On “The Great Undoing” Song and Video

As regards the era of Ageless, I feel "The Great Undoing" is less the ending of a chapter and more a dogear on one of its pages—something to circle back to. As needed.

It already felt ridiculous to me to still be stuck on that relationship when I wrote “The Great Undoing”, but to be putting the song out now—seven years after the fact—well a lot of self-validation had to happen.

The way life manifests in a series of movements that aren’t always strictly forward, healing is so open-ended and non-linear. Shit is always coming back up. I prefer the gentle approach of allowing for things to, sort of, stick around. If they need to. Overstay their welcome. I think there’s a tremendous amount of guilt that accompanies grief, in that we feel it’s necessary to get over something as quickly as possible. It’s counterintuitive, if you ask me. To feel obligated to move past something. I remember being angry at myself because the amount of time I spent grieving that relationship far outweighed the length of the relationship itself. Who cares? It’s not science. It’s relative.

In a way, sharing this song so many years later feels like an affirmation. I was so concerned back then with what people thought of me. Whether they were whispering behind my back, calling me dramatic and obsessive. I was convinced my hurt was annoying, that I just needed to “get over it already.” But more likely, nobody was thinking about me at all.

The thing was, I wasn’t just tasked with getting over the breakup, I was tasked with getting over myself. Getting over the insatiable urge to center myself in the lives of others. If, by putting out this song, I’m dragging something out, or unearthing something that’s long since been buried, that’s news to me. I’m not so self-obsessed that I think it’s going to make waves in the lives of anyone. If it does, bully for me.

I used to be first in line to pick apart any one thing I did. Now, I dare say, I’m last. With the video, my aim was to play out the very big and fanciful ideas I once had about the relationship, and to memorialize the future I’d imagined for us, almost in apology. I can’t travel back and tell my younger self it doesn’t matter, there’s no such thing as being unnecessarily affected, what you feel is what you feel. But I can acknowledge that this was no ordinary ache. This was a great undoing.

So, I built this dream world for her, as if to say, “You got to the other side. Does it matter how?”