Favor — Julien Baker

#365Songs: June 12th

I love contradictions, when two seemingly distinct truths exist simultaneously. Most things in life reside on a spectrum, somewhere between here and there, moving in different directions all at once. You can be a little of this, and a little of that. Problem is, we’re trained to see binaries: Democrat or Republican, Masculine or Feminine, Gay or Straight. When you live in a black and white world, it’s not so easy to show your true colors, your place on the spectrum.

We took the forty down to
Visit the family, and I
Told you, the only kin I knew
Was who I could see from the gurney
I used to think about myself
Like I was a talented liar
Turns out that all my friends were
Trying to do me a favor
I always want to tell the truth
But it never seems like the right time
To be serious enough
I’m sorry, I’m making myself cry
How long do I have until
I’ve spent up everyone’s goodwill?

I’ve lost touch with most of my childhood friends, and have faded away from my family over the years. It’s about politics, sure, but it’s more than that. It’s that feeling that I’m not quite me when I’m there, have never been me, perhaps never knew enough about myself to even know what that means.

I’ve felt resentment for being so unknown, and misunderstood, and yet know that at least some of that is unfair: one can’t be known if you won’t allow others to truly know you. What I’ve learned these past years is that I actually knew less about myself than others saw in me, words unspoken carved between us holding back a deeper understanding.

Perhaps what I’ve learned most is that for as open as I can be, I’m quite hard to truly know. I let you in, but not all the way because there’s a space within that I haven’t even allowed myself to go. Perhaps you saw, and knew, but couldn’t say. And that’s ok. I can’t expect you to know what I’ve been unable to acknowledge.

For me, everything is a spectrum: the way my brain works, the way I feel attraction, the way I process the world. And yet rarely have I shown to others what I feel inside, those inward contradictions too difficult to express. That’s the thing about masking: it’s a protective barrier, a defense, a way to go unseen. Do it for long enough and you fool even yourself.

Sat on the hood, out all night
Trying to scrape together change
You pulled a moth out from the grill of your truck
Saying “It’s a shame”
How come it’s so much easier
With anything less than human?
Letting yourself be tender
Well, you couldn’t make me do it
It doesn’t feel too bad, but it
Doesn’t feel too good either
Just like a nicotine patch, it
Hardly works, then it’s over

Julien Baker grew up Baptist Conservative in Memphis, Tennessee. Her music is depressing, dramatic, self-destructive, and even though she blossomed young — she was 18 when her debut album, Sprained Ankle, dropped — she was already wrestling with queerness, devout Christian faith, addiction, and the devolution of her mental health.

She said in an interview with the CBC, “When I came out to my church in Memphis I remember I had this super emotional meeting with the worship pastor and I was like, ‘I’ve got something to tell you and I’m freaking out about it’ and she was like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Just tell me.’ And I was like, ‘I’m gay!’ and she goes, ‘So?’ And it just felt like it had to be a dream.”

That reaction we fear from others is rooted in culture, in a political and religious discourse that permeates in all directions. Then, now, always. What does it mean to be something others believe shouldn’t exist, to feel things others forbid, to want things you can’t say aloud? It’s difficult to say what feels worse: to be unseen, to be misunderstood, or to hide within yourself for fear of how others will see you. A truth must first be spoken before others can understand it—and that should always mean more than how that truth is acknowledged or accepted.

Julien Baker when asked by Slate about her feelings about Pride month, “When I was a kid and I first came out, I didn’t like Pride because something viscerally within me was, I think, intimidated by such an expression of queerness. I think it’s because the milieu I grew up in was sending me a lot of mixed information about just how to be a person in the world. A lot of my friends, I mean, I don’t have to say it, but the church, obviously, and then also just growing up in the South and being in a largely Republican family, there are certain kind of folk ways that you learn, especially being a woman, about modesty and self-expression and the general social conditioning to not take up space. And obviously, making any reference to sexuality or sex taboo completely off the table for discussion.”

Who put me
In your way to find?
What right had you
Not to let me die?
Ooh, but did I even know
What I was asking for?
If I had my way
I’d have missed you more
Than you missed me
You missed me
You missed me
You missed me

My Mom’s side of the family is mostly Catholic and, like their Church, incapable of processing their own contradictions — often at the expense of others trying to live their truths. My Dad’s side of the family was Jewish, a truth hidden most likely out of fear of how my Mom’s side of the family would react. I was raised to accept the worst person in the room, to center myself around how others would feel — even if that meant holding back to keep the peace, even if that meant repressing parts of myself I wanted or needed to express.

If you know me at all, you know I shy away from labels, defy definition, challenge norms, question rules; I live in the gray zones, dispose of the binaries. It’s who I am; it’s who I’ve always been. It’s gotten me into trouble, often, and yet I never knew what it meant, never understood what made me that way, what truth lived beneath the surface. I didn’t know that queerness is also a way of seeing, a way of challenging the systems that fail to recognize you.

I keep thinking about what Julien Baker said about the “folk ways,” about the “social conditioning to not take up space.” To be different is to take up space, to stand out. I remember years ago, when I was in my teens, a second cousin came out as queer. When her mother told my mother and aunt, she apologized for making them uncomfortable. When that second cousin brought her girlfriend to Thanksgiving, another family member said, “I don’t care who she dates, but I don’t want my children to see it.”

That’s my social conditioning, the way I was told to not take up space. And yet I did in other ways: I dressed against the grain, challenged politics, disappeared so that my noticeable absence took up space in protest. And that’s how I showed up with you, too, whoever you are: a person who challenged, who ranted against injustices, who allied for Others, who quit jobs when others would’ve stayed, who bantered about a variety of topics, who went deep with you without ever revealing anything about myself. I didn’t take up the space in the most important way: by showing you who I really am, how I really feel, even if my place on the spectrum would’ve made you uncomfortable.

I guess it’s never too late to be yourself.

As Julien also said, “A lot of artists I like end up being queer. Or maybe it’s a subconscious thing that you can identify of, like, ‘Oh this person understands the nuances of the romantic narrative of a queer person, or the social narrative of a queer person. ‘ And then you discover, lo and behold that they are a queer person.”

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