What's Your Escape?

I can understand how the edges are rough

And they cut you like the tiny slivers of glass

And you feel too much

And you don't know how long you're gonna last

But everyone you know, is trynna smooth it over

Find a way to make the hurt go away
But everyone you know, is trynna smooth it over

Like you're trying to scream underwater...

Yesterday was an emotional day for me.  Well, actually I've been pretty emotional for weeks now, but yesterday was especially affecting, almost revalational.  You see, I've got this friend who's been going through a lot of inner-stuff lately and yesterday it all came to a head.  We ended up talking about it and hopefully I helped ease his situation. Like with pretty much everything else in my life, music came to the rescue as I tried to formulate my responses to his pain...

 But, I won't let you make the great escape,

I'm never gonna watch you checkin' out of this place

I'm not gonna lose you

'Cause the passion and pain

Are gonna keep you alive someday

Gonna keep you alive someday

I believe I did help, at least from his reaction to our discussion, but it was hardly my own words and listening that did it.  Y'all know how much I love P!nk, and once again her wisdom resonated true-to-life.  The words to her song, The Great Escape, fit this situation so perfectly, so succinctly, that I could see my friend acknowledging what she was singing in her song as he listened.  

This morning, however, I couldn't help but feel sad, and it took me all day to figure out why.  As I listened and offered advice to my friend last night, the subject of skeletons and personal demons came up, which was what made me come to this song in the first place.  This morning, my own demons were the cause of this melancholy I was feeling, and am still feeling now.

All day long today the sadness nagged at me.  I thought a lot about my own life and how I haven't been happy with it, especially lately.  Troublesome thoughts that my own demons, my own issues, are hardly ever shared with another, haunted me.  Sometimes I feel that no one cares about me enough to want to help me, listen to my problems.  That's not exactly right.  My friend Rich is the one person who does truly listen, and on a regular basis, to my shit. But that's just it, he's a friend.

The condition of my life is always perpetuated in my thoughts, and it has been especially lately with my birthday coming up, and two sobering anniversaries just passed.  My loneliness has been getting the best of me and maybe I'm feeling more and more like I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life.  I don;t know how, or if, I can change it.        

Then I got to thinking...maybe there's no one to open myself up to because I'm often on the listening end of deep conversations, all the while keeping distant my own deeper issues.  Maybe I don't trust anyone enough to share.  Listening is my great escape.  Some people delve into drugs for their escapes.  Others turn to alcohol or shopping or some other obsessive compulsive disorder escape their pains.  I take on other people's problems to escape my own.  

Oh, terrified of the dark, but not if you go with me

And I don't need a pill to make me numb
And I wrote the book on runnin',
But that chapter of my life will soon be done

I'm the king of the great escape
You're not gonna watch me checking out of this place
You're not gonna lose me
'Cause the passion and pain
Are gonna keep us alive someday
Yeah the passion and the pain
Are gonna keep us alive someday, someday

I helped my friend last night by sharing with him these wise and compassionate words.  Little did I realize then that the words applied to me, as well, and probably every single other human being on the planet.  We all have something, something that we're not proud of, that we do to help us escape our problems.  It's not a terrible thing that listening is one of my great escapes, but it's no the only one.  Personal issues can become so ingrained in ourselves that we are so afraid we're too enmeshed in them to change.  And so we escape.  I need to stop escaping...  

What's your escape?

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