You're On Your Own, Kid

(Yes, this is another post about a Taylor Swift song. No, I will not apologize for it.)

I first heard this song on TikTok. It was used in videos of people reacting to Taylor Swift's newest album, and mostly involved people talking about what a gut punch this song was.

If you haven't heard it yet, I highly recommend listening to it.

The part that sticks with me the most is the bridge to the end. The last two lines go like this:

“You're on your own kid / Yeah you can face this.

You're on your own kid / You always have been”

Those lines hit me hard, but it took a bit of unpacking to figure out why they affected me so much.

I've written a bit on here about how I struggled with severe anxiety growing up and that the signs were ignored by the people around me. Even now I'm still surrounded by people who would jump to correct me if I ever called myself mentally ill in their presence.

I was made to feel like my emotions, my feelings, were too much. I was too sensitive, too shy, too scared to try new things. People made jokes about how I wouldn't try any new foods, and to this day I have trouble eating in front of new people. From the beginning, I was seemingly facing this battle by myself.

I do want to say that I have an incredible support system now, full of people who do their best to understand me even when they haven't experienced what I'm going through. However, for every one person in that support system, there are at least two outside of it that I don't feel comfortable with. I’m much better about communicating my feelings and when I need help, but old habits die hard. There are even some places I don’t enjoy going to anymore because of my conflicted feelings about my experience.

I remember the first time I thought about telling my story to help other people. I was in elementary school, and even though neither I nor the adults around me had the knowledge or language to convey what was going on with me, I knew there was something. This eventually led to my obsession with things like the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, the enneagram test, and other “pop” psychology that made its way onto my corner of the internet. I was desperate to understand myself. This also gave me the impression that I wanted to become a psychologist, until I realized later on in high school that it wasn’t for me.

Let’s back up a bit more. From a very young age, I knew I was different from other kids. I was more emotional, more sensitive, quieter. No one else cried as much as I did, not even close. When my teachers or other adults would ask me why I was upset, a lot of the time I didn’t have an answer. Inevitably, their response would be, Okay, then stop crying. There was a time where I genuinely wondered if other people could just snap their fingers and turn off their tear ducts. How do I learn how to do that? Am I the only one who can’t? I started getting the idea that people around me were annoyed by my constant crying, so I tried to stop. It didn’t work because, again, I can’t turn my tear ducts off. This eventually morphed into denying my feelings altogether.

Why am I crying? I’m not. I seem very upset? I am completely calm.

I would look anyone in the eyes and lie to their face. I would apologize for any emotions I had.

I was never taught how to regulate my emotions. I was just told to do it. It wasn’t until I started therapy at sixteen that I began learning how to do that, and I’m still working on it six years later.

We’ve come a long way in terms of kids’ mental health, and mental health as a whole, since I was little. We actually have conversations about it now, we talk about how to regulate emotions and remove ourselves from situations that could be triggering for us. This is great, definitely, but there will always be part of me that is angry that I had to struggle so much. I can’t change the past, but I can do my part in making others feel like they aren’t alone.

No matter how much your brain tells you that you are, you are never on your own.

—Abbie