How Writing & Releasing a Hate Song Made Me Authentic
Aimed solely at friends and family.
Recently, while listening to a podcast, I heard an analogy about jumping into a bonfire that transformed my relationship with my biggest regret.
A regret that previously every time I remembered it, made me squeeze my eyes shut until they hurt, grind my teeth together tight and release an audible groan of anguish for being such an embarrassing, upsetting, base level of human.
It was an episode of The Tim Ferris Show, and Elizabeth Gilbert, a guest, was recounting a story that Life Coach, Martha Beck had given her. Gilbert points out in the interview that Martha Beck is who the term, ‘Life Coach,’ was invented for, one of her students being Oprah Winfrey.
Gilbert tells of how Martha took on an extreme integrity cleanse when she found out she was dying, being completely honest no matter what, no polite social lies, nothing. She lost every single member of her family because of this, as well as her marriage … but what she gained was her health, and what she became, was herself.
Gilbert then described the analogy Martha used for when you do something so bold for yourself that you might lose everything, which often means, everyone.
You’re standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump — you have to be willing to burn away everything you thought before.
These bonfire moments are so fantastic because only one of two things can happen …
One of them is that you find out it wasn’t actually a bonfire, it wasn’t as scary as you thought, you did it, you took the leap and it turned out to be easy.
The other option is that it is a bonfire, and you are incinerated, and your entire life is incinerated by it. And that’s even better because then you get to be reborn as a phoenix on the other side, completely new.
I walked into one of these bonfires with my eyes closed, and I got incinerated.
I used to move around a lot, 3.2 times a year on average for about 6 years.
It wasn’t because of a career or relationships, I just wanted to explore new lands, new people, and new experiences … and the real reason was, I liked having no one depend on me. I liked no one I knew being able to come see me, and I really liked no one holding their expectations over me.
I had set out to drift along for a while, alone, happily meeting & happily leaving people. Freeing myself from the pressure that comes from the well-intentioned concerns of people who know you.
When you’re someone completely new in a place, this pressure doesn’t exist, because a moment ago you didn’t exist.
After a few years of this ‘liberation quest,’ I found that 3–5 months in each place & job was my sweet spot. Longer than that and I wasn’t a new guy anymore, I was a permanent fixture that others started relying upon.
Once I got the duration right, the only thing I messed up was leaving, and I did it every time.
I made the Easy Choice, Hard Life mistake for 6 years, which I thought was unavoidable:
Instead of being honest about my lifestyle to the new friends who had opened up their lives to me — I would lie and say I would be staying in touch, and that I’d be coming back.
I then felt compelled to stay in touch, but my nature was for seeking solitude. My efforts fell halfway between late replies and leaving messages unopened, gradually souring every relationship I’d made.
The worst part of this was that I was caught in a loop.
The people from the place before my most recent last-place had given up on me by now. But the people from my most recent last-place were still messaging and phoning in good faith that I’d get back to them.
I went through this cycle 19 times, always carrying an unwanted tail of past friends whom I had attached, never getting the guilt-free solitude I was seeking, and always being in the process of disappointing friends.
By not being honest with others about who I truly was, I was stopping myself from being who I truly was.
Building a Bonfire
Over a few frustrated, (ironically) lonely December nights, I finally snapped whilst writing a stream of consciousness piece. My pen was sprinting across the page to the point I couldn’t even make out my handwriting, so I got my phone out and unleashed it into my Recorder.
It was everything I wanted to say about the loop that I thought I couldn’t, boiled to bubbling point.
The only person that really needed to hear it was me. But of course, I have an ego, so that’s not what happened.
I was listening to a lot of Hobo Johnson & the Lovemakers around that time, so my recording had come out as a spoken word more than anything else.
I showed it to a very understanding guitarist friend who started fingerpicking along to it with a satisfying, bluesy riff.
We tried a live version together, me attempting to keep in time with his rhythm and in turn, he followed me when I sped up and slowed down. It kind of worked, we liked it.
I’d never made music before so I was euphoric and insisted that we kept rehearsing it.
After a month of rewrites (just adding more words) and tweaking the “composition”, I said the thing …
“This should be on the radio.”
The guitarist lit up, “Which station?”
Dead serious and with conviction, “ALL the stations.”
Jumping In
So I sent a phone recording of it into the smallest radio station I could find, to be validated as soon as possible, naturally.
To our genuine surprise and ridiculous joy, they liked it and wanted to play it on an Introducing show that week on Friday night between 7 and 8 pm — prime time … we celebrated like we were headlining Glastonbury.
I did that annoying thing people do when something “great” happens in their life; I shared it. ‘It’ being the radio link they could tune in to, to listen live.
I shared it in private messages and group WhatsApp’s to all the people who messaged me from the various places I’d been, gloating.
We turned up to the station the day before it aired, to help the DJ trim the song, as it was 7 minutes long … yeah, we thought we were good.
They also wanted a quick intro from us which we guessed would go something like this … “Hi, we’re The Blah Blah’s and this is our first and only current song, Blah Blah Boys. Find us @ nowhere, because we’re both scared of social media, Cheers.”
He took us straight into the booth, which we pretended was no big deal, and he surprised us by saying he was going to play the whole 7 minutes.
I kept my cool but I was ecstatic on the inside as on the way over I really wasn’t sure what I could take out …
He gave us headphones, adjusted overhanging mics, sound checked us, then flipped a switch which lit up a fire bell- red box above him, displaying the words, ‘LIVE,’ and asked about the song’s origin.
