Trying and Buying My Way Through

the one who meant most said to lend him an ear:
keep your eyes on the road but let the passenger steer

but blinded by fear, i choked on my coke
leaving everyone but me laughing in joke

until I spoke through thin, tired lips
my nose in the air and my hands on my hips

trying and buying my way through this town
with nothing but good looks and a serious frown

baptized and chastised and trained by the bell:
so many a penny got lost in the well

and no one can tell, the tale’s been told
the paper’s been read and the shoes have been sold

and there’s plenty of nothing to stir with the air;
but who cares to spare their feelings from there?

or share and compare the bad with the good;
“all you need’s right under the hood”

(like it should be, or could be misunderstood)

by beggars and thieves and ghosts lost in time:
madness is method to someone divine

Author’s Note:
Originally written: November 11, 2005 - The cost of belonging in a world that never slows down long enough to notice what it takes

I thought this was just teenage angst when I wrote it. I didn’t realize I was documenting myself in the process. Reading it now, it’s not as scattered as it felt then. It’s layered. Intentional in ways I didn’t understand at the time. Every line holds a piece of something I was experiencing but couldn’t fully explain yet... pressure, performance, loneliness, awareness that felt bigger than I knew what to do with.

So this is me going back through it, line by line, and finally giving words to what I was trying to say at sixteen.

“the one who meant most said to lend him an ear: keep your eyes on the road but let the passenger steer”
I was trying to translate the kind of guidance that sounds wise when it’s spoken, but leaves you disoriented when you actually try to live it. It came from someone whose voice carried weight in my world, someone I trusted enough to listen closely, maybe too closely, and what I was being handed felt like a paradox dressed up as direction. I was being told to stay in control, to be responsible for where I was going, to keep my hands steady on the wheel… but at the same time, to loosen my grip just enough to let someone else decide the direction. And I remember how that landed in my body… it didn’t feel like guidance, it felt like trying to drive in the dark with two sets of hands fighting for the same steering wheel. There was this quiet panic in it, like no matter what I chose, I was going to be wrong. If I held on too tightly, I was stubborn. If I let go, I was reckless. And somewhere in the middle of that, I started to lose my own sense of instinct, because I was too busy trying to follow instructions that didn’t belong in the same sentence. That contradiction didn’t just live in that line, it bled into everything. It set the tone for how I moved through the world back then… second-guessing myself, overcorrecting, trying to be both the driver and the passenger in my own life, and never fully feeling like I was allowed to trust where I naturally wanted to go.

“but blinded by fear, I choked on my coke leaving everyone but me laughing in joke”
This is social anxiety, embarrassment, and hyper-awareness. I was trying to capture that exact kind of moment that feels small on the outside but detonates quietly inside your chest. It’s the kind of fear that doesn’t look like fear to anyone else. It just looks like a girl who laughed at the wrong time, or swallowed wrong, or got a little too quiet all of a sudden. But inside, it felt like my body had betrayed me in public. Like my throat closed up at the worst possible moment, like I couldn’t even do something as simple as drink without becoming hyper-aware of every eye in the room. I remember how loud it all felt, the laughter, like everything kept going effortlessly for everyone else while I got stuck in this tiny, humiliating loop. And the worst part wasn’t even the choking, it was the realization that I wasn’t in the moment with them… I was watching it from just outside of it, like I had been quietly removed without anyone noticing. They were laughing together, and I was left trying to catch up, trying to figure out where I missed the cue, trying to re-enter something that had already moved on without me. There’s a kind of loneliness that only shows up in crowded rooms, when you realize you’re technically included but not actually connected. That’s what that line was. Not just embarrassment, but the ache of being present and still somehow separate, like I was always one second behind the version of myself that knew how to belong.

“until i spoke through thin tired lips.. my nose in the air and my hands on my hips”
This is performance. I was describing the moment I learned how to wear confidence like a costume that didn’t quite fit, but looked convincing enough from a distance. The thin tired lips were real, I could feel how forced my voice was, how carefully measured every word had to be so I didn’t slip and reveal how unsure I actually felt. There was nothing effortless about it. It was rehearsed in real time, stitched together out of instinct and survival. And then there’s the posture, nose in the air, hands on my hips, like I had studied what confidence was supposed to look like and built myself into that shape, even when it felt unnatural in my body. I wasn’t grounded in it, I was holding it up, like something fragile I couldn’t afford to drop.

