#2, “Joining You,” Alanis Morissette (1998)

150 Favorite Songs: #2, “Joining You,” Alanis Morissette (1998)

content note: suicide

I don’t talk about this with anybody. But I’ve thought about suicide every day since I was a little boy. It isn’t an active thought; I don’t have plans, I’ve never made a plan. I’ve never even really given much thought to how. When I’ve written about it, which hasn’t been much, I’ve described it as a loose tooth. If you haven’t got a loose tooth, you don’t understand why someone who does would keep messing with it, why their tongue always finds it. If you’re the one with the loose tooth, it’s hard to do anything else. I expect that doesn’t makes sense to most people, and then it makes a lot of sense to the people for whom it does.

Mostly I think about it just to check if it’s still there. It always is.

Writing about suicide is tricky, because it makes some people worry who I don’t want to be worried, and also because there is a well-documented phenomenon called “suicide contagion,” which is where the idea spreads from one person to another, usually after someone in their community has died that way. But my friend Ana Marie, who wrote about her own history and experience with it recently, also noted that there is one way of talking about suicide that has the opposite effect, and it is when describing the experiences of someone who has faced suicidal ideation and then not made an attempt. So I’ll keep going.

(If you are reading this and thinking about trying to die that way, please call 988, which is the number for the suicide and crisis lifeline. It is a good idea to do that. It’s not a commitment, just a phone call.)

There’s some evidence that suicidal ideation is inheritable, if not necessarily genetic. This makes sense to me, because it has been there my whole life. I used to have a therapist who, after Covid vaccines became available, started offering in-person sessions in a secluded nature preserve, which was actually a very nice place to do therapy, even though there were also sometimes hikers walking by. I started meeting her there every other Wednesday morning. One time, I told her that I thought about it every day. She wanted to know more. “What about today?” she asked me. “It’s still early,” I said.

I’m writing about all of this, which I know is a heavy thing to put into a newsletter that is still ostensibly about music, because there is a song by Alanis Morissette that I have also thought about pretty much every day since it was released, when I was a teenager.

There are a lot of platitudes around suicide prevention. Sometimes it feels like the lifeline number is one of them, which is why I tried to write that parenthetical up there in my own voice rather than copying and pasting the boilerplate “if you or someone you know” text that you see a lot. There are also a lot of messages and songs that say things like “things will get better” or “you’re not alone.” I think the form these thoughts take are different for different people, and I am sure there are people who need to hear those things, but they don’t make those thoughts get quiet when I hear them. The way those thoughts come for me are not “things will never get better” or “no one cares.” They’re usually more like “you don’t have to keep doing this if you don’t want to.” And sometimes I don’t want to.

“Joining You” is structured as a message from Alanis to a friend. Despite how many times I’ve listened to it, until I looked at genius.com a few minutes ago to read other people’s interpretations of the song, it never once occurred to me that the friend might not be a man. I guess that’s how personal it felt to me.

The message is to a friend who has started talking about wanting to die by suicide to his mom, leading her to come to Alanis for help because she and this friend have “had this inexplicable connection since our youth.” The verses are very specific, describing this friend, who is an intense person who feels uncomfortable in the world and who has curiosities that make it hard to relate to most people. And then it gets to the chorus, which uses the same structure each time it comes around, but with different words. It’s just a simple list: if we were our bodies. if we were our futures. if we were our defenses, i’d be joining you. if we were our culture. if we were our leaders. if we were our denials, i’d be joining you. And so on. if we were our name tags. if we were our rejections. if we were our outcomes. if we were our indignities. if we were our successes. if we were our emotions. if we were their condemnations. if we were their paranoias. if we were our incomes. if we were our obsessions. if we were our afflictions.

I’ve thought a lot about why that has been such a meaningful set of lines. It’s because they don’t challenge the premise. They don’t say “but it’ll get better.” They say, “it makes sense that you’re thinking about this. But.”

And that acknowledgment, how unpatronizing her response is, cuts through the thing that makes me feel like all of the other anti-suicide messages don’t understand what my experience is like. I have always felt very understood by “Joining You,” both the verses where she talks about a person who it seems like is maybe a lot like me, showing that she understands who he is, and the choruses, where she offers the gentlest of firm counterpoints.

The part that says “you don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to” is a small part of me, but it can feel like the only part when it gets loud. It hasn’t done that in a long time, and I’m grateful for that, but there have been times in my life when it’s definitely been the loudest part. And “Joining You” helps me contextualize how small it really is in those moments. Because she is saying “we’re not just our bodies, which we might find difficult to live inside of; we’re not just the bad futures we imagine for ourselves; we’re not the culture we live in, which might be unkind toward people like ourselves; we’re not the things that have made us feel hopeless; we’re not the things other people are trying to put on us; we’re not even simply our feelings. We are all of those things and also something more, and I believe that completely, because if I didn’t know them to be true, I would be thinking the same thoughts you’re thinking right now.”

And that all feels undeniably true to me. I’ve felt very afraid, ashamed, worried, and alone in my life—probably not more so than anybody else, but enough for them to fill my whole body—but I also know that we are the composite of many things. Thinking that we’re just whatever thing feels urgent is a lie we tell ourselves. (I think this is also why very successful people are often surprised to find that they’re not any happier than they were before they became successful; it’s the same principle, just turned in the other direction.) Alanis’s response here is so gentle that it it doesn’t raise my defenses. She doesn’t argue or preach, she receives the implicit suggestion that we are these small parts of ourselves and simply says, “if that were true, I’d be joining you.” It gets through to me. “Joining You” is built around earning the trust of the subject of the song, Alanis’s friend she’s singing to, and the way she does that also makes me trust her. It’s silly to say, because I’ve never even met Alanis Morissette, but I always really felt like she was talking about me.

I thought about it today, because I think about it every day. It passed quickly, just the thought “could I?” and then the thought “I could, but I’m going to do something else now” and then I did that and it didn’t come back until I sat down to write this, which I knew would obviously do that but it’s fine. Most of the time, it’s that quick. Even if it happens a few times in a day, it’s usually that quick.

But it hasn’t always been, and when those times have come around, I’ve had “Joining You” in my ears, and it has helped me get to “I’m going to do something else now.”

I don’t want to be pretentious. I don’t want to say something grand like “this song saved my life.” I really honestly don’t even know if that’s true. Here is what I do know: I know that I have lived for as long as I can remember with the thought of suicide never far from the surface. I know that I have listened to the song “Joining You” many times, and the things Alanis Morissette sings in this song are things that help me decide that I don’t want to die. And I know that I’m still here.