Essay: Tell Me Where To Go

Note: This essay is a companion piece to the new live recording of my song “Softer” – available now.

My relationship with my mother has never been stable. I understand she loves me, but I have never felt that she has liked me. There are constraints and acceptable avenues of interaction between us; the terms forever evolving, a rotting staircase you timidly ascend, not knowing which step will be the one you fall through.

Naturally, I have believed the cause for our precarious relationship to be something rooted in myself. Her anger has never felt like frustration at a situation, but rather a core resentment of what I intrinsically am, of what I represent—marked from birth.

The artist Sharon Van Etten released “Seventeen” in January of 2019. Though only vaguely familiar with her prior work, each note arrested me. Over and over, it played, four circling minutes pulsating through a tiny pill-red Bluetooth speaker, crunched high frequencies splattering the modest square footage of that year’s rented room.

“I know what you’re gonna say/ ‘I think that you’re all the same’/ Constantly being led astray/ You think you know something you don’t.”

In the song, Van Etten is a mother talking to her teenage child, shading in the thickness of walls these positions place between each other. Like the designation of boss and employee, the setting of mother and child in a traditional Western sense implements hierarchy. Van Etten spotlights that the trope of the rebellious teenager is an easy excuse to reframe the challenge of growing up. In reality, power is starting to shift. The parent wants to protect and lead, but the child has grown into their own person with their own decisions to make—a struggle ensues.

If rebellion were encouraged, the future might not have to be such an echo. We have to push past the lines of what is acceptable to find our own value system, to understand what we actually believe, personally, not secondhand. Of course, there is also the trap of simply adopting the ideals of another group, cloaking ourselves in an identity instead of engaging in the archaeology of thinking. A true rebellion is interior. It is discovering, through immense effort and excavation, the undeniable attributes of you, the only you that ever was and ever will be, and then finding ways to implement these gifts in your lived experience.

And this is scary.

To be an individual is to be a threat and to be threatened. To stand alone, to commit to what you believe in is brave, but it is not easy, and it is not fun.

As a teenager, I fought against everything. The family, the church, the schools, the society at large—what I failed to do at that age was create a tangible idea of the better, of a direction for this energy of change. The past engulfed behind me, the future a chasm, everywhere a dead, endless expanse. I tore down without any idea of what should be built in place when the burning subsided.

“Downtown hot spot/ Halfway through this life/ I used to feel free/ Or was it just a dream?/ Now you’re a hot shot/ Think you’re so carefree/ But you’re just seventeen/ So much like me.”

As the bridge appears, Van Etten slightly alters the above lyric to a cutting “Afraid that you’ll be just like me,” and despite swearing to myself that I would never be like my mother, in many ways, it is clear I am her son.

A perfectionist with every task, I am always working on something and combating the feeling that I don’t deserve to take a break. I am easily overwhelmed, and though it manifests in different ways, I am equally quick to anger. I am obsessive, intense and continually in search of something just out of reach. I am often lonely, and I am often the cause of my loneliness.

In a 2 a.m alcohol-fueled fight with a former partner, she asked, her voice suddenly vacuumed back from a shout to a whisper, “why do you hate me?”. It knocked me, the soft force of acknowledgment, the rebuilt dynamic, the possessive grasp aimed from my eyes, ignoring everything slipping. At that moment, I was on the other side of the same old scene. I was generations of unrecognized repetition – all the ways I swore I’d never be.

I wished I could have been different in numerous shameful moments throughout my life, but remained unable to shift, my weight was already in motion. I think my mother wishes she could have been different with me, but the chemical reaction began the moment she had me.

While it is never too late, sometimes, doesn’t it feel like it always has been?

Replaying moments such as these, I view myself through a phantom lens, a character in a film directed by ghosts. It creates meaning to be seen, even if only in the imagination. Reality is too vast to comprehend.

One of the higher functions of art is to slow time down, to crop out the infinite, so we can sit inside a single, solitary moment, that never was or will be again in the exact same way. This ability to pause and rewind allows us a chance to find what we would otherwise miss. If pain is observed, it becomes endowed with purpose: there is a witness, there is a lesson, all of this is for something. If our hurt cannot be transformed at some future point, if it remains unacknowledged, what meaning can it have? An endless present of wretchedness is impossible to withstand. It’s why people leave.

I have spent 31 years on this planet, and have long since left childhood behind. Yet, I forget. I revert. I still search for belonging in the lives of people who can never provide what I seek. I still find myself looking for someone to tell me where to go, what to do, what achievement will make me feel okay, what love will justify my continued existence.

Over the past 4 years I’ve committed to self-reparenting through therapy and trauma recovery, through the dissection of the past and the active implementation of recalibrating to healthier choices after an emotional flashback in the present. This is to say, I do not discount the field of psychology, nor the terrain of the spiritual, nor the importance of real-world friendships. However, I believe the role of art, of advice in writing, in song, is undervalued, and has been the most consistent support in my tunnels of darkness. I find the words I never heard in the creations of those I will never know, and wrap them around me, build walls from them to lean upon, sew blankets to soften, place cold glass to cool.

In Seventeen, the line that moves me the most is:

“I see you so uncomfortably alone/ I wish I could show you how much you’ve grown.”

They are words I forget (or try to forget) how deeply I crave.

It was my birthday a few weeks ago, and a friend texted me a short message with a similar sentiment. I started softly crying as the half-empty train car I was on rattled through a tunnel.

My God, how all we really want is to just be seen.

I continue to do my best to not allow fear to push me back within my self-made cage. I choose to expose my unflattering tableaus to light, to be available to others, regardless of if anyone is watching.

We are who we are, even, and maybe especially when the cameras are off.