[ESSAY] The Terrifying and Horrible Feeling of "Unlove" or: Close Analysis of "Nobody" by Mitski

"Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody

Ooh, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody"

- "Nobody" from Be the Cowboy by Mitski

    The other day, I was listening to Mitski, as does every other queer man who's slowly but surely approaching his 20s, and I was particularly entranced by the song "Nobody." I have listened to this song probably a thousand times over the past couple of years, but for some reason, after listening to the song the 1,001st time, the message resonated so much more deeply than it did before. Of course, I already grasped the very didactic theme of resculpting oneself to achieve this externally validating love, but I also found this strange motif of "unlove" present, even outside the bounds of romantic love. The dissonance of "nobody" repeated several times mirrored my discomfort, my struggles to adjust to my current, modern life; it was not, in fact, that I was objectively alone, but rather, it was the moschate odor of intense loneliness that was making me go insane (well, more so than I usually am). This feeling of loneliness was not attributed to the absence of people in my life: throughout my teenage years, I have bonded with various incredible and talented people, some of whom are taking time out of their day to read these thoughts. Instead, I attribute this feeling of loneliness to the sometimes real, but many times irrational feeling of "unlove," which I define as the idea not of hatred or of indifference, but rather, a feeling of a failure to garner others' love, particularly of people who one considers to be close with. It's the feeling one gets when someone says, "I really like you as a person" rather than "I love you." It's a notably selfish, sometimes all-consuming feeling, but I do believe that everyone, at some point, feels this "unlove," and there's use in trying to navigate it.

    Just a few weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article entitled: "The secret to happiness? These experts say it’s feeling loved by others" by Maggie Penman. Within the article, happiness researcher (yes, real thing) Sonja Lyubomirsky describes the "lonely moment" as one in which you are not feeling loved. It sounds simple enough, but Dr. Lyubomirsky attributes these moments to evolution: back in the period of hunter-gatherers, you might have died if you were not cared for, so when we feel as though our social bonds are not as strong as we want them to be, it triggers an evolutionary signal that we are literally actively dying. It's a very subtle perception of flight-or-fight, and as a result, we internalize this feeling of loneliness and attribute it to our own shortcomings. This dramatization may first lead us to alter ourselves to fit a definition of being "lovable." We may change our appearance, wear different clothes, or change our personalities. When it doesn't work, we turn to more drastic and dangerous actions: taking up substances or further isolating ourselves are examples. To quote Mitski (yes, surprisingly, this is a serious essay): "I've been big and small and big and small and big and small again / And still nobody wants me / Still, nobody wants me." Mistki utilizes epizeuxis through the repetition of "big and small and" to underscore the escalation unlove has on our physical bodies. Notice how the stanza, as well as the entire song, is centered around changes being made to the narrator, to the individual. It's centered around what happens to the "I" when the evolutionary signal of loneliness kicks in. There are two things you can note from the epizeuxis: the first is the fluctuation, both of unstressed and stressed syllables, and the physical body itself. "Big," a stressed syllable, is followed by "and," an unstressed syllable, which is followed again by another stressed syllable: "small." This alteration causes this very nauseating tone to both be read and also heard in the song itself. Perhaps Mistski is alluding to the fact that the process of growing and shrinking the physical body is exhausting and unbearable; if we couple this idea to the fact that the line alludes to disordered eating, we can see the intensification of the nauseating tone. This analysis leads into the second point from this line: the eagerness we have to self-impose psychological torture to pull ourselves out of the feeling of unlove. It's a very human action to recognize ourselves within a given conundrum and think, immediately, about "solving the problem," even when the problem is unsolvable in a given temporal space. The problem of unlove is especially susceptible to a very dangerous kind of methodology to solve the unsolvable. We objectively cannot control the love others give us, but we will sure try any means necessary to do so. How? By focusing on our own individuality, hence the importance of the song centering the individual's actions. It helps to also refer to the author's own thoughts about the line itself. When asked about the line, Mitski notes that the lyric was "literal, like I have gained weight and I’ve lost weight and I’ve been big and I’ve been small... Just like what will it take? What will it take to be wanted? What do I need to do to be desirable? That’s where it came from." When you position this quote amongst the very dramatic fear of death, we are more willing to take action through torture. There's a growing body of scientific literature that supports the idea that self-harm is a temporary relief mechanism. Leigh Shane, a strategist at AMFM healthcare, supports the idea that self-harm controls what is uncontrollable. By taking action, even destructive action, you feel as though you are making progress towards escaping the death that comes with unlove.

