Painting things red

I've recently heard this song "Red" by Daniel Merriweather and the lyrics really meant something to me. Here's the main ones which resonated with me:

Knowing that love isn’t here,
You see the pictures
But you don’t know their names,
Cause love isn’t here

And I can’t do this by myself,
All of these problems, they’re all in your head.
And I can’t be somebody else,
You took something perfect
And painted it red.

Behind your lies
I can see the secrets you don’t show.

I might find this difficult to explain, but I'll try...

Clearly here is a man who has tried to connect on a deeper level with a woman who won't let him, she won't accept the good things for what they are and she won't ever let her life be perfect. She covers up her tender secrets with a film of lies. I've felt that way often myself, from the woman's perspective I mean. I've felt unable to love, unable to give those last parts of myself, unable to trust and unable to tell the truth about my feelings and I've constructed so many lies to hide it all that sometimes I've not been able to remember what version of myself I was portraying.

I can't accept perfect things and I "paint them red". It's easier to do this with everything than to work out what is and what isn't perfect.

To explain it all here is to get deeper down than I feel I should, no-one needs to lay themselves completely bare for all to see, because it's so difficult to heal over those wounds again. You have to deal with things for yourself and in your own way and rely on yourself ultimately to keep your own truths and secrets. You see it so many times with celebrities who say too much about themselves in the public arena and who can't then ever seem to make their lives their own again.

I learnt a very valuable lesson about this recently, that opening yourself up for the sake of nurturing a full relationship with someone leaves you vulnerable and raw. Now that a particular relationship has ended I can finally close up those wounds and let them heal naturally, but I couldn't see at the time that this was what I needed to do. I thought it was a nurturing relationship, I took a chance and opened up in a way I had never done before, and I got hurt in the end. I had already healed those wounds up myself once, admittedly there was a lot of scar tissue, but that's inevitable. I got caught up in thinking that opening them up and healing them in a different way would leave a neater result, but I was wrong. I should have just painted it red, should have just remained closed off inside and happy on the outside as I've lived a lot of my life.

There is a danger that if you let yourself fall apart too much you can be left without the control to put yourself back together and you have to rely on others to do it for you. Some people are comfortable with that, but I've spent most of my life trying to avoid it at all costs, denying the need for comfort and support, rather than allowing myself to rely on it and get hurt when it doesn't work out or when people turn away from me.

I'm not talking from any unhappy point of view here by the way, I'm not depressed about it, I just was struck by how much this song meant to me and the struggles I've been having recently with letting go of enough of myself to allow others to understand the real me, but in balancing this with my instinctive need to protect myself. Honesty is an incredibly vulnerable place and it's a place I'm not comfortable living in, which might seem strange coming from such an honest blogger, I feel it's more a place to be visited when necessary.

What these thoughts led me to was the question of why I feel so different, why I often feel so empty and devoid of the emotional depths that other people seem to dive into so freely. I used to think I was unusual in this respect, but then why would this song mean so much to people that it's become a chart success and so many people identify with it? This started me thinking that actually we are not all that different to each other. The singer felt these things, very likely about a real girl, I've read poems and stories and seen characters in film and in dramas who all fit into this category: the ones who paint things red.

Maybe I'm not so different to everyone else? Maybe I've had natural reactions to events and I'm just following the same road anyone else would follow? I spent a while trying to decide whether this was a comfort or whether it destroyed the specialness I felt that I had. We all have to feel like we have something unique don't we?

I think in the end it's a comfort, that so many people have had the same struggles and ended up the same way and I'm not on the path less trodden after all.

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