#50, “Just Like You,” Rollins Band (1991)

150 Favorite Songs: #50, “Just Like You,” Rollins Band (1991)

Before we start: This one goes into some heavy stuff. Content warning for childhood sexual abuse.

My memory more or less starts at around eleven years old. Anything before that is pretty much a black hole. There’ve been a handful of random memories from earlier than that, but it’s a very small number—maybe four or five, and I couldn’t tell you their significance. A toy plastic tunnel set up in the basement. A few vague recollections of my grandparents’ house; the Thanksgiving that my older cousin, a vegetarian, complained about eating a bowl of Corn Flakes for dinner; a portable classroom trailer where I took keyboard lessons for a short amount of time. I have no idea how old I am in any of these. There are pieces I can’t tell if I remember, or if I just know about them. Do I recall wearing a certain shirt, or was I just photographed in it? I don’t know. I don’t remember any of my elementary school teachers, but they’ve been enough a part of the family story told about my childhood that I know which ones I disliked.

I didn’t really understand that this was unusual for a long time. When I was thirteen, my family moved back to the same small Indiana town where I was born, and where we lived until I was in kindergarten (or maybe first grade; I have no recollection of any of it). The town hosted an annual fair in the park each fall, and there was one shortly after we’d moved back. A girl my age said my name, which surprised me, because I didn’t know anyone there. We’d been classmates, apparently, and she’d remembered when I moved away to Florida. It seemed impossible to me even then that someone could remember something that happened when they were seven or eight years old. I thought everyone’s memories started around the same time that mine did.

I didn’t give any of this much thought for a long time. I didn’t know why I didn’t remember anything from those first ten or eleven years. I still don’t, not really. But a few years ago, I was in therapy, and suddenly, a few months into working with a good therapist, an important question occurred to me out of the blue. We hadn’t gone anywhere near this topic in the work we’d been doing, but it suddenly seemed urgent. I counted down the days until my next session so I could ask. Knowing that a therapist who met me as an adult couldn’t give me an answer to the question I was really trying to understand, I asked her: Do I exhibit the signs you would associate with a childhood sexual abuse survivor?

“Yes,” she said. Just like that. One word. And things started to make a little bit more sense. We tried exploring the question, working gently around the edges of it. She couldn’t answer it definitively, of course. She settled on saying that I had signs that are frequently associated with childhood shock trauma. Certain memories started coming—again, nothing definitive, but things I hadn’t realized where in there. When I was little—I have no idea how old, none whatsoever, but I know this happened—I became sharply averse to any displays of physical affection, would not allow my parents to hug me, would only tolerate a handshake to say good night. I don’t know why, or what precipitated it. I know that discomfort faded to a degree, but persisted to some extent into adulthood. Sometimes it still does.

I didn’t get as far into understanding it in therapy as I’d wanted to. Covid happened, and my therapist went virtual for a month or two, then ended her regular practice entirely. I worked with other therapists, who had different ways of working, and eventually came to accept that while some memories would occasionally come back, like the handshakes, they didn’t answer any questions. If they were puzzle pieces, they were part of the vast blue sky in the landscape painting, not the trees or the lake in the foreground. I came to accept that I wasn’t likely to find those pieces. I have a voice that lives in my head that tells me that if it were real, I would remember, that I’d have some way to prove it, to provide details to whoever the judge living in my head is.

So sometimes I wonder if the sense I have of what happened to me is something I made up and told myself. Sometimes I don’t.

But I’ve always understood myself, and my feelings, best through music. And when I don’t know what it means that there’s a big hole where the first ten years of my life should be, I have “Just Like You” to help me make sense of it.

“Just Like You” is about something very specific, that I don’t personally relate to. Henry Rollins wrote it about his father. His parents separated when he was very young; his mom was a cool, if emotionally distressed, bohemian type, while his dad was a strict military-style disciplinarian. He would, during his childhood, spend the occasional weekend with his father, which sound like they were terrifying, emotionally and verbally and physically abusive. When he turned eighteen, he cut him off, and then he became a little bit famous, and at some point in his late twenties, agreed to meet his dad. “Just Like You” is about that encounter, when he realized that he and his father shared so many of the same mannerisms, that they spoke in the same cadences, that they looked alike, that when he looked in the mirror, he’d see his father’e eyes in the ones reflected back at him. The song, even by the fairly aggressive standards of the Rollins Band, is unpleasant to listen to.

Those aren’t my experiences; while I don’t know exactly what happened to me as a kid, I’m confident that it doesn’t involve my dad. But the explosion of “Just Like You,” the catharsis and the howl of the song, feels very relatable to me. The song takes a long time to start—there’s an introduction of tones and feedback and loose drums and spoken words, but the first guitar riff doesn’t enter until almost two minutes into the song. Then, once it does, it’s like a bomb goes off. Rollins barks the words “I am the man from the human choke hold” and narrates the shame of being abused as a child over shrieking, angular guitars and puncturing drums. There’s a brief boast that’s always been incredibly meaningful to me—“from the wreckage of humiliation / i got my self respect / i pulled myself together / what the hell did you expect?”—and then a chorus in which he just screams his throat raw, bellowing the word “rage” twelve times in a row.

I don’t have whatever memories would tell me exactly what happened when I was a child. But I do know that the way a person would react to what feels true to me about it is with anger. But I’ve never been good at dealing with that feeling. I’ve never really known where to put it, or how to express it. I’m very good at tamping down an emotion that feels too big for my body, though, which is many of them. That’s often more comfortable for me than actually letting myself feel them. Sometimes, listening to “Just Like You,” and the parts where Henry Rollins screams “rage,” is as much as I’m capable of.

But that’s so important. In lieu of learning how to really feel my feelings, I taught myself how to write them down, to externalize them and give them form and to process them into something that exists outside of me. That’s useful, but being unpracticed at expressing anger isn’t the same thing as never feeling it, and having the opportunity to connect with that, and to hear a voice that roars with the anger you’re entitled to, even—maybe especially—when it’s an inarticulate expression of pure guttural feeling, makes that emotion sit a little more bearably.

This is a lot to get into on what’s ostensibly a music blog, and I’ve weighed for a long time whether I wanted to talk about this, given the parts of it that I can’t answer. But also, a song like “Just Like You” has helped me feel less alone when dealing with feelings that are enormous and painful, and I think that’s because it’s rare to encounter something that gets into something really difficult. I don’t know if me writing about this here will mean anything to anyone, but I also feel like, because I found some solace and meaning in this song, I owe it to anyone who might to offer what I have, too. I don’t know another way to find peace around this. Not really.

I’ve made my peace, more or less, with the fact that I can’t tell you what exactly happened when I was a kid. I’ve mostly accepted that I can’t fully claim an identity as someone who went through some kind of abuse because I just don’t know. But also, what I do know is that outside of that uncertainty is the feeling that there’s a lot of pain and hurt and anger in whatever hole those memories should be in. And having a song like “Just Like You,” where all that’s being expressed is that a visceral rage by someone I’ve always looked up to, stemming from something that happened in his own childhood, makes those things easier to live with. I may not have my own answers, but I can still shout along with his.