Behind-the-Song: One More pt.2 (Patreon)

Fun fact: this was actually the first, and for a long while, the only, song I wrote without the prompt being an immediate overwhelming emotion. I wrote this one based on old feelings. Things I hadn't felt in a while, and things I'd been feeling for a very long time (i.e., the battles left upon the shelves...)

This part of the song, truthfully, might be difficult for me to properly unpack. I'm going to get off-track about all the things that come up for this emotionally, looking back.

I think part of what made the initial feedback for this song so difficult to hear is that the song is so utterly close to home and so incredibly vulnerable. Criticism, or perceived criticism, of the song felt like criticism of me and my feelings.

We so often put such vulnerable pieces of ourselves into art, and I think maybe people forget that we kind of are our art. There is a person behind the words. And these words are a very thin veil between a song and myself.

I'm a mess (x4) / I don't know how to pick up the pieces, no / But I just keep pushing further on, and on again / Just one more inch, one more step to the edge

After my first concussion, I started likening myself to a puzzle of sorts a lot. I felt like a part of me was missing and if I could just find that missing piece, I could get back to being "me". But the truth was, the old me was gone. And she was never coming back.

And so, for a while, I thought that I would just lay broken forever. That there was no piece to find and there was no putting me back together.

But somehow, this broken thing continued to survive and push forward. And it was so hard. And I didn't want to, a lot. And as I've mentioned before, I've had many moments of thinking I couldn't possibly keep going. I still do, truthfully. Not infrequently. And I wish I could explain how or why I manage to get through them, as if my personal experience might help someone else, but I don't have the answers. And honestly, that's ultimately not what this post is for 🙃

With the last line of this, I wanted to describe the feeling of pushing forward despite feeling like you absolutely can't, a little more visually. Because while every step forward is, theoretically, a step in the right direction, every step forward also feels like the last. How many impossible steps forward until things are okay again? Until I feel okay?

But that doesn't exist. Because "okay" wasn't the feeling I was searching for, it was the old me. But the old me I wanted back didn't actually exist. It was always just an idea. And that's not an attainable thing. That's not a realistic thing to be trying to move toward...but I digress (again).

I guess what I'm getting at is that every time you push yourself up again, it feels like you couldn't possibly do it again. Like it took all of you and anything could set you tumbling. It's a volatile thing, trying to stay upright when everything in your brain is telling you to lie back down 🤷‍♀️


Did I get terribly off track and carried away? Probably. Did any of this make sense? Who knows. But those are the thoughts I have about this first half of the chorus 😅 Like I said, I don't think I could ever give this a proper explanation. But at least you can try to decipher my brain dump on it 🙃👍 Sorry for my scrambled egg brain on this one...