    But the feeling of unlove can not only be read in the context of self-harm but also as a means to bolster a very competitive mindset. I think there's always a wonder of where we place among our friends. Most people, at some point, will ruminate on if their close friends prioritize them to the same extent, and this rumination drives much of the insecurity behind unlove. The questions of "where do I rank amongst my friends" transforms receiving love into a kind of competitive game: who will win my close friend's love? This perception of love positions it as a finite resource, one that can be exploited. A part of me actually wonders whether or not this perception comes about because of the hyper-capitalist society we have constructed in the West. In any case, Mitski also addresses this competitive nature; within the first few lines of her song, she says, "Venus, planet of love, was destroyed by global warming / Did its people want too much, too?" This imagery and metaphor of destruction not only alludes to the idea that capitalism fuels some of the interpersonal competition we experience, but it also paints love as a kind of financial, limited resource. Mitski entangles both the "planet of love" with the all-encompassing consumption of natural resource. When we perceive love in this regard, the unlove we later feel transforms our identities into ones of consumption. We must now "labor" to sustain ourselves within the competition; we must adjust ourselves to "climb the ladder" of achievement within social environments. Our mindset has now become one of hierarchies, and we must individualistically reach the top of our friends' hierarchies. Yet, Mitski notes that there is a duality of this mindset: we want to maintain ourselves within capitalism, yet there is an embedded fear that our wanting will lead to eventual weathering and destruction. The all-consuming desire that the people of Venus feel actually leads to their eventual downfall: "destroyed by global warming." Thus, this interpretation delineates that this mindset may actually keep us furthered in isolation, worried that the desire of love we seek from our friends might destroy the social habitat altogether. Our actions thus become fragmented; we want our changes to the external and internal to be noticeable but implicit. The feeling of unlove thus becomes selfish, consuming, and also entrapping.

    So, what can we do about this feeling of unlove? Dr. Lyubomirsky argues that, "To feel love, you need to be known and also know the other." She goes on to imply that it is impossible to be "known" if you are only exposing the positive aspects of your life. In today's world, many often use vulnerability as a tool to garner support or respect for their leadership, to employ pathos within a debate, or to increase their odds of getting into a selective program or institution. We've gamified vulnerability almost to the point where we have desecrated its original purpose. I'm not here to argue that vulnerability is not a tool, but I do want to argue that there is a better use for vulnerability: we can use it as a tool to strengthen our social bonds. Saying this is easy enough; when I applied this philosophy at Columbia, what would often happen is that I would grow naturally distant from the very people I was vulnerable towards, and this distance, for me, felt like definitive evidence of a rejection of my vulnerability. I defined unlove in this essay as one in which the social bonds we form within our friendships lack the love we often seek, but I cannot deny that there is perhaps another form of unlove that captivates the indifference felt by an individual of our past after a platonic love has crumbled. And this type of unlove is somehow more dangerous, not because it doesn't induce the same effects as the unlove I described previously, but because it further traps us within the cycle of isolation. If vulnerability is the medicine to our isolation, then this rejection of vulnerability almost serves as an allergy to the medicine. So, again, what can we do? The other night, I had a 4-hour deeply intense conversation with a friend about many things, but one of the topics I presented was a comprehensive unveiling of literally all my insecurities. I think there are many important points about this conversation, but one of which is how I started it: firstly, by asking if he was comfortable with this conversation, and secondly, arguably more importantly, by telling him that I missed having conversations with him. Dr. Lyubomirsky finally states at the end of her interview, "It seems counterintuitive, but if you want to feel more loved, the first step is that you make the other person feel loved first." This honesty, this apparent transparency in love, is how you remove the allergy to the medicine. It's how you push past all the horrible and terrible forms unlove can take and how you build something much stronger with another person. Funny enough, Mitski's centering of the individual in "Nobody" is perhaps why the individual is stuck in the vicious cycle. So, with that in mind, the one and only advice I will give in this essay is to text someone you care about and to tell that you love them. Being careful but incredibly earnest is how you break unlove.