What's it about?
Welcome to Rustedandforgot! This is a small space where I share a bit about myself. Nothing fancy—just a place to keep everything in one spot.
Rusted and forgotten
I’ve lived through loss at an early age, and it shaped a lot of who I am today. My mother passed away when I was five, and years later I also lost my grandmother—someone who played a major role in my life and upbringing. Those experiences left their mark, but they also taught me how to keep moving forward even when things don’t make sense.
My dad was later diagnosed with a very rare and very serious form of melanoma cancer with a 10% chance to live. I still remember the phone call from the operating table when he said "I'll see you when I wake up, love you son". That day I learned what it meant to be tough. He pulled through, had a couple other complications and is living cancer free, three years later, still working full time.
Over time, I stopped trying to “escape” the chaos and instead started learning how to understand it. That’s where music—especially metal—became important to me. It’s not just noise or intensity; it’s structure inside disorder, emotion without filter, and a kind of honesty that’s hard to find anywhere else.
A lot of what drives me now is the search for peace within that chaos. Not by avoiding what’s heavy, but by facing it and turning it into something that makes sense to me. Metal reflects that mindset—loud, raw, and honest, but still intentional.
This page is just a small space where I share a bit of that journey: who I am, what I connect with, and how I see the world through sound, experience, and reflection.
What drives me
What drives me isn’t simple—it comes from everything I’ve lived through and everything I’m still trying to make sense of. Losing my mother when I was five and later my grandmother left a kind of weight that doesn’t really go away. It changes how you see things. It makes you grow up around absence, and you learn early that life doesn’t always give explanations.
Instead of letting that turn into something that pulls me down, I’ve tried to turn it into something I can move with. Not avoiding it, not pretending it isn’t there—but facing it and letting it shape something meaningful.
A huge part of that comes through music, especially metal. It’s where I feel things fully instead of holding them back. There’s something about the chaos, the heaviness, and the emotion that feels honest in a way nothing else does. But it’s not just the intensity—it’s the structure inside it, the way everything still has purpose even when it feels like it’s falling apart.
Crowbar has been one of the biggest inspirations in that. Their music hits differently because it doesn’t hide pain—it sits in it, understands it, and turns it into something powerful without trying to escape it. That idea shaped a lot of how I listen to and connect with music now. It showed me that heaviness isn’t just aggression—it can be honest, reflective, and even grounding.
Life after death
My sister Ashley has been part of my life more in absence than in presence. She’s struggled with addiction for a long time, and because of that, she hasn’t really been around as I was growing up. That distance has shaped the way I understand family—not in an ideal way, but in a real one.
It’s not something I carry as anger. It’s more like a quiet understanding that people go through things you may never fully see or control. Even without a relationship built in the usual way, she’s still part of my story, and that reality has influenced how I look at connection, loss, and what it means when someone isn’t fully there in your life.
In a way, it reinforces a lot of what I already feel about life—that not everything is whole, not everything is consistent, and sometimes you learn to live with gaps instead of answers.
What it means to me
I feel things deeply—sometimes too deeply to explain in a way that makes sense out loud. It doesn’t come and go easily. It stays. It lingers in the background of everything, even in moments that are supposed to feel normal.
Loss didn’t just happen once in my life and fade into memory. It shaped the way I experience everything. It’s in the quiet moments, in the music I turn to, in the way certain sounds or memories can hit without warning. There’s a weight to it that never fully leaves—it just changes form over time.
I don’t really “move on” from things. I carry them. I learn how to keep going while they’re still there. And most of what I feel ends up going into the music I connect with—the heaviness, the honesty, the emotion that doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Bands like Crowbar didn’t just inspire me musically—they made something inside me feel understood. Like the weight I carry wasn’t foreign or meaningless, just unspoken. That kind of connection hits deeper than words usually can.
Sometimes it’s overwhelming how much I feel, but I don’t see that as weakness. It’s just how I experience life. Heavy, honest, and always present. And somehow, I keep going through it anyway.
Connect with us
Location
Lexington, North Carolina, United States
Contact information
Email: [jpaul336@icloud.com]]