Finding Solace In Perfect Words

Growing up, I always felt isolated and disconnected from those around me.  It was hard for me to connect with my friends on a personal or emotional level.  Sure, there was some teen angst involved, but it was more than that.  Social interaction wouldn’t come naturally to me, and I felt weird for how I acted and how my brain worked.  I didn’t even fully comprehend the things I felt and thought.  I just felt disconnected and ostracized, like a stranger to the human race.  That experience is where my love for art began.

Art helped me deal with these internal struggles I held.  The lyrics of music specifically meant a lot to me around the end of middle school and all throughout high school.  Seeing other people express themselves and put the emotions I had into tangible words grounded me from feeling so distant from the world.  I was able to put a description on all these different things that I was, and found a connection I had never truly felt through others’ words.  

“I spent my life weighed down by a stone heart
Drowning in irony and settling for anything
Somewhere down the line all the wiring went faulty
I’m scared s***less of failure and I’m staring out at where I wanna be”


“I Just Wanna Sell Out My Funeral”, The Wonder Years


These are a set of lyrics that I held dear to my heart when I was in my teen years.  These lyrics felt like someone was able to reach inside my brain and pull out all that was within.  I felt less alone, less like some oddity – as if someone else had similar thoughts and feelings, and they were able to explain it so simply.  The lyrics captured how I felt defected, like something with my brain was made wrong, how I felt stuck with who I was, how I looked at others with jealousy and longing.  


“With a winning smile, the poor boy
With naivety succeeds.
At the final moment, I cry
I always cry at endings.”

“Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”, Belle & Sebastian


This set of lyrics builds upon this idea of doubting the best to happen – a pessimistic worldview, which I used to find myself in.  I don’t know if I can describe the bigger emotion of this writing.  It’s this sadness of things ending, even when it's for the better.  I often find myself crying to the endings of happier pieces of work, like Hayao Miyazaki movies or love songs.  In the world and in my household, growing up made it seem shameful for a man to get emotional as often as I did.  Hearing a guy from the nineties sing about crying to endings regardless of their outcome made me feel more secure in my sense of self, and allowed me to grow into a better person.


“In a world that I can’t fix
With a hammer in my grip,
I’m no closer to heaven.


I can stay here in the darkness
Feels like I’m wandering in circles for days
I may never reach the gates
I’ll keep walking anyway
I’m no closer to heaven”

“No Closer To Heaven”, The Wonder Years


These lyrics express a dread that bubbles inside me. As an eternal people pleaser, I want to help the people around me, friend or not.  I hate to be an inconvenience, and I feel especially terrible when I can’t help the ones I love.  It can be very hopeless, but the second set of lyrics remind me that I need to keep moving forward and not let that feeling take over.  

This moves into a different kind of writing that I think everyone points to as comforting.  Motivational writing creates a space that helps you to keep moving forward, keep doing your best, and keep living life to the fullest.  Personally, it's always been nice to have a short set of words to repeat to myself whenever I need to pull myself up and out of a dark headspace.  


“This is not where we belong,
But it's where we are right now.
Find a spot and settle down.”

“Sunny Brixton”, Superchunk


This has been the perfect mantra for where I am in my life currently and where I may continue to be throughout the rest of my twenties.  Maybe it will take a while to get to a time where I have a successful career, a place to live, and a life with the people that mean the most to me.  But that doesn’t mean the time it takes to get there has to be any less enjoyable.  I need to enjoy the life I have and enjoy it now.


“Time isn’t holding us,
Time isn’t after us.”

“Once In A Lifetime”, Talking Heads


It’s beautiful; it’s simple; it’s comforting; it’s everything to me.  It’s these positive affirmations that life will be okay, that all my problems will not be the end of me. Words are able to create such a feeling within me, within all of us.  Because writing has that power over us: to inspire, to cradle, to move us.  It makes us who we are, as authors and as humans.  As I’ve drafted and written this article, I wonder how much of myself comes through not in my words but in words I find solace in.  I wonder what your favorite quotes, passages, and lyrics are and if they speak towards the person you are now or at least, the person you want to be.  


I want to end on what I think is the most important piece of writing I have heard in my life.  The atlas of my outlook as I am now.  What I always try to keep in mind as I go about my days.  And I hope it shows the power writing can have on anyone.  The musician, Jeff Rosenstock, wrote the lyrics 15 years into his career, after hundreds of other songs.  You will always find new feelings to express and new words to express yourself.  Keep writing and write from your heart; it might just touch someone else’s.


“And it’s not like the love that they show us on TV,
It’s a home that can burn,
It’s a leg to freeze.
Love Is Worry.”

“…While You’re Alive”, Jeff Rosenstock

By: Robert Scanlon