This quote is from the song “Breakable” by Ingrid Michaelson and I absolutely love it. You can obviously take it literally, which, to me, makes a good point, even more than what she’s probably talking about – relationships. No matter how great we think we are, there’s always that slim chance something can totally go wrong. Just because I’m a competitive figure skater doesn’t mean I’m also not one of the favorites at the hospital (because you know they love me!). Does the rib cage actually help you any? What about the pericardium? Every so often you hear in the news about how this got infected or how it filled up with fluid. So much for protection. And even if your heart is fine, the blood it pumps might not be. It just fascinates me, everything that can go wrong, and yet people still say they’re “putting their heart into it”, that’s why they’re surviving. What a mess, illness. And Ingrid says “So it’s fairly simple to cut right through the mess,/And to stop the muscle that makes us confess.” If I’m talking about illness here, yeah, I see it. It’s so totally easy to lose hope. What are we confessing? Are we confessing our desire to stay alive? Or maybe we’re confessing what’s really wrong. Maybe it’s easy to “cut right through the mess” of illness and stop us from confessing what is happening in our lives, to protect ourselves from other people’s reactions, to ignore it ourselves. What’s making us stop? Ourselves, our distrust in other people. There’s very little wall, the song is saying, so once people get to you, you just stop pretending to care. It doesn’t exist.
The next verse is about how the boy fastens Ingrid’s seatbelt “because it is the law”; she sees his love in his “two-ton death trap”. I see this, by my analysis, as a revelation of the dichotomy of how things constrict us, have the total potential to kill our spirit, but also help us and protect us. Again, not telling people about illness totally fits here. Sometimes if people don’t know and something happens it’s not only awkward to explain, but maybe they don’t believe you, or they don’t take it seriously, or even their pity/overreaction totally kills your spirit that day. But if people don’t know then you have to keep it bottled up inside, there’s more awkwardness, and it contributes to your denial itself. So maybe it is better to get it out in the open, but there is always that huge risk. And that is enough for me.
