Hands 2 Hold U Down

This song has given me the chills every time I've listened to it. For your perusal, here are the lyrics, which appear to be written by a clinically depressed, lovestruck 20-something who thinks most things are "amazing" when she is not crying and listening to the soundtrack to "Purple Rain:"

"2 HANDS 2 HOLD U DOWN )) yrs + mine )) life is amazin )) yr amazin

2 HANDS )) ive got U now )) dont u ever die )) life is amazin )) yr amazin

werent we sad from tha start?

black earth runs inside my heart

runs deep inside U

run in2 tha flame"

This song is scary because it evokes what I feel when I am starting to fall in love with someone; that feeling of hope that you will be happy, of desire for someone whose flaws you can't see, that fear of fucking everything up and losing someone whom you'd never want to lose, and of losing your hopes and joy and desire along with them. I know that the song is sexy and provocative, but I can't help but feel its coldness, too. I think that the songwriters very deliberately juxtaposed rather romantic, sexy lyrics, with alienating, alienated music -- fuzzed-out synths, distorted bass and vocals, and a vocal track that sounds so distant from the rest of the song -- to create tension and discomfort. However, I wonder if it isn't true that a lot of other love songs deal in fear, anxiety, and desperation anyway, even ones that aren't trying to create an uncomfortable ambiance. I am thinking of Motown songs in particular, for some reason. "Baby, I need your loving. Got to have all your loving." "Stop, in the name of love, before you break my heart." "Why do you build me up, buttercup, just to let me down?" Love is a place where we make ourselves fragile, where the vulnerability of even the most brutish individual is revealed. Love is a mental and emotional mode of joy and reassurance, but it is also often one that invites rampant insecurity. Love is scary.

I am pretty easily scared, though, to be fair. Those of you who know me know that I've had severe problems with depression and anxiety since I was a child. I was diagnosed with bipolar illness at age 13, but I'm not lucky enough to be someone who gets hypomania or mania. I have had five manic episodes in my life and countless depressions. These days, I am not depressed much anymore, except for when it's dark outside a lot (thanks, Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD, ha ha!) or I have things in my life making me sad, like losses, because I take medications, exercise, and go to therapy. But I am afraid that I was not always an easy person to know, especially in my teens. While I am not as prone to depression as I was then, or as anxious, I can still get very anxious around certain types of new challenges.  Those of you who don't know me can imagine what it must be like to know someone who has these problems, who is always a bit more nervous and jumpy than other people over something simple like taking an exam, driving to a new place for the first time, or going to a party and meeting new people. Or someone who sometimes looks physically weighed down with concerns, or whose blank face makes them stand out of a room of people with dynamic, laughing smiles and animated, sparkling eyes, a person who cries if a certain song comes on the radio. You can imagine that this complicates love for people like me at least as much as it complicates simpler things.

As song this song shows, falling in love (or just a good day) can let you sort of forget or conceal your disposition toward nervousness; life can be amazing. People like me don't always show the world how nervous we are. We disguise our nervousness in normalcy, just as this song disguises it with the format of a song about love and sex. We smile brightly and tell jokes to compensate, tell everyone what we're happy about, insist that we never should have had that last cup of coffee. However, what you don't get to see is the worst of our anxiety, because when it's at its worst, we are hiding and not showing anything of ourselves to anyone else. Avoidant behavior characterizes anxiety as much as feeling worried does. Isolating yourself, not talking to friends and other people who love you, procrastinating, and leaving places when you're uncomfortable are the most common "negative symptoms" that characterize anxiety disorder. (In the lingo of psychiatry, negative symptoms represent the stuff that people with psychiatric disorders stop doing. These are usually things that most healthy and functional people do to have a relatively normal life, such as eating, sleeping, working, going out, bathing, etc. Positive symptoms are things like feeling worried, feeling depressed, auditory hallucinations, delusions, feeling the urge to do, then doing compulsive behaviors like checking or counting, etc.) 

Perhaps you think it's weird that I think this song is about anxiety and you didn't notice that on first listen. However, for me, the negative symptoms of my anxiety are always the ones that I believe go unnoticed, because they are an absence of action rather than me doing something weird that will be noticed. Believing that no one sees my anguish both comforts me, because it allows me to think I'm passing as a normal person, yet it also alienates me, because I think that my invisible unhappiness can never be acknowledged and understood by another person. I do the same thing with my depression. I will hide it from everyone if I can, because I am ashamed that I can't just shake it and be free of its affliction. For me, the people I love are sometimes the ones from whom I most wish to conceal my anxiety and depression, because I don't wish to burden them or make them worry about me. However, I usually end up telling them, because I trust them and don't want to hide anything from them. I try to allow myself to be vulnerable.

