Brilliant … But Bouncy

You Give Yourself Away.

Larry and I no longer argued after the bars closed, because I would never again keep him from sleep. He went to bed and I stayed up listening to music.

As the angst of living with Larry while being very much alone began to take hold more permanently in my brain, I turned to the one thing that kept me functional: music.

In 1987, U2 released The Joshua Tree album and I bought the cassette. Its lead single, With or Without You, held a special place in my heart. Something about that song made me think it was written specifically for me, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it might be.

Night after lonely night, I would put my tape in the boom box and hit “play.” At the chorus, I would scream-sing at the top of my lungs:

I can’t live … with or without you ….

I did not know to whom I was singing. I only knew that I felt deeply, painfully, excruciatingly torn, like my life could never be my own because something was pulling me in opposite directions. I felt like I was dying but had no idea why.

Sometimes I believed it was Larry who was holding me back. It had become difficult to live his life, but I had no life of my own to live.

Sometimes I believed it was my parents. I couldn’t live their lives either, but I was miserable living without the people I so dearly loved for the first 20 years of my life.

Maybe I couldn’t live with or without The One from college. Or maybe it was Bonnie. I just couldn’t live the way I was living.

The deepest, most profound meaning came to me from the song’s refrain:

And you give yourself away … and you give yourself away …

At this point in the song, I crumbled completely. I had numbed myself for too long to be able to cry, but I would wail like a wounded animal in a steel trap: “And you giiiive yourself awaaaaaay…!”

I knew, deep down, that I had given myself away, lost myself completely, misplaced my very soul.

This had happened for no discernible reason; I was just gone. The person I’d been had completely vanished, even from my own view. Yet I had no idea where I’d gone, or if I’d ever be back.

And you give and you give and you give yourself away ….

Maybe I’d given my soul, as the retreat pastor had said, to all those men with whom I’d had sex. That felt true, but something else felt like it was truer; I just didn’t know what it was.

Mostly I just randomly moaned aloud in tune, knowing the song was deeply, powerfully, inextricably linked to me.

And immediately, at the song’s last note, I rewound the tape and played it again. And again.

I wallowed in the song like a pig in a mud bath. I played it again and again and again and again, every single night, all night long, for months.

I had no idea – truly, not a clue – that I was singing With or Without You about alcohol.