The car radio can be a dangerous thing. You’ll be running errands or about to pick your children up at school when, all of a sudden, a song takes you by the hand and says, “It’s time for a good cry, don’t you think?” For me, the latest song to do such a thing is the new single from Weyes Blood, “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody.”
Sitting at this party
Wondering if anyone knows me
Really sees who I am
Oh it’s been so long since I felt really known.
Inviting us into her interior life, Natalie Mering, the driving force behind Weyes Blood, shows us the tricky nature of loneliness. It’s no secret that feeling isolated isn’t just determined by whether or not you are around other people. You can feel utterly alone on a campus of 25,000 students or even at your own birthday party for that matter. Anton Chekhov once said, “If you are afraid of loneliness don’t marry.” In other words, physical proximity does not guarantee companionship. Being around people to whom you don’t feel a sense of connection can make things even worse.
The song pivots from Mering’s own personal plight to our collective one. “Living in the wake of overwhelming changes we’ve all become strangers even to ourselves,” she sings. The changes she’s talking about shouldn’t be shrugged off too quickly. The pandemic effectively changed the way we relate to each other, in part by resetting nearly all intermediate social relations — book clubs, dinner parties, Bible studies, pickup basketball games. Some of the old routines have returned, but many have not. Mering’s mention of us being strangers to ourselves, however, makes this song a post-pandemic tribute to our lingering malaise. Covid, the behemoth that threatened to wipe out humanity, has been all but defeated. But a battle can feel strangely melancholy after it’s over, even if you’ve won. We may have defeated the external enemy, but we forgot about the one inside of us. As Freud once dismally put it, our hysterical misery has transformed into common unhappiness.
That’s when Mering opens up the door and lets everyone in. Rather than speaking solely for herself, she speaks for all of us. “It’s not just me,” she says. “It’s everybody.” In a bold move, she offers the world a diagnosis that we would never readily admit on our own. That’s the reason why I started crying when I heard this song. I didn’t realize I was lonely until Weyes Blood told me I was lonely.
Loneliness is a condition that often goes undiagnosed, partially because of its ability to shapeshift. Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, said that loneliness might not always look like the sad, solitary figure at a party, that it can often manifest itself in the form of another emotion like anger or short-temperedness.
But the real reason why none of us want to admit feeling lonely is that we assume no one else feels the same way. Most of us live semi-transient lives, the mechanics of which involve moving to a new place and walking into a community with pre-existing relationships. All of a sudden, we’re back in high school, believing that we must be the outsider. After all, everyone already knows each other.
Then there’s the sense that showing weakness is counterproductive to actually having friends. If you ever let on that you need a friend, it’s almost a guarantee that no one will want to hang out with you. Ever since God decreed that it is not good for man to be alone, we’ve been pretending that we don’t know what that feels like.
But experience shows that friendship is not born out of shared victories, but out of a shared sense of loss and suffering. Of course, a healthy relationship includes both joys and sorrows, but the bonds made in the emergency room are likely to be stronger than the ones elsewhere. Edward Wood, who served as the British ambassador to the United States during WWII, once put it this way: “In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.” Mering says it much more simply but maybe even more effectively: “We all bleed the same way.” The line serves as a great equalizer of humanity. While our external lives might look drastically different, our insides look remarkably similar.
It all begs the question: is the fact that we bleed the same way enough to save us? After all, it’s hard to help each other if we’re all lying in a bloody heap on the ground. Solidarity might be enough to cure a person from loneliness, but not always. As Weyes Blood’s contemporary Angel Olsen once crooned, “Are you lonely too? High five, so am I.” Diagnosing the illness may be a constituent of a cure, but it shouldn’t be confused with the cure itself.
Right at the song’s climax comes its most stirring lyric. “Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely,” Mering sings. “Has a time ever been more revealing that the people are hurting?” Just as the need couldn’t be any greater, she offers the antidote. Whereas judgment is the essence of what drives people apart, mercy is what brings them together. It’s a fundamentally Christian idea, that the solution to our ills is not in changing or improving the world, but in forgiving it. It may feel satisfying to judge others from an ivory tower, but eventually there will be no one around to share in your moral victory. You’ll be right, but you’ll be alone. In that sense, it’s not an overstatement to say that mercy is, indeed, the only cure to this loneliness.
This kind of mercy is made manifest when we give each other the benefit of the doubt. When the overworked nurse refuses to answer the call bell; when the minister does not show up in time to deliver last rights; when the driver behind us is intentionally getting up close and personal. The solution is not correcting these people, but forgiving them. Of course, in our own lonely states, we will miserably fail to do even that. True mercy must ultimately come from the source. We may all bleed the same, but only one bled on behalf of a lonely world.
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3 responses to “It’s Not Just Me (It’s Everybody)”
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Thanks for this thoughtful reflection. I experience loneliness frequently, and I’m often challenged to think about its deeper meaning. I do know that I depend on the mercy of others for those times when I experience relief from it.
Love this whole article and the tag on the Weyes Blood song. Enjoying wondering how the band’s name relates to Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant short story…
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