Behind-the-Song: Falling pt.2 (Patreon)

It’s always interesting going back and analysing my own songwriting after the fact. I always have a generally good idea of where I was at and what I was writing about, but in the moment, while I’m in the process of writing a song, it is really not that deep 😂 I’m not usually actively thinking about what words I want to write, I just know what feeling or message I want to convey and I hope the words come 🤷‍♀️ It is, in true form, a diary entry of what I’m feeling and/or thinking about. At least it starts out that way, and then I have a bunch of pieces I have to string together 😅👍

This verse, I think, was clearly written post-dizziness. It’s less “I am actively not okay” and more “well…this was…not my favourite experience 😅” and just trying to articulate that experience, I suppose. 

“Can’t trust myself when I’m falling asleep at the wheel / I’ll stick to the passenger seat / It’s just a roller coaster anyway”

I’ll be completely honest here, I 100% wrote this driving analogy as just something clever to say about being unwell 😅 But it sounds deep, right? And I think it definitely does a good job of getting the message across, albeit mostly by accident 🙈

In the most literal sense, I am not even allowed to drive a vehicle 😅 I don’t have my licence - and my learner’s permit just recently expired, actually. But because I have seizures, I would need to be seizure-free for an absolute minimum of 6 months before I’d be allowed to apply for a new driver’s licence. So I will, in fact, be sticking to the passenger seat for the foreseeable future. A true passenger princess 👑

But I meant this line to be about driving my own body. Because I honestly feel like I do not have control over my own body. And this feeling became more and more pervasive once the seizures started and I’ve been losing more and more functionality. Granted, in recent times, I’ve gained a lot of functionality back, but at the time I wrote this song, I was actively losing control of my body more and more. And it sucked. And it was scary. So I put it in a song, naturally 😅

And it has been a roller coaster, in general, broadly. But if I had to guess, when I was writing the song, I meant the roller coaster of being okay for a day or three and then suddenly being very not okay, and having no idea which way it was going to go on any given day. This was the time when I was just beginning to identify that my seizures correlated to specific ranges of air pressure, so I didn’t even have any way of predicting seizures at the time 🤷‍♀️ I was simply ✨along for the ride✨

Stuck in a daze, and I’m losing control / & everybody’s unphased by the storm they don’t know / But it’s consuming every part of me…

The first line of this is pretty self explanatory… I was having migraines daily and seizures every 2-4 days; I was very out of it most of the time, and I quite literally lost control of my bodily functions, frequently. 😅😬

And I’ve always been semi-decent at hiding (intentionally or not) how I’m actually feeling when I’m unwell, once I get used to whatever it is. So it’s pretty common that, in general, people don’t really know or understand what I’m going through. And I don’t expect them to.

I do try to be pretty open about it on stream and stream-related spaces, but low-key that is in part an effort to set expectations. I wouldn’t share if I didn’t also value the connection to others dealing with similar issues, but for instance, when I would share an instagram story about a bed gremlin day, it was mostly because I didn’t want people to be expecting message responses 🫣

At the time I wrote this song though, while I would somewhat openly talk about health issues, there was a lot more that I wouldn’t share. And so even more than the past couple years, most of my struggle went unseen 🤷‍♀️ Which is not a problem, but you know… “everybody’s unphased by the storm the don’t know”. Because how could anyone be “phased” by struggles they don’t know are happening 🤷‍♀️

But at the same time, it felt like my whole life. I was falling apart. My whole world felt like it was coming down around me. I mean… when I started writing this song, I literally couldn’t stand 🫠 So anyway…tough times 😅

And yet, such a cheery sounding song 🙈