“You tell me that I’m complicated And that might be an understatement Anything else? (Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha)”
These are the first lines of “Easy” by Camila Cabello that I heard playing from the speakers at work last Saturday night. I was playing music from my phone to help move the evening along, it was just my coworker Miles and I who got to hear the odd collection of songs I’ve assembled on my “Spring 2020 playlist.” All of the songs are ones I enjoy listening to for a variety of reasons, pilfered off of other playlists on Spotify so I can listen to them until they annoy me. I didn’t realize who sang this song until after adding it to the playlist, but despite my usual dislike for Camila Cabello’s work post-Fifth Harmony, I decided to keep the song because it was catchy and sweet.
It was within these first few lines that Miles turned to me and said the words I haven’t been able to get out of my head for a week:
“Man, does every girl like this song?” “Wait, what do you mean ‘every girl’?” I asked, offended. He shrugged. “I dunno, just seems like a lot of girls like this song.”
There’s an analytical monster in me, one my boyfriend calls dangerous overthinking, who provides me with this question often in my life. It annoyed my parents to no end when they couldn’t punish me or tell me about how something worked without me asking, “But why?” They often didn’t have a good answer, and the frustration from not knowing why still fuels me to learn the answer to anything I don’t know. In this case, I was asking, “What about this song makes it so popular and enjoyable for girls?”
In trying to answer the question of why this song was so popular, I thought about why I had initially liked the song. There were several lines within the song that just connected, or felt like something I would think about my own relationship. “You tell me I overthink, ’til I ruin a good thing” is almost something verbatim my boyfriend has said to me, as well as the chorus, in which she describes finally finding someone that doesn’t make her feel like she’s “hard to love.” In the second bridge she sings, “You really, really know me, the future and the old me, all the mazes and madness within my mind.” These were the lines that stuck with me, the idea that someone loves you even when they know your darkest depths.
Cabello has been fairly transparent with her struggles with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. She opened up on her Instagram in a post from last year to talk about how she struggles with overwhelming thoughts, saying, “I used to live so much in my head , constantly trapped in my overthinking and being in my head as opposed to the present moment- and lately just going back to my breath and focusing on it puts me back in my body and back in the present and helps me so much.”
The notion of madness in your mind is common for anyone struggling with a type of mental illness, which according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness is 19.1% of US adults, or roughly 1 in 5 people over the age of 18. To contextualize that for us college students, most classes average about 25-30 people, making it likely that 5-6 people within each of your classes struggle with a form of mental illness, such as depressive episodes, anxiety disorders, or bipolar disorders. With how many people deal with mental illness in our country and across the world, it’s saddening to learn that it takes around 11 years after the onset of mental illness for people to get any type of treatment such as pharmaceuticals or psychotherapy (NAMI, Metal Health by the Numbers).
As anyone who’s dealt with mental illness knows, there are a lot of thoughts and feelings that become increasingly difficult to regulate and de-escalate. Dealing with interpersonal relationships can become difficult too, especially when your mental health is left untreated. Emotions are especially raw, clarity can be really hard to find, and communication may be more difficult than normal. I’ve dealt primarily with anxiety since the age of 11 or 12, but I have also experienced depressive episodes that have lasted months and sometimes years. I believe a lot of what contributed to my development of anxiety and depression had to do with the environment I was raised in: a conservative and authoritarian home and social life dictated by religious beliefs. I was constantly experiencing cognitive dissonance because I could not resolve how I actually felt about issues versus what I was taught to think. This dissonance went on for years. It combined with my mental illness and caused me to become someone who was controlled by fear, lashed out when things became confusing, and often spiraled down these black holes.
One of the hardest things to come to terms with is that mental illness doesn’t just affect you, it affects your loved ones as well. I always felt an incredible amount of guilt that would keep me trapped in a downward spiral, because not only was I fighting this internal battle, it also affected my relationships.
