Behind The Lyrics of ‘Love Me’
I started writing this track on a walk home. There were a few thoughts running through my head at the time but the main one was, “what is the most vulnerable thing I could say about myself right now?”. Sounds a bit ‘out of the blue’ but, as I’m sure many of you do, I often have conversations with myself about the things happening in my life and around it. And so, this question came up. And it stuck with me.
As I continued to think on it, the way I was feeling about love at that time, felt like the toughest thing to admit to myself. That I did want to be loved by somebody else. I sung it out loud, with my phone ready to record ‘And I guess I, just want to be loved’. It was difficult to admit because I’d just tried dating for the first time in my life (at 24 years old, is that shocking? I don’t really know, it shouldn’t be) and it had gone terribly. I didn't like the way dating felt and I definitely didn’t like the way I’d been treated. Boundaries were crossed and I was left feeling like I never wanted to try dating again. Honestly, I still feel that way, I’m not sure I will ever want to date EVER. Yet, I also couldn’t deny that the feeling of wanting to be loved and wanting to be cared for and wanting to live out the fairytale fantasies Id had since I was a kid, was still very real.
On that walk home, the chorus of ‘Love Me’ was born. Conversing with, well, myself, I came to the realisation that day that I wanted love in many ways. Not just the romantic kind. From friends, from family, from people I’d let go of so long ago and, more than anything else, from myself. ‘20 years of making myself up for you’ was a reflection of the way I’d let past “friends” in my life and past versions of myself, force my appearance and my actions to go against what I truly felt and how I truly was, simply to feel love. All of the lyrics in the chorus build upon this and the realisation I had over time, that I could feel more love by actually being myself and that losing some people isn’t always losing love. It can instead help you gain it from yourself and see it in the places your mind didn’t let you before. Lines in the chorus like ‘sure I’ve got a list of fears, got a hidden box of tears but, after all of these years of tearing myself apart’ and ‘I just need to find my feet with a little care in the steps I take.’ emphasise the act of facing your trauma and growing from it by taking care of yourself.
In the very first line of the song, I wrote ‘Peddling down these roads, can’t ever seem to get back home’. For a long time, I find anyway, you can feel so lost after someone has inflicted trauma on you, no matter who inflicted it. After some of the trauma I inflicted and others inflicted upon me, I remember feeling like I was lost in my own body. Like I was trying so hard all the time to live and be me, but I couldn’t truly do that because I was consumed by bad thoughts. It was a constant fight inside and trying to allow myself to reach the surface and. breathe, was at times impossible. A lot like how it feels when you’re peddling like crazy on a bike to get home when all you see around you are things you don’t recognise and trails you can’t see the end of. ‘Maybe I should’ve seen then, a burn when it hurts ain’t a friend.’ is a line I wrote when thinking of how I felt around the people in my life (now all in my past thankfully) who made me feel small. So, painfully small. Because when you first meet people like that, they make you feel good right? Special in some way? And a little light inside you goes off. You shine, just a little. But then as time goes on, those people tell you not to shine and you don’t deserve to shine. So the light gets trapped inside and it starts to burn. I thought in this line, about how I sometimes feel a burn in a good way. Like the burning desire I have to write and be creative, to learn new things and to be with the people I love. It’s a burn that drives me but it’s never kept inside me (oops that rhymes). Anyway, I use it to drive me forward and through that I let it show. Yet, those people in your life who manipulate you into believing that burning light isn’t worthy of being shown, they make you keep it inside. And it physically starts to hurt you doesn’t it? That’s where this line came from for me.
The line ‘There’s a quiet, there’s a lullaby’, leant more into the thoughts I had about how things in your life that are a constant, whether good or bad, can become a comfort or, no, more like a familiarity. Though, in familiarity we often feel more comfortable. Like how lullabies, which are sometimes so dark in their lyrics, are still comforting because we’re so familiar with them and we’ve heard them from, usually, someone we loved. I feel like in bad relationships, that’s something that is also true. We can find ourselves becoming so familiar with dark words or actions that we don’t register them as something bad anymore. They’re just a part of the scenery. Because they become a constant and we accept them because they’re coming from someone who supposedly loves us. I mean, there’s so much more to it than just that, and I feel like the MV story I created for this song helps show it better, but this line was drawn from those experiences.
Finally, I wanted to end the song on a more hopeful note. Not only because I want anyone who hears it and feels the experiences behind it themselves, to know there is hope, but also because in my own journey, I’ve been lucky enough to feel that hope. And I’m in a much better place now because of that hope. So the last line ‘I am ready to be strong, I’ll be strong’ really just portrays the way I felt inside when I realised I needed help and was ready to go out and get it. I went into therapy, because really I don’t know what better way there would’ve been for me to feel better, and through it I also realised how strong I’d already been to just get through those bad times and survive them. So, I hope you all know too, that even if you’re in the midst of something awful and you feel like there’s no way the sun will truly shine again, you are being so strong right now. And that much strength? It will pull you into the sunlight again one day. Please just hold on.
Samaritans Mental Health Helpline
12th November 2022, I started writing ‘Love Me’ on my walk home from food shopping! Inspiration really can strike at any time it would seem :P x