The Storm That Made Me - Azriel
I wasn’t supposed to survive long enough to make it here.
I mean that. Not in some poetic, dramatic way, I mean it literally. I was a broke kid from Hull, dragging around a guitar that barely stayed in tune, playing to empty pubs, scraping together change to eat, and still telling anyone who would listen that I was going to make it someday.
People laughed. Hell, sometimes I laughed too, but only to hide the fear. I didn’t have a plan B. There was no trust fund, no backup job, no family to fall back on. Just pain, stubbornness, and this voice in my chest that wouldn’t shut up. A voice that screamed: “You were made for more.”
I didn’t know what “more” looked like. I just knew it wasn’t this. Not the cold bedsits. Not the loneliness. Not the feeling that I was already fading out before I’d even had a shot.
But I kept going.
Gig after gig. Night after night. I played through broken strings, sore throats, heartbreak, and hangovers. I burned out more times than I can count, but something always lit me back up again. A song. A letter from a fan. A memory. A face.
Eventually, things changed. Slowly, then all at once. A song hit. A show sold out. A door opened. Then another. And suddenly I wasn’t the kid no one believed in, I was Azriel. I had a name people recognized. A voice people wanted to hear.
But that wasn’t the real turning point. The real shift, the moment that cracked me wide open, was her.
Sera.
She didn’t come into my life quietly. She came in like a storm, no warning, no mercy. She didn’t just love me. She wrecked me. Took everything I thought I knew about myself and set it on fire. And then, somehow, in the ruins, she loved me harder. With no fear. No filter.
She made me face every part of myself I’d buried under noise, fame, and old wounds.
She didn’t just save me, she changed me. And I let her.
It wasn’t easy. Real love never is. We fought. We broke. We rebuilt. Again and again. But what came out of that storm was something stronger than either of us alone. She helped me become the man I’d spent my whole life chasing.
Now when I look around, I see everything I wasn’t supposed to have. A home. A career I built with my bare hands. People who know me, not the stage version, not the press version, but the real me. And this love... this dangerous, healing, beautiful love that nearly tore me apart to put me back together.
So if you’re out there, reading this, and wondering if it ever gets better...
It does. But not the way you think.
It doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t come pretty. It comes in the form of storms you don’t think you’ll survive. It comes through loss, silence, doubt, and pain. It comes when you’re about to give up, and something in you says: not yet.
So dream big.
Dream until your bones ache.
Hope like it’s oxygen.
And when the storm comes... let it wreck you.
That’s where the real story begins.
— Azriel 💙