I’m convinced that my family has never quite known what to do with me. Always the oddball, I am the middle child, the only brunette, left-handed instead of right, and talkative to no end. I disliked everything that others enjoyed and I was overall a contradictory, sassy, super inquisitive ball of energy. My nickname in childhood became “Wild Child” because of my uncontrollable nature. But as I got older and my anxiety started manifesting more and more, I became a real problem child for my parents. I would overreact to situations, feeling scared or triggered by something and not understanding how to calm myself back down. Once on high alert, I would always go into a “fight-or-flight” mode, with flight mode causing me to disappear from numerous events, and fight mode causing, well, fights. It was hard for my family to understand what I was going through because I didn’t understand much of it myself. I wasn’t easy to live with because I needed things to be just so, and if they weren’t, chances were that I had a meltdown. My parents and siblings worked with me on some things, but as the years went on and I got worse instead of better, their patience wore very thin.
By the time I was in my mid-teens, I was experiencing not only anxiety, but also intense depressive episodes because I could see how much I was getting on my family’s nerves. At the age of 15 I began self-harming, which only led to more guilt that I was hurting the people I loved by hurting myself. The guilt, doubt, and fear became the loudest and most cruel voices within my head, and I came to the conclusion I was just Fucked Up & Overall Crazy. Unfortunately, whether they intended this or not, this message was reinforced by my family’s attitude towards my unspoken mental illness. I can’t even count the number of times my mom, dad, or older sister used the word crazy to describe me, and I’m sure it seemed that way! I can’t entirely blame them for how they reacted, but I also can’t entirely forgive them for the shunning I felt when they didn’t understand me. I felt like an outcast in my own family, and although my sister and brother also had issues and fights with my parents, I was so deep into my depressive state that the only thing I could see was how upset I made them, how annoying I was to them, and how hard I had seemingly become to love.
This feeling of being hard to love came from my familial support system, but it followed me into friendships and more seriously into romantic relationships. I found myself in several emotionally abusive relationships with men (boys actually) who also had issues with depression, anxiety, mood swings, and possibly undiagnosed personality disorders. Part of me is also a fixer, so I looked for love in people whom I could attempt to help. I believed if my own family found me difficult, someone would have to be just as fucked up as me to understand and love me. While they were loving me for my crazy, I could make them better and eventually we’d both be happy. Years of my life were spent with these boys whose own issues clashed with my own to create excessive emotional codependency. Part of why I stayed in these relationships for so long (3 years with one, and a little over 2 with another) was because I had sold myself the narrative that only you know yourself best, and so someone could only truly love me if they saw me how I saw myself. The fatal flaw within this type of love was that I saw myself in a pretty awful light. The list of negative things I thought about myself was long, and yet I fully expected someone to be able to point out all those things and still say “I love you,” when I couldn’t even say that to myself.
Right after ending things with my last boyfriend a year ago—on Valentine’s Day, actually—I got into another relationship. I’m a serial monogamist, what can I say. There are a lot of differences between this relationship and my last few, but the biggest is that I absolutely fucking love myself. I work harder on who I am as an individual person, and that makes me able to bring my best self into a partnership with a really great guy. This isn’t easy, at least not in the way that Camila Cabello states in her song. Loving myself has been a long journey, and a lot of it had to do with accepting who I am outside of my family’s expectations. Loving myself began with saying, ‘I am okay. I am exactly who I am, and there is nothing wrong with me.”
In my Magazine Writing class we’re learning about the part of an article called “The Kicker,” which is the punchy end of an article. For me, the kicker of this piece is that I wanted to write about why this song was popular with so many girls. I went into writing this with every intention of talking about how society deems girls are hard to love because of their emotions, and while I know for a fact that this is true and influenced me when I was a teen, I also realized that it was my own mental health issues and adolescent development within my home support system that led me to feel hard to love. The only way that I escaped this Groundhog Day loop of looking for love in the wrong places was to finally learn how to love myself.