When I first heard this song, it was a “wind down” from a spinning class. The teacher had eclectic tastes in music. I wasn’t quite sure what all the words were and when he told me the band I had never heard of them. From what little I did hear though, I knew I needed to hear it as soon as I got home. Little did I know, I was about to witness an amazing video that it is hard not to be captivated by.

The music and lyrics immediately pull you in and you definitely DON’T want to listen if you are having a bad day. Very depressing.

What I hear is the song of a woman in a relationship with a very controlling person. A little different then the obvious lyrics of Voices Carry by Til Tuesday. “I’m your dolly stuffed with extra baggage.” She came into this relationship as a very vulnerable person, who is at this point not even human. The cartoon doll in this video is poignant as it portrays the slow motion, the dragging of a person with major depressive disorder. What I especially like was the red yarn. I asked myself what this was symbolic of an intuitively, I received the answer “a web of lies.”

”Beaded gazes lead you nowhere anyways.” Dissociation, spot on. That look on a person’s face when it seems as if no one is home inside. Dissociation is a coping mechanism for trauma and it is when a person goes into auto-pilot mode or becomes a “space cadet” as we used to say in high school. Now I just think about all those kids, like myself, very sad. Dissociation is hiding in another world when conflict is too much to face – your there but you are not.

”I’m lonely with a static smile, I think my stitching’s coming loose, I’m hard headed.” Again, she is explaining how depressed she is, who wouldn’t be in this relationship? But at the same time she has been so passive/aggressive about how she has handled things and she is about to blow off some steam.

”Lay me down to shut my eyes.” This is denial, pretend that things are not happening in this relationship. Like the red yarn thrown into the corner of the room in the video. The web of lies this person is telling her and she is telling herself in the cognitive dissonance from the trauma bond.

”I don’t need you anyway, go home.” She says it but doesn’t mean it and hasn’t mustered the courage to be hard headed and, in reality set those boundaries she has been holding back on. Instead she tells the person to go home. She is unable to handle it today.

I love the mirror images, one with clothes one without. Staring at the self and asking the self “Why,” maybe she is questioning her own reality of this relationship and why she is in it. How many times women do this as if to confront the lies they have been holding on to. Maybe they will show up in the mirror. In the end, she makes a scarf out of that yarn and throws it around her neck to walk out of her own house and face the cold brutal day. The scarf being symbolic of holding on to the deception, carrying it around like baggage.