When We Were Young 2025 supports each other at the HeartSupport booth
“It was crazy to think about people that I had never met who related to me, empathizing on such a profound level. It just blows my mind. It gave me the support that I didn’t know I needed.”
When We Were Young has quickly become the premier festival for those ready to relive their MySpace-era nostalgia — plus the generation inspired by the 2000s and 2010s. This year, when Panic! At The Disco, Blink-182, Weezer, and Avril Lavigne headlined two days of a scene kid’s dream lineup, HeartSupport was there too to facilitate mental health help in a community ready to care for each other.
Christine was one of the people who stumbled on the booth without any previous knowledge about HeartSupport. She was standing in a nearby festival merch like when Executive Director Nate Hilpert started chatting with her. Quickly, she found herself getting emotional.
“I came to When We Were Young fest by myself. So I’m a one person festival attender. It’s like, well, that’s super fun and independent. But it still can feel lonely sometimes. Yes, I’m enjoying this, but I look around — I don’t know this person, I don’t know that person. And so there were moments when I felt alone. Nate looked at me and gave me the red tile to fill out,” Christine recalls. “I just also moved from California to Massachusetts about a month and a half ago. Most of my family is in California, so it was a big move for me. It was for work. But at the end of the day, I don’t have people in Massachusetts. So coming here kind of brought up a lot of weight on my shoulders, a lot of recurring themes. I put my red tile up about moving.”
But Christine’s journey with HeartSupport wasn’t over. Later in the day, after rocking out solo to a few bands, she came back to check the wall. She was immediately overwhelmed.
She says, “I came back, and I saw all these people, people I’d never met, feeling similar effects of moving and saying that it will get better, and feeling for me losing, having empathy.”
Christine was far from the only one to open up throughout the weekend. Some of them were also brand new to HeartSupport’s mission to heal the scene. Others had been familiar with the org’s work for years.
“A man came up to me to get tattooed, and expressed how he had followed HS since the beginning, and that he had used multiple variations of our support through all of the years of HeartSupport,” remembers HeartSupport staffer Bryce Maopolski. “I talked to his wife, filling her in more deeply on what HeartSupport does. She was moved and actually opened up herself on the wall, seeking support. Her column was filed with beautiful responses of encouragement and love. It was so stunning to see a couple whose lives had been so impacted by HeartSupport for over a decade, but also so recently — especially because this was their first time ever seeing the wall in-person.”
For many of the festival attendees who stopped by the wall, it was the beginning, not the end, of their engagement with the HeartSupport community. Several people signed up for support calls, including one young woman whose words stuck with Nate.
“She said, ‘I’m not going to be taking a spot from someone else, am I?’ And I said no, it’s for you. She ended up opening up about multiple deaths in her life. She wrote ‘I feel like my mind decided I’m the one dying, and I’m just drowning,’” Nate shares.
Seeing her deep hesitation to believe that she was worth support and care, Nate encouraged her to learn more about the Support Calls program. He got her signed up on the spot, ensuring that she would go home with steady, caring company as she continues to navigate grief.
The truth is that stories of life and death are often brought to the HeartSupport wall. No one in the community is afraid of that darkness: they embrace each person walking in it with love.
“One of the first people who I spoke with never shared her name with me, but I will never forget her,” shares volunteer and HeartSupport writer Mary. “I was standing by the tattoo station when I welcomed her and told her what HeartSupport was about. She listened intently, and then told me that she was all about what we were doing, given what she had recently experienced: Just a few days earlier, she had attempted to end her own life.”
The two were able to have a conversation about the fact that the attempt had come from a place of survivor’s guilt, watching friends lose their lives to mental illness and having to grapple with being the one to survive. At Mary’s urging, the woman opened up on the support wall, where people quickly responded and filled out her column with affirmation of her life, and her choice to be alive — still, no matter who she has lost.
The impact HeartSupport was able to have throughout just two days was massive. In total, 35 people opened up on the wall, and 180 more people wrote responses.
HeartSupport at When We Were Young 2025
HeartSupport will keep showing up at festivals, facilitating moments like these where loneliness becomes connection and grief becomes comfort. We’re only able to do so because of the generosity of a community that believes in healing the scene. Will you be a part of that community?