“trying and buying my way through this town”
That’s probably the most honest I was without realizing it. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere automatically, I felt like I had to earn my place in every room I walked into. Like there was an invisible price tag attached to acceptance, and I had to pay it with whatever I had available at the time… my appearance, my charm, the version of myself that people seemed to respond to best. I was constantly adjusting, constantly offering pieces of myself in exchange for belonging, hoping I could land on the right combination that would make someone decide I was worth keeping around. But underneath all of it, there was this quiet exhaustion, because none of it felt like me. It felt like I was building a version of myself for public consumption while the real version of me stood just behind it, watching, waiting, wondering if she would ever be enough on her own without all the effort, without all the performance, without having to prove her place every single time she walked into a room.

“with nothing but good looks and a serious frown”
I was naming the strange, hollow currency I thought I had to survive on. It was self-awareness, yes, but the kind that stings. I knew what people noticed first. I knew how quickly a face could become a first impression, how easily beauty could be mistaken for substance, how a certain look could open a door just enough to let you stand in the frame without ever really being invited inside. And the serious frown mattered just as much, because that was the part of me that couldn’t fully pretend. That was the shadow under the polish. The heaviness I carried even when I was trying to seem composed. I think, even at sixteen, I already understood that people were seeing the surface and making a story out of it, while everything tender, frightened, and complicated underneath me stayed hidden like a house with all the lights turned off.

There’s a sadness in that line that I don’t think I fully understood when I wrote it. It’s me admitting that I felt reduced to what could be observed quickly, almost carelessly… as if my face arrived in the room before I did, and by the time my actual self caught up, people had already decided who I was. Good looks felt like a fragile offering, something praised but not protective, something that drew attention without guaranteeing love, depth, or safety. And the serious frown was what slipped through anyway, the part of me that betrayed the fact that I was not as effortless as I may have appeared. That line is me standing in the middle of all of that, painfully aware that what I had learned to lean on was also the very thing that made me feel unseen. As if I were holding out the prettiest wrapping paper in the world while quietly knowing there was a whole storm underneath it no one was asking to unwrap.

And at the heart of it, yes, there is that brutal, aching belief that this is all I have to work with, and it still isn’t enough. Not enough to be deeply known. Not enough to secure belonging. Not enough to make people stay for the parts of me that were less lovely, less polished, less easy to admire. It’s the voice of a girl who had already started measuring her worth in reflections and reactions, and still kept coming up short. A girl who could feel the terrible difference between being looked at and being loved. Between being admired and being understood. That line holds all of that for me now… the bitterness of being seen in fragments, and the grief of suspecting that the truest parts of me might be the least visible of all.

“baptized and chastised and trained by the bell:”
I was trying to name all the hands that had been on me without ever quite touching me… the invisible systems that shaped me before I even knew I was being shaped. Baptized was the language of being made clean, of being told there was something in me that needed saving before I even had the chance to understand what it was. It was water on my forehead and expectation in my chest, a quiet agreement that I would grow into someone acceptable, someone good, someone worthy of being kept. And then chastised because goodness, as it was taught to me, always seemed to come with a consequence waiting behind it. Correction dressed up as care. Discipline framed as love. I learned early that stepping out of line didn’t just bring guidance, it brought shame. A tightening. A pulling back into place. Like I was something that needed constant adjusting to stay presentable.

And then there’s trained by the bell, that rhythm of being told when to move, when to speak, when to stop, when to sit still. A life broken into increments, measured by sound instead of feeling. It wasn’t just school, it was conditioning. It was learning how to respond on cue, how to exist within structure, how to prioritize obedience over instinct. I think what I was trying to say, even then, was that I could feel how all of it was working on me at once… faith shaping my sense of worth, authority shaping my sense of right and wrong, education shaping how and when I was allowed to exist in a space. But none of it was asking me who I actually was underneath all that shaping. None of it was interested in understanding me, only in refining me into something easier to manage, easier to define.

