Come Around

Our second single is now available for listening on the front page of our website, on our YouTube channel, and from major streaming services! Please have a listen and then, should you care to learn more about where the song comes from, come back here and read all about it!

High school isn’t easy for anyone, wasn’t easy for me

I know some people love high school, but I’m not entirely sure that I would buy it if they said it was easy. I think there’s something to be difficult for everyone in high school. Between negotiating puberty and its aftermath, the suddenly increased pressure to make yourself look good to your future universities of choice by taking the right courses and getting the right grades, a changing social landscape, and learning to strike a balance in the face of newfound freedom, there’s plenty of things that can go wrong.

My high school experience was certainly a challenge, as I struggled with my mental health, with friendships, and with school itself. Between grade 6 and grade 9 I went from being good at everything to struggling mightily to focus in class, to complete assignments, or sometimes even to make heads or tails of what I was supposed to be doing on assignments.¹ Of course, my trouble with friendships didn’t start between grades 6 and 9 – it was nothing new. But there was one particular person who managed to make my high school experience especially miserable.

More than one reason for that, but she’s at least three

I still remember telling a therapist about it a few years later. She said, “It sounds to me like she broke your heart.” And it was true. 

And oh, oh, oo-whoa, sometimes I wish I could be
Someone whose first heartbreak came when she was a bit more carefree

Yeah, I had a lot on my mind at the time. It was shortly after my original (incorrect/incomplete) diagnosis of major depressive disorder and the world seemed extremely bleak.

High school isn’t easy to navigate, when you do it alone

A lot of my memories of high school involve sitting in an empty classroom or the basement hallway, alone, reading, during lunch, or else sitting in the guidance office, crying, journalling about how much I hated myself.²With all the hundreds of students in that building, somehow I felt so isolated.

But the point of this song is not, in fact, the heartbreak or the loneliness at all. The point is in the bridge, and the partial verse and pre-chorus that follow.

I’ve been around more years than I had then
Done things teenage me couldn’t imagine
Fell out and in with the crowd too many times to count
I’ve learned how to let go of what we did then
Tried to see what motives might have been
Guess in a way you could say that I’ve come around

High school isn’t easy for anyone, wasn’t easy for her
Do I even remember it right, time’s made it all blur

But I stopped seeing my face
I felt like I’d vanished without a trace
And I stopped using my voice
Silence seemed the only choice

Did I have my heart broken? Yes. I think there is little doubt, for me, about that. But was it broken by some villain who plotted to destroy me? No. My heart was broken by a human being who had her own problems. And we were children, really. I was a child who was seeing the worst in what was going on around her. She was a child who was no doubt influenced by other people in her life, and who had her own struggles. The entire high school was full of children who had their own struggles, from the one who managed to befriend me over time and is still an important part of my life now to the one who taunted me in the hallway, from the one who made me feel like little more than an object to the one who I thought didn’t know I existed but who signed my yearbook in such a way as to indicate that hey, maybe I wasn’t an invisible ghost after all. 

And that’s why the song’s title comes from the bridge. Because it’s the important part. Guess you could say, in a way, that I’ve come around. I’ve come around to seeing that people are more than characters in a morality play. Every single person is a fully fleshed-out main character in their own story, and it does them a disservice to allow ourselves to think otherwise.

And as for yourself, well, when you start to ask yourself just who you’ve been all along, you were you all along.

—

¹ In some ways I was a stereotypical burnt-out gifted kid.

² This is not a productive use of a journal. But of course nobody EXPLAINS it to you, they just say “try journalling!”