More Than Friends

My first song!

Inspired by lost friendship.

I wrote this song to process a multitude of conflicting emotions surrounding anger, sadness, grief, gratitude, resentment, and disappointment. This song touches on themes related to power, manipulation, control, intelligence, betrayal, growth, and the ego. It also speaks to the anxious-avoidant attachment style and how even an awareness of the dynamic I was in and the persons intentions with me (even if they themselves may have been unconscious of ulterior motives) wasn’t enough to save me from getting hurt. In the end, playing the game only hurts yourself. However, I am grateful for the relational experience that inspired this song because having the awareness of the underlying dynamics propelled a lot of introspection throughout the relationship and helped inspire growth for both of us. The lyric “Am I the mad hatter, or a masochist?” is probably my favorite line in the entire song because it encapsulates an awareness of both myself and the other persons experience, as well as my relationship to my own ego, while still touching on those central themes of power, manipulation, and control. The last chorus flips the power dynamic asserting, “Afraid of the power in my hands that I gave you when I played pretend that we were more than just friends, be sure to thank me in the end, goodbye”. This is a lyric that I think encapsulates the way some of us process grief and disappointment; we use the ego to shield ourselves from acting like we are hurt from what happened. The ego, in this specific situation, wants to say: After all, how could I be hurt since I manipulated first and pretended first? How could I be hurt since I was intentionally making myself smaller to make the other person feel bigger, and conscious of myself doing so? How could I be hurt since I was conscious of what I was doing for this person: that is, making them feel valuable/valued? Well, that’s exactly how I got hurt. And, also how I hurt them too. The chorus says, :”If you screw me, maybe then, we’d be more than friends, but here we go again, what a lie”I’d like the listener to largely derive their own meanings from, but I will say that it is speaking largely to the theme of manipulation by both parties in the relationship - do not give your power away. The lyric “Can’t you see your patterns? Do I even matter? Stop making her sadder, it’s the final hour to change before it’s too late…” was written with the person this song is about in mind as sort of a wake-up call to heal their avoidant attachment style before they cause the next person more pain. The line “Do I even matter?” more specifically speaks to how important it is for me to know that I am valued in a friendship and/or any relational dynamic. I learned to stop giving/placing all of my value to/on the other person and start valuing myself first (instead of second), and for that I am grateful.

Don’t play games, ya’ll …(but if you so must play the game, and run a risk of getting hurt, play the game with ideally your own growth and the other persons growth in mind).