That line is me standing in the middle of all of those forces, realizing I had been taught how to behave long before I was ever taught how to be. It’s the feeling of being molded instead of met. Of being guided without being known. And there’s something almost suffocating in that realization, like waking up and noticing that every part of you has been influenced by something external, and not knowing where any of it ends and where you actually begin.

“so many a penny got lost in the well and no one can tell”
I was thinking about all the quiet offerings I kept making into a world that didn’t echo back. Every hope felt like a small coin I dropped into something deeper than I could see… wishes, effort, pieces of myself I thought might come back to me in the form of belonging or understanding or even just recognition. I remember believing, in that almost superstitious way you do when you’re young, that if I just gave enough… tried hard enough, loved carefully enough, shaped myself just right… something would return to me. That there was a kind of balance to it. That the well would give something back.

But it didn’t.

The coins just disappeared. No sound of them hitting bottom, no ripple reaching the surface, no proof they ever existed at all. And that’s the part that settled into me the hardest, the silence of it. The way effort can vanish without acknowledgment, like it was never offered in the first place. “No one can tell” isn’t just about other people not noticing… it’s about how invisible that loss becomes, even to yourself over time. How you start to question whether it mattered at all, whether you imagined the weight of it, whether those small, hopeful pieces of you were ever real if they left no trace behind.

There’s something deeply lonely about pouring yourself into something that doesn’t reflect you back. It’s not just disappointment, it’s self-erosion. It’s watching parts of yourself slip quietly into something unseen, something unmeasured, and realizing there’s no witness to it. No one counting what you gave. No one marking what it cost you. Just a well full of things that once meant everything to you… and a surface that stays perfectly still, like nothing was ever dropped into it at all.

“the tale's been told, the paper's been read, and the shoes have been sold”
This is cynicism about how life is packaged and consumed… then discarded. That hollow feeling of watching something meaningful get flattened into something temporary, something people consume and move past without ever really holding it. The story gets told, and for a moment it feels important, like it should linger, like it should change something… but then it’s just another headline, another page turned, another thing people skim and set down like it didn’t carry someone’s entire life inside it. I think I already felt that ache back then, the way the world can take something heavy and human and reduce it to something digestible. Something that fits neatly into a narrative and then disappears as soon as the next one comes along.

And “the shoes have been sold”… that line feels heavier to me now than it did when I wrote it. It’s the image of a life already walked out… every step, every place it’s been, every moment it carried someone forward, reduced to an object that can be passed from one person to another without any trace of the person who wore them first. Shoes hold movement, they hold distance, they hold the shape of someone’s weight over time… and yet once they’re sold, all of that becomes invisible. They become just shoes again. Replaceable. Exchangeable. Detached from the story they once carried.

I think what I was trying to say, without fully knowing how to say it, was how terrifying it felt to realize that even a life, even something deeply personal and lived-in, could be turned into something impersonal once it’s over. That the world has a way of taking what mattered and making it manageable, marketable, forgettable. And there’s something almost unbearable in that… the idea that you could pour yourself into living, into becoming, into surviving… and one day it all gets folded into a story someone else reads quickly and moves on from. Like the weight of it never really had a place to stay. Like everything eventually becomes something that can be handed off, sold off, and left behind without anyone fully understanding what it once meant to carry it.

“and there's plenty of nothing to stir with the air; but who cares to spare their feelings from there?”
This is emptiness dressed up as activity. I was trying to describe that strange, suffocating kind of emptiness that hides behind constant motion. Rooms full of talking, laughter that sounds right but doesn’t land anywhere, conversations that skim the surface like they’re afraid to break through it. It’s the feeling of watching people fill silence with noise, like stirring an empty pot just to convince themselves something is cooking. Everything looks alive from the outside… voices overlapping, bodies moving, energy bouncing around, but underneath it, there’s nothing solid to hold onto. No depth. No stillness. No place for anything real to settle. Just air being moved around so no one has to sit in what’s actually there.

And then that question, “but who cares to spare their feelings from there?”… that’s where the disappointment slips in. Because once you see the emptiness, you start noticing what gets lost in it. Feelings get handled carelessly. People speak without thinking about where their words land, because everything moves too fast for anything to really matter for long. It’s like being in a room where everyone is tossing fragile things into the air, and no one is watching to see what breaks when it hits the ground. I think I was realizing, even then, how rare it is for someone to slow down enough to actually consider another person… to hold their words for a second longer, to soften them, to protect something tender instead of brushing past it.

