Spring break of my final year of grad school, I stayed in a cabin in the Smokey Mountains for a couple of nights.
I was trying to bribe myself into–you know– figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. Or at least what to do next. I was like, “I’ll just sit in the mountains and it will come to me, since it is obviously not happening in the busyness of grad school.”
Well, I finished this song (“25”) instead.
I made no plans. I just kept writing and arranging and avoiding. Which is probably what I’ll continue to do forever. Or at least that is what my twenty-something brain thinks.
This song is tfw: When you’re 15 you have this grand illusion that when you’re an adult it will just happen for you. You can do whatever you want. Opportunities will just be presented by your fairy godmother. You have this profound faith in your future, because you are your future, and the only thing holding you back is the the limitation of your age.
And then when you get there. You get to be ehem, 25, you realize that you are the age where you thought you would be free. But the limitations are no longer imposed by others, they’re set by you. By the story you’re telling yourself.
It’s a nostalgia for who you thought you would be. For the uncomplicated ideals you had for yourself.
But also a love song for the people going through it with you. The ones who can look at the shit show that happened to you and make it into something good, or at least an inside joke. It’s about the people who pull you out of the overthinking, out of the nostalgia, and back into the real.