There are moments in life when a song reaches through the noise of existence and grabs hold of something deep within us, something we didn’t even realize was waiting to be understood. For me, that moment came through two sets of lines from Thousand Foot Krutch’s “This Is a Call,” lyrics that didn’t just resonate but rather felt like someone had somehow reached into my chest and pulled out truths I’d been carrying around without fully acknowledging them. The first line, “And he tells everyone a story, ’cause he thinks his life is boring,” struck me with its simple honesty. The second set hit even harder: “And he cries but you’ll rarely see him do it, and he loves but he’s scared to use it, so he hides behind the music, ’cause he likes it that way.” These aren’t just lyrics to me anymore, they’re mirrors reflecting back parts of myself I’ve been looking at sideways for years, never quite willing to face them head on until the music forced my hand.
I talk a lot, and I’ve always known this about myself. I’m the person who can fill silence with stories, anecdotes, observations, random thoughts that tumble out one after another like they’re racing to escape my mind before I forget them. Sometimes these stories are exaggerated, details embellished just enough to make them more interesting, more worthy of the time I’m asking people to give me. I’ll take a mundane trip to the grocery store and somehow spin it into an adventure, find meaning in the most insignificant interactions, turn nothing into something simply because I need there to be something. And for the longest time, I didn’t understand why I did this, why I felt this compulsion to narrate my existence to anyone who would listen. But that line from the song crystallized it perfectly: I think my life is boring. Not all the time, not every moment, but enough that I feel the need to dress it up, to make it seem more interesting than it actually is, to justify my presence in conversations and in people’s lives by being the one with stories to tell.
There’s something deeply uncomfortable about admitting that you find your own life boring, because it feels like admitting defeat, like confessing that you’re not living up to some imagined standard of what an interesting life should look like. We’re bombarded constantly with images of people living their best lives, having adventures, making memories, doing things that seem significant and meaningful, and when you measure your own existence against that impossible standard, it’s easy to come up short. My life isn’t filled with dramatic moments or extraordinary experiences, it’s mostly routine and ordinary, the same patterns repeated day after day with minor variations. And so I talk, I fill the spaces with words, I create narratives out of nothing because if I don’t, what am I left with? The silence feels too heavy, too revealing, like if I stop talking, people will realize there’s not much there worth paying attention to. The stories become armor, a way of presenting myself as someone more interesting than I fear I actually am.
But it’s the second set of lines that really gutted me, that reached past the surface level self-awareness and dug into something raw and unprocessed. I do cry, though most people would never know it. When I’m alone, when the walls of my room are the only witnesses, that’s when it happens, and when it does, it’s not quiet or gentle. It’s intense, overwhelming, the kind of crying that shakes your whole body and leaves you exhausted afterward, like you’ve just run a marathon of emotion. The rest of the time, I’m the uplifting one, the positive one, the person who tries to see the bright side and encourage others, and there’s nothing fake about that version of me. But it’s not the whole picture either, it’s just the part I let people see because the alternative feels too vulnerable, too much like exposing something that should stay hidden. Crying in private has become its own kind of ritual, a release valve I can only turn when no one else is around to see the pressure escape.
The part about loving but being scared to use it hit me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I care deeply about people, about my friends, about my family, about humanity in general in this abstract but intensely felt way. I’ve written about radical empathy on my political blog, this belief I hold that everyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, deserves empathy. Not excuses for their behavior, not absolution for their actions, but empathy as a baseline human response to other human beings. And I cannot tell you how isolating that belief feels sometimes, how many people dismiss it as naive or weak or dangerously misguided. They think empathy should be conditional, earned, given only to those who deserve it by some metric they’ve decided on, and when I push back against that, when I insist that empathy shouldn’t come with prerequisites, I can feel the distance growing between me and whoever I’m talking to. It’s lonely, believing in something that feels fundamental to who you are while watching other people treat it like a character flaw.
So I don’t talk about it much anymore, at least not in person, not in conversations where I have to watch people’s faces shift from curiosity to skepticism to dismissal. The blog is one thing, a space where I can articulate these ideas without having to navigate the immediate social consequences, but in my actual life, with actual people I care about, I’ve learned to keep that part of myself tucked away. Maybe I care too much, maybe that’s the problem, maybe if I could just be a little more selective with my empathy, a little more willing to write certain people off, life would be easier. But I can’t seem to do it, and that inability feels both like a strength and a burden, something I’m proud of and exhausted by in equal measure. The caring doesn’t stop just because it’s not reciprocated or understood, it just goes inward, becomes something I carry alone.
And then there’s the music, the hiding place the song names explicitly. When I’m really in my feelings, when the weight of everything becomes too much to carry in silence, I retreat into sound. The music I listened to in high school, all that emotionally heavy stuff I thought I’d outgrown, has come roaring back into my life over the past few years. Linkin Park, Creed, Alter Bridge, Green Day, the earlier Blue October tracks that drip with pain and confusion, Eminem’s raw vulnerability wrapped in aggression, NWA’s anger and authenticity, Avenged Sevenfold’s complex emotional landscapes, all of it. These aren’t necessarily emo bands in the technical genre sense, but their music carries emotional weight, deals with pain and struggle and the messy complicated reality of being human. After high school, I tried to move away from this kind of music, tried to evolve my taste into something different, maybe something I thought was more mature or sophisticated. But since 2019, both personally and globally, things have been hard in ways that require different coping mechanisms, and I’ve found myself returning to these artists like old friends who understand something about me that I barely understand about myself.
