May 27
Would Not Come
I hadn’t listened to Alanis Morissette in a long time, years, but last night I dug out my favorite album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. I think it’s her smartest, often angriest album, and I spent a good stretch of years identifying with that sort anger. After high-school, for a solid six years, I had a great deal of internal anger. I didn’t end up going to college like I expected. I didn’t have any friends who weren’t online, let alone an honest to Christ girlfriend. I was going to disability advocacy meetings with my mom, not living like a fellow of twenty. I didn’t have assistants, nothing was what I wanted for myself. It all happened so slowly, steadily, and I grew to hate it. I never talked about it, never knew how. It was hard to live that way because I’ve never thought to myself, oh, I’m disabled, so I obviously can’t have a girlfriend, or leave the house without my mom. Fuck that, it’s not me. I couldn’t directly identify with Alanis’ lyrics, I didn’t share her experiences, but I definitely understood them on an intellectual level, and I felt the emotion behind them. My anger was in that I was lacking experiences, and the necessary support toward such experiences. That lack of experiences ended three years ago.
So, last night, Alanis starts singing Would Not Come. I’ve always liked the song, always understood it intellectually, but last night it hit me completely differently. I’m living this song, right fucking now I’m living it. For the last fucking year, I’ve lived it. I was so close to everything I ever wanted, and I lost it in a blink, so fast my head spun, so fast my head still spins. I lost my end to loneliness, the lover I wanted for so long. I lost my best friend, my muse. Right now, my life is a series of fixes, trying to find something that will not come.
Yet, when I don’t feel like bleeding in the bathtub, I realize that my life is better than empty. I feel awful, beyond fucked up, but I got here by way of so many experiences. I can genuinely identify with so many songs, I have so many of my own words to write, I’m not devoid of a life. Yes, the songs are of loss, addiction, depression, suicide. Yes, my writing is very dark. Still, bad experiences are better than abject nothingness.
I don’t want to be here. Sometimes I’d happily open my wrists and be done. Still, if I manage to dig my way out of this nightmare, if I don’t break, I’ll be a better me.
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3 Comments so far
Reckon in another life, if you weren’t a writer, you’d have been a singer/songwriter. I get that vibe from your writing a lot of the time.
“Right now, my life is a series of fixes”: strikes me as very relatable – most of us are just stumbling from one calamity to the next, running toward whatever small victory we glimpse on the horizon, trying our best just to stay afloat
You haven’t broken yet.
And already you’ve made me a better person.
I never spoke of this before, but I will here. This album saved my life. Particularly, That I’d Be Good and Thank U.
I dreamed of eating a bullet when these were released. Sometimes, I still do, but I never forget what these songs said to me.
I would be good, even if I got and stayed sick. Thank you silence! Thank you nothingness!