The Saddest Songs of all Time (Part Two)

“It’s a two-for-one sale on teen angst.”

Welcome back. I’m glad I didn’t scare you off with that downer of a post last time.  This here’s the second part of my list of the saddest songs of all time, or at least the ones that I find most depressing.  You can read the first part here if you want.  Like I said last time, each song on this list is going to fit to a specific theme. But first I’m gonna tell a story about that theme, and that theme is suicide.

This article could be potentially triggering and a bit emotionally taxing, so if you don’t think you’re in the right place for it right now, I completely understand.  If it’s really bad, you might need this. Skip to the very end where I talk about meme songs.  Just don’t listen to the songs that I mention in this post, alright?

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I want to emphasize the fact that I am fine right now.  As of this writing, I am not suicidal.  I have great friends, family, and a solid support network.  My medication works, my depression is in check, and I don’t self-harm.  But this article isn’t about right now.  It’s about how things once were.  Mom, you might want to skip this one.

Before I get to the actual (relatively short) list of songs I know about suicide or depression in general, I want to clarify something about the post last time.  When I said during my rant on Ed Sheeran that the song came to me in the lowest point in my life, it wasn’t just because of the emotional turmoil of my friends graduating.  It was also because I was at the bottom of my struggle with clinical depression and suicidal ideation.

Here’s the problem with writing about depression, though, and I’m gonna tell you this from a first hand experience; it’s emotionally tough to relive those memories, to try and capture all that negative energy and display it as text on a webpage, but it’s also mentally tough.  Because when things are good, they’re good, and you don’t think it’ll ever happen again.

I hope I’m not the only person to experience this, where now that I’m over that particularly problematic time, I don’t understand how I let myself slide so far down. I don’t remember it very well.  I look back at those times when I was this close to killing myself, and now I think, “Jeez, how could I have ever felt like that?  I won’t let that ever happen again.”  But I did feel like that, once, and I had good reasons for it back then.

Those emotions don’t travel well across time.  They don’t age like a fine wine, where you can look back years later, not with fondness, per se, but with a certain empathy or better understanding. No, that isn’t how it’s been for me.  Instead, in my experience, those emotions kind of dissipate into the air.  They’re gone, and you’re left feeling better but not entirely understanding what happened.  You have that new knowledge, yes, of personal indicators and signs and things to be wary of, but it’s an incomplete understanding.

It’s also one of the reasons, I think, why it’s so hard for people who have never had depression to try and understand what it’s like.  It’s damn near impossible for me, someone who’s struggled with depression and continues to struggle with anxiety and OCD, to properly communicate to myself the mental state that I was once in, and it isn’t like I can replicate those emotions on command.  How could I expect someone with no prior depression experience to attempt that?

Depression and suicidal ideation don’t always go hand in hand, but at least for me the descent went a little something like this.  Near the end of my sophomore year in high school, I started to feel this constant pressure at the back of my mind that I wasn’t good enough or that I was a failure.  So I went to see a counselor.  Turns out I hate therapy, and that’s a fairly common trait among people with OCD, but for that moment I came out alright.  I told my mom that sometimes I had thoughts about hurting myself, but I’d never actually do it.

Then things got worse.  I think it was around the winter of my junior year in high school when I started really feeling the depression.  It became hard to enjoy anything, and I was fixated on thoughts my own existence and how much easier it would be if I just stopped existing.  There were some external factors that lead to this, about half of them of my own doing that I now deeply regret, but most of it came from inside me. 

My mom openly told me she sympathized but couldn’t really understand what I was going through, and that’s a good thing, if you ask me.  For someone to truly understand what depression is like, they’d have to have been through it, and it isn’t an experience I’d wish upon anyone.  But I tried to explain what it felt like to her, so I used my creative writing skills to perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine that your mind is like a news station.  Your big thoughts are the main stories, your emotions are the hosts, memories are the review segments, things like that.  But the depression is the stock market ticker-tape.  That little thing at the bottom of the screen that you can ignore if you don’t care about it, but once you notice it, it’s impossible to get rid of.  And so these thoughts roll along, like so many numbers.  Things like “You can’t do it.”  “They hate you.”  “You’ll never get better.”  “Kill yourself.”  “Kill yourself.”  “Kill yourself.”  For me, it was usually that one.