There’s no shame in it anymore, this need to hide behind the music. If anything, there’s a kind of honesty in acknowledging that sometimes we need something between ourselves and the world, a buffer that lets us feel things without having to explain them or justify them to anyone else. The music holds space for emotions that don’t have easy names, for the complexity of feeling too much and not enough simultaneously, for the exhaustion of maintaining the uplifting persona while something heavier churns underneath. When I put on those tracks, the ones that hit me in the chest and make everything feel both worse and better at the same time, I’m not avoiding my feelings. I’m actually letting myself have them in a controlled environment where I don’t have to worry about being too much for the people around me.
The phrase “he likes it that way” from the song initially felt like a defensive statement, like an excuse or a justification for keeping people at arm’s length. But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I’ve realized there’s truth in it that’s not about defense at all. I do like having the music as my hiding place, not because I’m afraid of connection or vulnerability in some absolute sense, but because some things need to be processed privately before they can be shared, if they ever need to be shared at all. Not everything requires an audience, not every emotion needs to be performed or explained or validated by someone else’s response to it. The music gives me permission to feel without the pressure of being understood, and in a world that constantly demands we explain ourselves, justify our existence, prove our worth through productivity or positivity or whatever other metric is currently in fashion, having a space that requires none of that feels necessary for survival.
What strikes me most about these lyrics is how they capture something universal through specificity. The songwriter was describing someone, maybe himself, maybe a composite of people he’d known, but in doing so he articulated something that resonates across individual experiences. We all have our versions of telling stories to make our lives seem less boring, we all have ways we hide our deepest emotions from public view, we all struggle with the vulnerability of caring too much or showing too much or being too much. The details vary but the underlying truth remains constant: being human is complicated and messy and often lonely, and we all find ways to cope with that reality that make sense to us even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.
I think about the younger version of myself who first encountered this music, who listened to these bands in high school without fully understanding why they resonated so deeply. Back then, everything felt more immediate and less examined, emotions running high without the self-awareness to step back and analyze what was happening. The music was just there, a soundtrack to adolescent confusion and pain and the slow awkward process of figuring out who I was becoming. Then came the years of trying to move past it, of thinking I’d outgrown that phase and needed to find new sounds that matched whatever I thought adulthood was supposed to sound like. But life has a way of bringing you back to the things you need, not the things you think you should want, and these last few years have made it clear that I never really moved past this music at all. I just temporarily convinced myself I didn’t need it anymore.
The truth is we’re all walking around with internal soundtracks playing, songs that speak to parts of us we don’t always articulate in conversation. Some of us are hiding behind music, others behind work or relationships or various forms of achievement, using whatever’s available to create distance between our inner lives and the faces we present to the world. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as we’re not completely losing ourselves in the hiding, as long as we’re still capable of moments of genuine connection and vulnerability even if those moments are rare. The balance is different for everyone, and what looks like hiding to one person might be necessary self-preservation to another.
Looking at where I am now, a few weeks away from 2026, I can trace a clear line from 2019 to the present, years that have been marked by difficulty both personal and collective. A global pandemic that rewrote how we relate to each other and the world, political chaos that never seems to end, personal losses and struggles that pile up in ways that sometimes feel impossible to carry. And through all of it, I’ve been returning to this music, these artists who understood something about pain and persistence that I needed to hear again. The fact that I’m still listening to Linkin Park and Blue October and all the others isn’t regression, it’s recognition that these artists were giving voice to something timeless about human experience, and that voice is just as relevant now as it was when I first discovered it.
The radical empathy I believe in, the crying I do in private, the stories I tell to make my life seem less boring, the love I’m scared to fully deploy because the vulnerability feels too risky, all of it connects back to these lyrics that somehow managed to see me before I fully saw myself. Music has this strange power to reach across time and space and individual circumstance to touch something universal, and when it does, when you encounter that perfect articulation of what you’ve been feeling but couldn’t name, it changes something. Not everything, not in some dramatic transformative way, but enough to make you feel less alone in whatever you’re going through.
So I keep listening, keep hiding behind the music when I need to, keep telling my stories and caring too much and crying in private and being exactly who I am in all the complicated contradictory ways that entails. The music gives me permission to be all of it simultaneously without having to reconcile the contradictions or explain them to anyone who wouldn’t understand anyway. And maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s what we’re all looking for in the end: something that sees us clearly and doesn’t demand we be anything other than what we are, something that holds space for our messiness without trying to clean it up or fix it or make it more palatable. The music does that for me, these artists do that for me, and these two sets of lyrics from “This Is a Call” crystallized why I keep coming back to it all. Because sometimes the deepest truths about ourselves come not from introspection or therapy or long conversations with friends, but from a song that somehow knows us better than we know ourselves, and has the courage to say out loud what we’ve been whispering in the dark.
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