I felt the guitarist shoot me a quizzical look. I passed it on to the DJ. “Oh … are we doing questions too?”
The DJ had space to fill on his show, about 20 minutes. He wanted a 10 -15-minute interview which he would split up either side of the song.
As the guitarist tried to warn me with body language I couldn’t see, I consented, not fully appreciating what I was going to say and who would be listening.
The questions began, he probed deep and it was bad.
I spoke of my misery every time my phone buzzed. Every phonecall was an interruption for the person ringing to talk about themselves.
I spoke about people who behave as if you owe them your time just because you’re family or were friends once. He asked how I felt about this. I said it was pathetic.
I confirmed that these lines from the song were from personal experience :
“I wondered if I’d miss them (friends) and didn’t really care if I did, in fact, I was more curious to see if I would.”
“They text not knowing my capacity is full. I don’t have energy for my best friends, for my family … my hand is closed, bunched and split. I’m happily alone.”
“It’s nothing personal I’m just bored of playing the character I designed to deal with the parts of your personality that repulse me.”
And asked if I really meant the shouty chorus line of:
“Please. Stop. Calling Me!”
I said I really did.
I could feel the guitarist wincing next to me. Near the end, the DJ asked him to extrapolate his thoughts on the song, to which he simply replied, “I think it’s all there in the piece.”
I walked out of the studio and knew I’d gone past the point of no return. There was a tepid layer of perspiration that left the building with me, that trembled cold as I walked away.
My Incineration
Oddly enough, I was on a plane when the show aired. The interview and song played sometime in the middle of my 2-hour flight.
Stuck in an aisle seat with my phone on Airplane mode, there was nothing I could do but imagine each person I’d sent the link to, listening and despising me more as each hateful second passed.
When I was on the ground I switched my data on and headed for a bar. The interview had aired over an hour ago. I sat down at a table away from anyone else. Looking down at my phone, with full signal, I waited, feeling sick.
Poignantly, after an hour of waiting, all I got was radio silence.
A day passed; nothing from friends, nothing from family.
I reached out with an apology attached.
I got some blunt replies from very few friends after this. They’d heard the message loud & clear and were either (understandably) no longer interested in communicating or giving me space that my song so aggressively said I wanted. It was up to me to decide which.
My parents got back to me after a while … but again, “Please stop calling me,” doesn’t work great for Mum & Dad.
When I phoned and spoke to them the conversation was nervous from both sides, nothing I could say after could reverse it.
There was a stint after where I really didn’t like who I was, and it was for the impact the whole thing had, had on them. It’s not nice upsetting nice people and throwing years of love and support back in their faces. Even writing about that now makes me want to bang my head repeatedly on this desk until one of them cracks.
I’d managed to offend and weird-out every close person in my life.
At least once a day, for the following 5 months after the interview aired, I’d cringe at the memory, squeeze my eyes shut until they hurt, grind my teeth together tight and release an audible groan of anguish for being such an embarrassing, upsetting, base level of human.
For those 5 months it took the number 1 spot as my deepest regret.
Psych central defines authenticity as this:
Being authentic means coming from a real place within. It is when our actions and words are congruent with our beliefs and values. It is being ourselves, not an imitation of what we think we should be or have been told we should be. There is no “should” in authentic.
Although I had scorched every close relationship I had to some extent, my actions and words were now in line with my actual views. By sharing the song and then going through & clarifying every lyrical dig in an impromptu and excessive interview, I had destroyed all the masks I’d been wearing for other people, in front of them.
I had no choice in the matter, I was authentic. I felt awful about myself, but I was authentic.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
~ Carl Jung
I heard the Bonfire analogy about 5 months after the radio show aired. That was the right amount of time for me to appreciate it I think. If I had heard it the day or week after I just wouldn’t have believed incineration could be a good thing.
6 months on now, as I’m writing this, I have had a reply from and moved forward with, about 30% of the people who heard the whole thing, which is better than I expected.
The friends who have come back to me are mostly my oldest ones, the friends I initially wanted space from. Somehow and incredibly to me, they still accept me despite over 6 years of flaky friendship and a song partially aimed at them called, “Please Stop Calling Me.” I have the best friends in the world, and now I know I do.
My incineration also closed the loop. Very few people get in touch and no one who heard it expects anything from me. My past barely interrupts me now.
I also physically can’t tell the easy lie anymore, the incineration has seared into me that sacrificing what I want to suit others in the short term, doesn’t work out for me or them in the long run. I would be screwing us both.
The biggest reward I’ve received for jumping into a bonfire is this, I have the life and level of solitude that I want now. I live alone, I own all of my free time guilt-free, and crucially, I speak to one or two friends and my Mum & Dad, who I am closer to now more than ever, near enough every week; because I want to.
That’s three phone calls a week, max, even I can show up for that.
My incineration didn’t save my life so dramatically as it did for Martha Beck, but it has improved nearly every area of my life.
My greatest regret had not been writing a hate song that was really aimed at myself. It was that I needlessly projected it onto other people, offending them, shaming myself, and tarnishing every important relationship in my life.
The Bonfire analogy, along with time, has helped me see that sharing it with the people in my life, is the single biggest step I’ve taken so far to improve my closest relationships and to become who I truly am.
Maybe Martha Beck’s analogy can help you with your regrets too.