So these intrusive thoughts slide along at the bottom of your periphery, always there at every waking moment of every waking day for months, maybe years, on end.  That’ll wear anyone down, given enough time.  It wore me down, that’s for sure.  And even though I told my mom that I thought about self-harm but would never go through with it, at some point I began to scratch at my skin until it bled.

And then I started to think about suicide, and how I would do it.  Sure, I said I’d thought about it but I’d never go through with it.  Right?  I wouldn’t actually kill myself, right?  That’s what I had said about self-harm, and that’s what everyone says until it happens to them.  And then?  You can’t come back from that.  It’s a one-way street, and I came pretty damn close to taking that turn.

Sometimes it isn’t your choice.  Sometimes your brain decides for you.  Thankfully, I never fully attempted suicide, but I became reckless, self-destructive, and hateful towards myself.  It came to a head, I suppose, when I sent myself an email on my school account saying that I wanted to kill myself.  Our school supposedly had this quasi-Orwellian system that would flag certain phrases for the administration, usually so the teachers could bust drug deals or whatever.  I wanted to test that system and see how smart it was.

I don’t know if I’d be here today if that email hadn’t been caught.  I’d gambled my life on a computer program, and the program won. I’m thankful for that.

That email triggered a chain of events that led to the cops coming to my house and taking me, by ambulance, to the local emergency room.  I went willingly.  I knew it was for the best.  And I let myself be admitted to the psychiatric ward.  I was committed for about five days or so and did my time on the inside, so to speak.  This was September or October of my senior year, so a few months after the events of my story about “Photograph.”  I don’t think that’s necessarily a coincidence.

The time that I spent in there was strange, to say the least, and could probably be its own whole post.  The emotional turmoil I felt and the grief I caused among my family, and the fallout from that event at school could be a separate blog, too.  My stay at the hospital didn’t cure me, but it did convince me that I didn’t want to go back, and it gave me the kick in the pants I needed to not kill myself, I guess.

I was incredibly lucky after getting out of the hospital in that I already had a support group of my family, close friends, and teachers.  Everyone was understanding.  Everyone was kind.  Everyone did their best to help me.  And I think it worked, because I didn’t go back to the hospital, even though return trips are pretty common for psych patients.  My mom says that my recovery is due to my own force of will, but honestly, I think it’s as much luck as anything else.

Things got better, then.  I graduated from high school and went to college, where I am now.  There were several frightening moments freshman year of university where things looked dark, maybe even darker than they had looked in high school, and I gave my friends, family, and myself a few more scares.  But I’m better now.   Sometimes those icy fingers still steal their way into my head and the ticker-tape starts running again, but those times are growing more rare by the month.  Maybe it’s the cursed miracle that is 70 milligrams of Prozac.  Maybe it’s my support group.  Maybe I’m a stronger person now.  Hell if I know.

I’m wary, though.  It could come back.  Something could trigger things to start all over again, and there’s always that chance that I might relapse and actually finally go through with it, if things got bad enough.  I’m not so naïve to think that I’m cured; the OCD tells me that much.  But being on guard is better than being at war, especially when the enemy is your own emotions.

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that depression is tough shit.  It isn’t fun, and I can say that having been there and back again.  But there are people who’ve got it way worse than I do.  And while telling someone to think about how much worse it could be is perhaps some of the shittiest advice you can give someone, there’s still some truth to it.

Mental illness is different for everybody.  I know I’m far from the only one to struggle with it, but I’m the only one who will experience it in the exact way that I did.  Everyone’s going to struggle in a differently, but I hope reading this has given you a better understanding of what it’s like if you don’t have depression, or given you some sort of solace if you do.

Things can get better.  I can’t promise when, or where, or how, or even if they will, but things can get better.  I think it’s foolish to say that things will get better.  Because as Voltaire knows, that isn’t always true.  But I know for a fact that things can get better.  And when the only choice you have is to keep fighting or die, what choice is there?

