Miranda: Love Is Looking For You

 

My obsession with Miranda Lambert is kind of… an obsession.

How obsession is this obsession? If my headphones are in, there is at least a 75 percent chance I am listening to a song of hers, or her singing a song of someone else’s.

How obsession is my obsession? If it were not for the Miranda Lambert tag on Tumblr (@JeremyTheMVP for those interested), I would likely never use my account. Same for Instagram (same username).

How obsession is my obsession? In moments of stress, I find myself singing “The Truth”. Which I am aware is not her song. BUT if you go back up two paragraphs, I mentioned “her singing a song of someone else’s”, I sing it with her version in mind.

My obsession is so obsession that I based the name of this blog “The Music That Built Me” off of one of her songs “The House That Built Me”. The blog was never intended to be a shrine to the lovely Miss Lambert*. I have an idea for how to do that that I hope to get around to soon. But I also have strict (SELF IMPOSED by the way) deadlines to fill with this thing. I do not want to go too long without a blog, so in times of transition between topics, I figured out that I can return to the person who is kind of responsible for me doing this.

Miranda stated a few years ago that “Love is Looking For You” is one of her favorite songs that she has written. Now, my favorite Miranda song changes daily. There will be songs I listen to over and over based solely on lyrics that pop into my head in relation to that song. Her proclamation of her love for this song, got me to listen to it more than I would before. And I found a deep relation in what she sings.

I may be misinterpreting what she speaks of here but I get the feeling that she is trying to say that absolute most important thing is to look at your self in the mirror and love yourself for you who are. That is something I need to do. Its not a “love the way god made you” physical type deal. No, my problem is more a moral issue. I need to be able to look at myself and realize that the decisions that I am happy with are the ones that I made on my own. And due to my frequent questioning of my actions (sometimes deservedly), I am unable to do that as easily as others would. I have no idea when I started to get this way, I have no idea who or what caused such gross insecurity. Sometimes I would and have tried to contort myself to fit in with another person for my own comfort but I always have found it easier to point out my own inadequacies. Revealing myself completely, so everyone knows exactly what is up with me. This has, in many ways, caused me to feel weaker because I am hiding very little if anything at all.

In the past few months, at least and I am using Miranda’s words here, I have been looking to put out a flame. Something that burns at me but I don’t know how because I do not know where to find this “flame”. How do you remedy what you don’t know is wrong? The longer this burning sensation goes on, the worse it gets. I need to find a way to get “over” someone who I was never “under” (Sup to Ross and Rachel for supplying me with that analogy way back in the 90s). I had no idea how to do this. My most logical answer in getting over this problem is to dive headfirst into something else. Head out into a rainstorm but the rain isn’t coming hard enough to put that fire out. So now I am burning and wet. I need to find a good medium. A transition of sorts.

The problem with this transition that I am looking for is mentioned by Miranda a little later into the song. “Maybe you’ve been swearing that forever might have already run out”. I have proclaimed several times that it may be too late for me to actually achieve anything. Based solely on the comparisons of other people I see. Now in the past few months, the hundreds of people I have turned to (much less of an exaggeration than you might think) have told me that it isn’t easy and they have gone through the same thing.

“You can’t love yourself, at the expense of someone else”. I can’t do this based on comparisons. Either good or bad. Every case is different. That is what this song has instilled in me. The unique optimism that maybe certain things have happened and will happen for a reason. I need to take my own time with all of this. Maybe the answer will come to me and I don’t need to worry about taking to many steps in its direction, it will find me.