There’s a quiet kind of disillusionment in that line. Not loud, not angry… just this heavy, sinking awareness that people don’t always handle each other with care. That sometimes it’s easier to keep the noise going than to risk saying something real, something that might require accountability, or empathy, or depth. And when you’re someone who feels everything a little too deeply, that kind of environment doesn’t just feel empty… it feels unsafe. Like you’re standing in a place where nothing meaningful can grow, but everything delicate is at risk of being crushed without anyone even noticing it happened.

“or share and compare the bad with the good; all you need's right under the hood (like it should be or could be misunderstood).”
I’m reaching for something I’ve been told over and over, trying to make it fit in my hands, turning it over to see if it actually belongs to me. It’s that familiar line people give you when you’re unraveling a little too visibly… everything you need is already inside you. It sounds comforting. It sounds complete. Like there’s a neat little answer tucked somewhere beneath your surface, just waiting for you to access it if you try hard enough. And part of me wanted to believe that. I wanted there to be something steady under my skin, something reliable I could lean on when everything outside of me felt inconsistent and loud.

But even then, I hesitated. You can hear it in the way I wrote it… like it should be… or could be misunderstood. Because what if it wasn’t that simple? What if what’s “under the hood” isn’t something polished and ready to guide you, but something messy, unfinished, still trying to figure itself out? I think I was questioning the idea that we’re all just walking around with perfectly intact answers inside of us, like we’re machines built with a clear manual we somehow forgot how to read. Because that wasn’t my experience. What was inside me didn’t feel organized or trustworthy… it felt loud, conflicted, full of questions that didn’t resolve neatly into anything useful.

And “share and compare the bad with the good”, that part feels like me trying to make sense of balance, like I’d been told that if I could just weigh things properly, measure them out, I’d find clarity. But even that felt off. Because how do you compare something that hurts with something that heals like they exist on the same scale? How do you line up your darkness and your light and decide which one defines you more? It felt like I was being asked to sort myself into something understandable, something manageable, when in reality I was still in the middle of becoming. Still in the middle of feeling everything all at once.

That line holds that tension for me, the wanting to believe in something simple and grounding, and the quiet resistance that kept whispering, it’s not that easy. It’s me standing in front of advice that was meant to comfort me, and instead of absorbing it, I’m pulling it apart, questioning whether it was ever meant to fit someone like me in the first place.

“by beggars and thieves and ghosts lost in time: madness is method to someone divine”
The philosophical ending is sort of my thing. I remember reaching for something bigger than myself, like I had backed up as far as I could and was trying to see the whole shape of things all at once. Beggars and thieves felt like the people moving through life in survival mode… taking, needing, grasping, doing whatever it took to get through another day without falling apart. Not villains, not heroes… just people shaped by lack, by hunger, by circumstance. And then ghosts lost in time… those were the ones who felt like they’d slipped through the cracks entirely. The overlooked. The ones who were there but not really seen. People carrying entire histories inside of them that no one stopped long enough to notice. I think I was trying to group humanity into these quiet categories of struggle…people reaching, people taking, people fading… and realizing how many of us were just trying to exist without ever really being held in a way that made us feel real.

And then that last line, “madness is method to someone divine”, that’s where it shifts into something almost unsettling. Because I think, even then, I could feel how chaotic everything seemed from where I stood. The contradictions, the systems, the way people hurt each other without meaning to, or sometimes while meaning to. None of it felt organized. None of it felt fair. But there was this lingering thought underneath it all… what if it isn’t random? What if the very things that feel senseless to us are part of something structured from a perspective we don’t have access to? That idea isn’t comforting the way people think it is. It’s heavy. Because it means the chaos might not be accidental. It might be intentional in a way I don’t understand yet.

That line feels like me standing at the edge of that realization, not fully stepping into it, but not turning away either. Like I could almost see a pattern forming behind everything, but I didn’t have the language or the certainty to name it. Just this quiet, unnerving awareness that maybe there is a kind of order to all of this madness… and I’m not sure whether that makes it more meaningful or more terrifying. It’s me admitting, in the only way I knew how back then, I see something happening here… something bigger than me… I just don’t know what to do with it yet.