I think the most accurate line of Judas’s suicide song from Jesus Christ Superstar is when he says, “My god, I am sick.”  Because at the end of the day, mental illness is an illness that can be treated, like the flu or that funky-looking lump you should probably get checked out.  Depression is something that a lot of people will struggle with for their entire lives.  I really hope this post helped someone to better understand what their parent or sibling or friend or significant other might be going through.  And if this post didn’t help?  Here’s some songs that might.

“Sunshine,” by Todd Snider

I’m going to try and keep this brief since I rambled on for so long earlier.  But this song, while ultimately hopeful, displays a pretty good grip on what it’s like to deal with suicidal thoughts.  The melancholy lines and chords don’t shy away from the brutal facts of the matter, and I appreciate it.  It’s raw, and real.  And even if it ends in a sappy appeal to religion, it still gets me every time, and I cry when I hear it.  It’s the kind of ending that I want to believe in not just for myself but for everyone.

I have a hard time finding a version of this song for my Spotify playlists since apparently every version that seemingly exists is live, but maybe that’s a good thing.  It makes it even more real, then.  When Todd Snider sings, I feel like you can really hear the pain in his voice.  I don’t know for sure that Todd Snider wrote this from personal experience or maybe very close second-hand experience.  But I’d be surprised as all hell if he didn’t.

“They tell me depression runs in the family. / Well, that doesn’t help me much.”  You can say that again.

“Hurt,” by Nine Inch Nails

Unpopular opinion, I prefer the original version over the Johnny Cash cover, despite what some people may tell you.  Another unpopular opinion, I also first heard this song on Rick and Morty.  But regardless on how you feel about that show, and regardless of the fact that this song is probably as much about drug addiction as depression, I think this song does a good job of capturing the essence of feeling trapped by your own emotions.

One of my biggest fears when I was in the depths of despair was that my friends and family would all one day get tired of watching me struggle, and they’d slowly disappear.  One line from this song epitomized that fear for me; “You are someone else / I am still right here.”  That sense of being trapped, of being unable to move, is crushing and also something pretty familiar to a lot of people who struggle with depression.

And if those last lines, “If I could start again / a million miles away / I would keep myself / I would find a way,” aren’t something someone would say before they kill themselves, then I don’t know what is.

“Adam’s Song,” by Blink-182

Blink-182 have a lot of sad songs (and also that one), but this one takes the cake for me.  If you didn’t listen very carefully, it might just be another pop-punk piece.  But, hell, it does one of the best jobs of explaining what depression is like, especially in teens.  And “please tell mom this is not her fault” is one of the most emotionally traumatizing things I think I’ve ever heard. It’s something that I’ve thought, and that makes it so much worse.

Now, the real song ends with some sort of hope that “tomorrow holds such better days,” much like how “Sunshine” ends, but I didn’t realize that until right now, as I wrote this.  When I heard this song, all I heard was the first half.  That’s all that mattered.  Tomorrow is irrelevant when you can’t get through today.  I think, somewhere, there’s a version of this song that only has the sad parts.  But I don’t want to look for it.

“I never thought I’d die alone, / I laughed the loudest who’d have known?”  And that basically sums up my last two years in high school.

Well, this has been a lot.  It’s my longest post yet, I think, and not actually about songs at all, really.  I hope you don’t feel like I scammed you into reading my sob story.  But I did promise memes, so here are those.  Let me introduce you to sad songs that I can no longer take seriously because they’re memes.

“Mad World,” Gary Jules version: Fuck Donnie Darko.  This cover of the Tears for Fears song was the best part.  But I prefer this version.

“Sound of Silence,” Simon & Garfunkel: Hello darkness my old friend.  I’ve seen so many memes that end with that.  And it’s also in that one TV show.

“In the Arms of an Angel,” Sarah McLachlan:  The internet corrupts everything it touches, but so does PETA, though I guess it wasn’t PETA that used this one.  I once used this song for a school project on sulfur.

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Green Day: I like Green Day a lot, and American Idiot is one of the best albums of all time, but I can’t take this song seriously anymore and I don’t even really know why.  I don’t think it’s aged well.

“Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen but also every version: Everything on the Shrek soundtrack stopped being a real song and transcended to the next plane of comedy, per Newton’s Smash Mouth principle.  Also, DOUBLE WAH.