So many of us live for everyone but ourselves, why? Why do we feel the need to please everyone else before we even think about our own well-being.
In their song Iris, The Goo Goo Dolls say “When everything feels like the movies, yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive and I don’t want the world to see me ’cause I don’t think that they’d understand. When everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.”
Music is so cool, the same lyric can hold so many varied meanings depending on who’s listening. We can not deny it makes us feel something, every single one of us. Either we’re going through something or we have everything good going for us, music is universal in in making us feel things on a deeper level.
Although we all have our interpretations on what we think an artist is saying, I do not think we will ever fully grasp the full meaning behind what the artist meant or how they felt while creating a particular lyric. I don’t think anyone could precisely recreate the insights and logic going on in someone else’s mind without the message getting lost somewhere along the way. Different ears hear different perspectives so, its easy for stories/insights to be reiterated in a different light than the one intended.
Anyway, what I felt the Goo-Goo Dolls were trying to depict through the first sentence was: despite all the fame and fortune, all the fans calling their name, idolising them, somewhere along the lines they forgot to really live. Yeah, they are performing every night and are on tour all the time, are known around the world and could have anything they want, material things that is, but that still doesn’t mean they aren’t just going through the motions, living for millions of others, becoming the image they created, losing themselves and not really living for themselves.
I am sure the beginning of the fame and fortune trip is the most thrilling thing in the world, you convince yourself you are going to be this happy forever, that all you need is what you have right there in that moment. Then years pass, things are the same, people around you seem to be stuck in the same cycle. Its 4 am one morning when the drugs are wearing off at one of the after show parties you attend frequently. You’re celebrating your 5th sold out show that week, at your 5th after party, your body still aching from the night before, still up at 4 am, drugs in your system, haven’t had a proper meal in days, your stomach queasy from the liquor, mind bouncing from the anxiety from the drugs. No one cares how you feel, they all on their own high. And by 7 am you’ll be getting ready to go to sleep to wake up in a few hours and do it all again. Year after year, show after show. On the road, state to state, half ass relationships, no one to call home to ask if you are doing alright.
Most people believe the life the fame and fortune is all everyone could ever want but I could see how its so easy to get caught up in and how the fake relationships and soulless people they seem to encounter on the daily could leave them depleted and lonely. Being in the darker parts of the world, meeting all the people who seem to live to fly off uppers for days, not knowing their surroundings, the people who just seem to have no respect for themselves and seem as if they have given up altogether. The people who are using drugs and other people just like them as a form of fantasy comfort in this world, they are trying to run away from themselves, from feeling anything so they live in a world they could never possibly be normal in if they were sober. I presume the come downs for these people are the worst, I can’t even imagine all the demons they have to face in their minds when the drugs dissipate.
I could see how involving yourself with those kinds of people and places for so long could kill your spirit, I could see how these artists who thought they would have it all, could slip into a darkness, a depression. We all wish we could be them but I am sure a lot of them wish they could be us. Have a three story house, nice car parked in the driveway, waking up to their kids jumping on the bed Sunday mornings and taking them out for a hike, the smell of their spouse cooking up bacon and French toast that smells up the whole house, owning that golden retriever that never stops licking their face but they love anyway, cuddling up in their robe and slippers on the couch with their loved one, drinking hot chocolate watching a feel good movie, reading the newspaper in their underwear on their own back deck, curling up on a lazy boy and reading a good book, and really anything and everything in between that entails living a family life. The things a lot of us take for granted.
Yes, artists could really have all this, but even if they did, they would have to pack up and leave all the time, for this show or that and it wouldn’t be the same. You couldn’t walk with your kids down the street with full on privacy unless you bought your own street, which, again is not the same. Once you become known in the public eye, a normal family life is nearly impossible and I could imagine the emptiness that comes with that feeling.
It is unfortunate though, because celebrity or not, rich or poor, hero or murderer, we are all going to question ourselves and our decisions. When the night falls and we are in a state of vulnerability, lost in our lonesome, our pity, it is inevitable that the inescapable feeling of a twisted, dark realisation will come over us. The curiosity of the “what if” questions. If we are doing it right, if we did, or are doing enough, if it’s everything we want, if and how we can change it now if we wanted to. Nevertheless, all of us, every single one of us will have doubts, will question our life path and wonder if it was the right one, questioning all of our decisions along the way that brought us to where we are, contemplating how things would have been different had we made different decisions in certain points in our lives. It is just what we do.
When coming to the realisation that we do not live forever, that life really does fly by in the blink of an eye; its our choices in life, our fear of being in inadequate knowing we have it in us to be extraordinary, that most frightens us. Knowing the power we have to be an exceptional human mixed with the gnawing of time ticking away on us, is a mixture for a recipe for disaster. It is easy to see how we all get so lost, so down on ourselves.
Anyways, therefore, what I believe the Goo-Goo Dolls came to that realisation. When you once were just a normal teenager watching movies and looking up to your role models who played the roles of celebrities and movie stars, where they made their lives look so glamorous and exciting and now you are living that “glamorous” life you seen in the movies, it must all feel like a dream. Like someone is going to pinch you and your gonna wake up one day in your crummy little apartment with your pot-smoking, good for nothing band mates, trying to find gigs in old dive bars.
