When We Refuse to Suffer (Album Version) - Jonathan Richman (Because Her Beauty Is Raw & Wild)

I’ve been pretty intensely battling with my bipolar disorder lately. I am, I suppose, undergoing a period of substantial growth. I’m learning a great deal, be it technical or intellectual or artistic or emotional. I am finally moving beyond my first stumbling steps toward some kind of adulthood, without dropping what makes me feel sometimes like a child staring with glee and terror and leaping into the arms of the world. I do, I do know that my life is good. I know that I am busy with many things that are important to me, and know that my loneliness is productive, my fear is productive. These things are useful to a point. I must finally, now, learn to be a woman alone and whole and truly in the world, and I do not regret the choices that led me here. But sometimes it is hard to live inside my head. My chest aches, my collarbone cracks open, my ribs are a gate swinging wide and all the dust the street kicks up gets in. I’m in love with everybody all the time, except when I’m not. I am falling apart at the seams, but I have arranged my disintegration well. I watch a stranger emerging from a building, eyes full of tears, and I have to grab a hold of something. A mailbox, a bike rack. If I touch anyone they will turn to dust, or worst, forget me, or even worse, remember. I barely know my own name. I wait for a bus. I imagine myself in a small pool of light at the bottom of the lake. I can’t stop seeing every color in the room, watching each movement of a body, hearing each sound as the shift of a symphony. I no longer know how to process life differently from something that is presented to me as art. My hands shake, I smoke too many cigarettes, I adore unavailable men, I draw a circle over and over and over again until it tears the page. I put my headphones in. I pretend to let the random chance of lyric state my mood. This song comes on.