Song Stories - Rearview

I finished going through the song stories of the Life To The Full EP, but there are still plenty more songs I've written, and many more stories to tell. Today, I'm talking about one of the most recent songs I've written - Rearview. As always, lyrics below for reference.

I've made mistakes I know

And there's times I wish I'd known better

But believe me I have grown

Yet you seem to think that you know better

And so I'm asking you why you're still stuck on the rearview

What you see ain't me, what I am's something new

Yet you still think you somehow know me better than I do

But you don't have a clue, cause you're stuck on the rearview

Yes, I haven't always looked like this

And I used to respond to he and his

But people change, and so have I

Yet you still call me dude and guy, let me ask why

Well, the rearview might be good for a smile

I'll look back there once or twice for a while

But that doesn't mean it defines who I am

We get to decide who we are, the future's unplanned

I wrote this one on guitar, and it started off with just a little motif that I was playing around with for a while. But then I also had this idea that I wanted to build a song around, and so I matched the two together.

Each verse kinda takes a different tack of what the situation might be. Perhaps you've changed because you made mistakes in the past, but you've learned from them. Or perhaps you've changed because of a realisation and deeper understanding about who you are. There are other things that could cause someone to change, of course, but these are the two that I focussed on, and I think they represent a fairly broad spectrum of experience. Pretty much everyone has mistakes that they've learned from; and though not everyone is a trans or non-binary person that was assigned male at birth (AMAB), many people have changed fundamentally in who they are over time. I had a bit of fun with the second verse, speaking more specifically to my own experience - my look hasn't changed too much (yet), at the moment I've just started regularly wearing skirts and that's about it for the most part. But I was also looking to the future, and when I might be performing this, when I wrote that first line. "I haven't always looked like this." Of course, I used to use he/him pronouns, so that's a direct call-out there. The reference to dude and guy in the last line is a personal bugbear of mine, where people frequently use both of those words in a gender-neutral way, but for me it feels very gendered. So that's just a reference to that.

But sometimes, other people don't keep up. For various reasons. Perhaps they haven't kept in touch, haven't seen you in a long time. Perhaps they took the mistake you made personally, and so try to keep reminding you of it. Perhaps they disagree with the changes that you've made to yourself, and the person that you've become. Whatever it might be; it's now like they're interacting with a past version of yourself, rather than the you that is now. They're stuck in the past. "And so I'm asking you why you're still stuck on the rearview." Sometimes, they can be quite insistent that who they're interacting with is the real you. "Yet you still think you somehow know me better than I do..." But they're not you. Nobody else gets to define who you are, if you don't want them to. Only you get to do that.

So what do we do with that? Well, sometimes you can catch people up. Sometimes people will get the memo, and realise they're kinda being shit, and change what they do. But sometimes people won't. And sometimes, that means the healthiest thing to do is leaving them behind - putting them in your rearview, since that's where they seem to insist on being. But that's up to you, as to what you do with the relationships in your life.

Of course, we don't just forget what's in the past. It still exists, and we can learn from it, and laugh at old memories, and all that sort of thing. But we don't live there any more. We live here, now. In the present. There's enough to deal with there!

I'm quite fond of this song. But I'm sure I'll write another before too long that I grow more fond of. It seems to be the way it all works! When I do, I'll put up another story about that one, I guess.