Unfinished Song Vault: Am I Bad? (Masking) (Patreon)

In honour of revealing my second ever piano original on stream, here's another piano piece (though I apparently never recorded the piano part...) 🫣

This is just something short I wrote about not being able to unmask when you're in pain or otherwise unwell. When you've spent your whole life pretending everything is fine because anything else was inconvenient/unacceptable. So you learned to hide your pain. Every kind of pain you had. And now as an adult, you don't know how to stop hiding it. Where my song "The Fool" is about being able to tell people that things aren't okay, but not being able to let it be seen, this is just about that invisibility factor. And feeling guilty about it. 

If you remember my "quick" rant about the woman on the bus singling me out, this song is kind of about that. About having pain and hardship, and serious pain and hardship, but keeping it all hidden even when I don't necessarily want to; when it's even harmful for me to not be able to show it. In situations like that bus incident, and you know, being at a doctor's office, it's genuinely a detriment to not be able to show the pain I experience. And yet I still don't know how to do it. And I honestly feel guilty for not being able to communicate effectively.

But just because you can't see it, and I struggle to let myself show it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Doesn't make it any less real. And doesn't make it any less valid.

I don't feel comfortable going into why I wrote "or they'd give me a reason to cry", but what I will say is that a big hurdle in this, I think, is that while I feel guilty for not adequately communicating, I was also taught to feel guilty for having and expressing emotions. And part of that was that I also wasn't good at explaining my emotions, but first of all...how many children are? And secondly, being able to explain emotions should never be an expected prerequisite for having and expressing them. Yet, I will still apologize for having them.

I started writing this one around the same time as the first piano song ("hurt a little more"), but never came back to it. I could never really decide if I liked this, or where to go from here...or if I was comfortable continuing 😅🙈

Lyrics:

Am I bad at pain?

Sorry, just one second, I got this.

Am I bad at pain?

Sorry, just a minute I promise.

Am I bad at pain?

Sorry, was I masking again?

.

Just 'cause you don't see it

Don't mean I don't feel it

Sorry, I was told that I was inconvenient

So I learned how to pretend that I had no feelings

Or they'd give me a reason to cry

I guess that's why I still apologize...