This song's vulnerability is arresting. The gauzy, somewhat hollow-sounding, half-whispered words "you're amazing" are like what you'd say while half-asleep in your lover's arms. "Don't you ever die" is a plea for the ephemeral, formless feeling of perfect love to reify itself and become something substantial that we can keep in our grasp. It is a wistful wish for a moment to crystallize, arrest itself, become an insect trapped in a drop of solidifying amber, a gem to slip into our pocket. The vocals in the background, slowed down to an unearthly timbre and drawl, sound like a woman crying; they repeat the plea like La Llorona, a weeping ghost calling a soul back to life and love rather than to the realm of death. Please, don't make me lose you. Please, don't let me fuck this up. I'm still sad sometimes, but I've got you, and you're amazing. You are helping me forget how sad I am, and I'm so nervous and scared that you will leave me because I did something wrong, and then I'll be sad because you're gone, and because I'm alone again. This song is confrontational, in a way, because it allows fear and anxiety to enter the conversation, but not to suck all the air from the room and extinguish the flame. It is not an avoidant song, even though it deals with anxiety in its bleak, brittle soundscape and by pleading "don't you ever die."

This could be me projecting my own tendency to become anxious about fucking up good things when I've got them, of course. We all bring our own subjectivity to every task, including interpreting music and texts. This song is vulnerable, but is it as scared/scary as it sounds to me? I am perfectly aware that I have fucked up good things in the past, and that this song could have been sung to me, and it scares me that I was so inwardly focused and selfish in my depression and anxiety that my friends, lovers, and family members would think to me, "Don't die. Please, don't die." I left my half-conscious body for my parents to find after overdosing on medicines. I tried this two weeks before my best friend and I were going to see Sepultura, but mainly thought better of it because it would suck to die without seeing Sepultura with my best friend, so I claimed I'd made a mistake so I could be sent home. We went to the concert, then a week later, I did it again. I didn't think of how upsetting this would have been for my best friend, or my parents, or for other friends and family, or for the school nurse who had to help me call 911 the first time. I didn't imagine how my father, who found his father's body after his suicide in 1971, might have been anguished by my inability to hang on to my life in the face of depression, anxiety, severe bullying at school, and the other, more usual problems of being an immature teenager (keep in mind that I was skipped two years in school, and so was a 12-year-old child facing the older-kid drama of high school during my freshman year).

I couldn't have told you that life was amazing when I was 15. I never made a real and consistent secret of my suicidal depression and paralyzing anxiety to the people closest to me, blithely unaware of how this probably terrified them because they knew I had not been afraid to try to end my life before. It scares and saddens me that I was so blind as a teenager not to understand how I was not only hurting myself. It scares me to think I simply tried to avoid my life without understanding what losing me would mean to the people I loved, to know how they'd have tried to hang on to my hand and beg me not to die, if I'd not hidden myself and my agony from them, afraid to burden them, until I couldn't handle it by myself anymore.

Yes, I'm not suicidal anymore. Life is pretty amazing. I deal with my sadness in part with music, by letting others sing my terror out for me, and by writing about what's on my mind rather than stuffing it down. I haven't made a suicide attempt or been in a psychiatric hospital since I was 17. But I'm still sad and nervous. I'm also afraid that anyone who knows that, who knows what I did, will automatically not love me. To me, the most terrifying part of love is not only allowing myself to be vulnerable and to trust a new person, but to "run into the flame" -- to put aside my fears, and go ahead and try to love and be loved. I doubt sometimes that I am good enough to love and be loved. After all, my awareness of every mistake I ever made in previous relationships haunts me. The egregious things I did as a suicidally depressed teenager, acting as though not even the purest love from the kindest and most devoted people could retain me from exiting my then-miserable existence... well, those things appall me now if I think about them for a while. 

I worry that even if "I've got (someone) now," I am really just still the person who made those mistakes, even if I don't make the same kind of mistakes, or on the same scale. It scares me to think that no matter how much I love someone, I am going to make some kind of mistake, because people do that. I will be too involved with my work. I will forget something he asks me to do. I will be too nervous and that will be off-putting. People tend to make mistakes from time to time, but I fear that I will make a more serious mistake that will hurt someone or disgust someone. I fear that they will not forgive me, and that they will disappear. I am scared to simply trust that someone who loves me will forgive me, and I'm scared to run into the flame holding their hand. I have been sad from the start and now I have to believe that someone could forgive me for my sadness and tendency to be human. That is easier said than done. This song makes it sound easy if you just look at the words, but the way it sounds sad and cold betrays insecurity and the fear of letting go and trusting.

Well, sorry, everyone. I hope that everyone I hurt before has forgiven me by now. I'm really not that scary these days, anyway. However, this song reminds me that the kernel of terror nestled in the black earth of my heart, that germ of unquiet doubt longing to push out a stem toward the sun, still lives within me. It reminds me that to be happy, I must somehow acknowledge it while not letting it beleaguer me with its incessant whirl of anxiety. I must not allow myself to avoid my chance to be happy. This song calls forth my greatest fears, actually. I'm scared of fucking up good things that make me happy. But generally, I am happy. I just can hear the unhappiness and happiness within this song because I feel both. That duality is also scary. 

I really hope that you aren't as scared by this song as I am. I think that White Ring made a masterful album, but I hope they are happier people than their music would lead you to believe.

Uh... Happy Halloween! Boo! Etc.