If I Could Be Who You Wanted

If you are a loyal reader, you know that I often refer to music when writing, usually spring-boarding into a larger topic based on a lyric or song title. Even the overall title of this blog came partially from a Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song. I find myself doing that again today as I was struck by a line from a song I have heard a hundred times before while driving down the road on a very rainy Kentucky afternoon on my way home for the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s funny how these things happen at specific moments in our lives, an album I hadn’t pulled out in nearly a year just suddenly appearing at my fingertips and then into the player in the dashboard. Then suddenly I am transported into that time, when I was listening to the album incessantly, absorbing the words and feelings of it. It was not a particularly happy time, but one that I have worked hard to leave behind me in the effort to move on into a happier existence.

The song is “Fake Plastic Trees.” The band is one of my favorites, Radiohead. From the title, I’m sure you’ve already decided it’s one of those very oddball pieces, alternative rock just a little beyond alternative, something unrelatable. But in that assumption, you would be incorrect. There is one specific line near the end that struck me then and still invokes deep thought today. It goes, “If I could be who you wanted….all the time.” Such deep, emotionally jarring thoughts wrapped up into one simple line. To me it’s about being at the end of a relationship and knowing that your partner is pulling away, knowing that you are not what he or she wants, about not feeling good enough for that person and feeling them slip away from your apparent inadequacy in complete apathy.

Of course, at the time that I discovered the album and began listening to the song so heavily, I was going through that very situation. It’s why the words spoke so loudly to me, gave me something to relate to. It fed my depression over the situation at the time, but perhaps it gave me a glimmer of hope that I wasn’t the first, nor would I be the last person to go through such a situation. It is one of the worst feelings in the world to not feel adequate, to feel like you are worth less than another person who you’ve loved or who you thought loved you, but in reality wants nothing to do with you. Some of us never recover.

But the lesson we have to learn here is that we cannot be what someone else wants, we can only be ourselves and know that that has to be enough. Even our spouses, our life partners, are not going to be perfect all the time, are not going to be who we want them to be all the time. If being ourselves isn’t enough, then we have to let go, regardless of how much it hurts, in hope of finding someone who will love us and accept us for the flawed beings we are. That was the most difficult thing for me to accept at the time. I didn’t want to give up, I wanted to change or prove that I could be what he wanted, that I could be good enough for him. I wanted him to want me again, like he did (whether he was honest about it or not) in the beginning. It took me a long time to realize that he was the one that wasn’t good enough, that he was the one that should have been fighting for my attention, that I was, in fact, good enough if not better than he deserved. It is very hard to let go when you are not ready to, though; and, thus, I struggled.

Thom Yorke sings, “It wears me out,” on the cut; and that, it did. I wore myself out to pure exhaustion at times worrying about things that I could not change. It was a futile waste of energy. Once I finally let it go, though, and was able to move on, knowing that I was good enough to make it on my own, I was finally able to rise from that ashes so to speak, or maybe out from amongst the forest of “Fake Plastic Trees.” All I can do is be who I am and hope that that’s enough. That’s all any of us can do.