hard things that happened to you, in some sense, also bear gifts, for you and for others. If you can turn your sagas into songs and your trials into trajectories, like so many others have, then you’ve won. Things that were expected to swallow you whole, instead catapulted you to your highest self. That’s why so many spiritual tomes warn against labeling anything “good” or “bad”. Good and bad can come from the same experience. Sometimes “good” or “bad” is just a matter of choice of perspective.
I don’t know if Billy Strings would trade his “sh*tty childhood” if it meant that he would not have the ability nor the ambition to take his innate musical talents to where they are today. I don’t know if Billy Strings had an amazing childhood if that would have made a difference one way or another, of him following his musical gifts to as far as they can reach. All that I can say is that I am utterly grateful that Billy Strings shares his gifts with us, however these gifts came into being.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