I can imagine that nothing feels how they feel it was supposed to, the glory and glamour wore off and they were left just going through the motions and doing drugs just to find some sort of joy. Or to feel anything at all. They get too ahead of themselves and are no longer writing music for the reason they started writing music for, but for the people, becoming a sell out, living for the fans and the producers not for themselves, a phoney. I can see how people might come to feel that way. When there is always an image to keep up, knowing if you slip up and be yourself you may lose fans, because they really only love who they think you are, must be a heart-breaking feeling.
They’re not living but merely surviving, going through the motions, don’t have any real feelings or can’t decipher which ones are authentic or not because they are told how to feel, how to act on a daily basis. It could be so easy to lose themselves. Drugs as a way to numb themselves, probably wondering what it would be like to really live in a reality where happiness didn’t need to be sought out by drugs or searched for but was just simply present in every day life.
Being a part of a life they always wanted but it not reaching their expectations, surviving doing what they think supposed to, stuck in their ways, no feelings, numb, have to bleed just to know their alive.
In the second part of the song “And I don’t want the world to see me ’cause I don’t think that they’d understand. When everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.” I believe the Goo-Goo Dolls are presenting themselves as misunderstood. As we all are in ways.
Sometimes theories or insights sound so much better until said aloud, because with words we can not thoroughly illustrate or interpret the perception of awareness we felt in ourselves when thought in our minds prior to being said aloud. Even now, I can not fully explain this specific idea of “everyone hears a different story.” This is why I love quotes. From The Corner Of His Eye, by Dean Koontz he states: “After all, you could never really know every last corner of someone’s mind or heart. No human being was perfect. Even someone of saintly habits and selfless behaviour might be a monster in his heart, filled with unspeakable desires, which he might act upon only once or never.”
And in Kurt Cobains Journal that was published after his suicide (people thought he was crazy but I understand his mind so much.): …”I’m not well read, but when I do read I read well.
I don’t have the time to translate what I understand in the form of conversation. I had exhausted most conversation at age nine. I only feel with grunts, screams and tones and with hand gestures and my body. I’m deaf in spirit.
I purposely keep myself naïve and away from earthly information because it’s the only way to avoid a jaded attitude.
Everything I do is internally subconscious because you can’t rationalise spirituality
We don’t deserve this privilege. I can’t speak, I only feel. Maybe someday I’ll turn myself into Helen Keller by puncturing my ears with a knife, then cutting my voice box out.”
I believe in our own minds we see ourselves as a certain person, we know our mindset, how we look at the world, we all have different perspectives and theories, we know what our hearts desire, what we need for happiness, we know what destroys us, kills us, we know what we want most of the time and what we don’t. The version we see ourselves as exists solely in our minds. To other people that version does not exist, they see what they see, just the outside: the wrapping paper hiding the gift. And because a lot of people are stuck in their ways of believing everyone does or at least should think exactly like them, those people will assume they know how you think. People may assume that if you’re upset over something they wouldn’t get upset over, that you are faking it, exaggerating. It is very easy for someone to discount your feelings as valid if it is a feeling they themselves have never felt. People are close minded to other ways of thinking, they don’t understand therefore can be critical sometimes not even intentionally.
This is why it is sometimes so difficult and exhausting to try to get along with some people. When people don’t understand where you are coming from, or why you get upset or even excited over the things you do, you are going to start to question yourself.
But I just try to think of all the times someone said something where I thought Who even thinks of that? Something that would never come to my head but clearly it came to theirs. That doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them does it? No, they just have a completely different mind than me so, different things excite them as well as sadden them. Just like each and everyone of us. So, if we are questioned by our peers why we think or act the way we do, we should never question ourselves along with them but instead have the attitude of being proud to let out who we really are, because there are so many people living their life in fear of doing just that.
In my heart, I am not too bad of a person, I do try to do what is best for everyone even if it affects me. Yet sometimes, when faced with a situation and I am trying to share my two cents, it most often than not comes out differently than thought in my head. Cause like I have mentioned you can’t really put an unconscious feeling that comes to your mind into words. So, because it came out different then expected; a different point might be getting across than the one I intended. Because I can’t properly express myself I sometimes stutter and get jumbled which frustrates me and I give attitude like I am mad at everyone else for not getting the point of what I am saying, yet really I can’t blame someone else for my lack of expressing myself properly. Really I shouldn’t be mad at myself either, I should be able to come to terms with knowing we are all misunderstood to an extent. I should be okay with knowing that the people who are reading me are not reading the real me necessarily, but be okay with that. With knowing that there will be many different versions of me out there depending on who’s judging.
We are all just a huge population of lost, misunderstood beings roaming the earth, thinking our way is the best way, shoving our ideas down people’s throats, trying to be noticed, trying to be the best, to share our beliefs and values, trying to get people to see how we see, feel how we feel, to understand where we are coming from, to get us.
So, I feel the Goo-Goo Dolls are trying to say: Like the game telephone, a phrase is thought up by one person and whispered into the next persons ear, and so on and so on, the phrase gets passed around the circle. At the end when the last person hears it and recites it out loud it is more often then not a completely different phrase from what it started from. Along the line the message gets fuzzy and distorted just like in real life the same kind of thing happens. You will tell someone a story to get certain point across but they focused on the part that mainly interested them. So, when the story gets passed on its possible that that one part that was focused may get exaggerated and the story may come out in a different way then initially intended and begins to hold a whole other value or meaning behind it.
Therefore again, what I believe they are trying to say is that even though the world won’t understand, they’ll all hear a most different song, see a different man, even though their image may be distorted, they just want at least one person to see who they really are. To make it all worth it. Or so that they could find a sense of self again.
If you haven’t heard the song:
