If your life were a movie, what would its theme song be?
I use the word melancholy fairly often when describing my moods. I don’t see it as a negative thing at all, it’s just how I’ve always been. I’m not overly pessimistic, but definitely not the most optimistic person.
The moment I saw this prompt, this is the song that popped into my head. I know it was used at the beginning of the weirdly wonderful movie Vanilla Sky, but surely there was more to my subconscious thinking?
Indeed there was. I can remember hearing this, the opening track to Kid A, and whilst not immediately loving it —I was a huge Radiohead fan and fell into the ‘hang on this isn’t rock music’ noise along with millions of others fans— it grew on me and revisiting the album a few years later sat deeply with me for a long time.
Thom Yorke has said that " ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ was about "trying to fit into the right place and the right box so you can connect" " which sums up my entire life.
I have always felt adrift, always felt separate, and to some extent I still do. I have a very small number of close friends, and we don’t communicate all that often, thankfully over the decades we’ve all grown comfortable with that and with not trying to ‘fit’ within each others lives.
But I know I morph and adapt myself a little too easily to fit in, to be part of the crowd, to be accepted, and I know I always will to some extent. As I grow older, and accept more and more of who I am, those feelings change, but they’ve been a part of me for my entire life, so they ain’t going anywhere.
And perhaps that’s where my melancholy comes from, an early realisation that I would always want to connect to others but would never feel that I was in quite the right place for it to happen.
“Everything In Its Right Place” by Radiohead
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What are your thoughts?