- All right.

It's working.

I've never done a concert quite like this before, but none of us have ever really done anything like this before in our generation.

(guitar music) My way of trying to make a world a better place is by creating something beautiful in people's lives.

My name is Sam Miltich and I'm a resident of Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

I'm a full time musician.

I'm a mental health advocate.

I'm diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

I had a very severe psychotic break when I was 22 years old.

I couldn't go on the road.

You know, I wasn't really capable of, at that point, really taking care of myself.

I kept working throughout that period, but just not at the same capacity that I was, you know.

I wasn't touring nationally or internationally, you know, and I was playing gigs, but mostly around Northern Minnesota.

I wasn't traveling to the Twin Cities very much.

I have all the classic hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia, really intense paranoia, sort of an obsessive rumination.

There's a certain level of cognitive confusion.

1% of the world population has this illness and it's just part of my life experience.

It was really the combination of taking the psychiatric meds, which got the symptoms under control enough that I could go to therapy and do the work necessary to recover.

Hi, everybody.

You can probably hear my cats, hear my kids playing melodica downstairs, so that's kinda fun.

I started the Patreon deal when the pandemic hit, we've never dealt with something like this in our lifetimes on this grand of a scale.

I'm just going to do some playing here for you guys.

I'm doing it once a month and then I do the single song once a week because I wanted it to maintain something that's special.

And it's filled that void of performing and people tell me how much the music means to them, and you know, any bit of comfort that we can get during this pandemic is worth taking.

(guitar music) I think anything where you're completely engaged, in terms of mental focus, it's a kind of meditation.

That's how I view improvisation and that's how it feels to me.

It has the same effect as when I meditate.

To me, it creates positive mental health.

Because of this sort of slow down in pace of life, a lot of my psychotic symptoms are much better.

I'm outside more.

I'm eating better food.

I'm sleeping better because I'm not on the road traveling.

And so there, there are positives, but then there's the existential questions of God, what is this all about?

Why are so many people dying?

The three words that come to my mind are adaptation, acceptance, and gratitude.

I've had to do that in my personal life with certain losses.

I was just thinking about how I can't hear out of my left ear anymore.

I lost all the hearing in my left ear last winter.

It's been wickedly hard to adapt to having lost half of one of your senses that you use for your life's passion.

And I've had to say, you know, you can grieve this loss or you can be miserable and bitter about it, or you can have gratitude for what you still have, which is the hearing in your right ear.

I'm actually really grateful to this one 'cause I got this guy right down by the sound hole.

So, I'm a pretty pleased that I still got that guy.

I can be angry and bitter about the fact that I have to take medication for schizophrenia or I can feel gratitude for the fact that it's given me the life that I have.

One way I've thought about this pandemic is, you know, people are kind of upset about how much life has changed.

We want to go to a restaurant.

We want to do what we did.

We want to do it the way we used to do it.

One of the things that it's done is it's made me just appreciate what I have.

We're just being asked to stay home and I know we can do this, communally as a group.

We're good enough to do this.

You have to hold a sense of gratitude that you still are alive and that you have a good life and that you have people that love you, which is kind of the most important thing is to have love in one's life.

(guitar music) As hard as it is to carry forward right now, we must.

Our survival as a species has always been our incredible ability to adapt to whatever circumstance that we're thrust into.

'Night folks.

(mellow music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Intersections" is brought to you by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.