Both Sides Now

Complexity, nuance and age

I want to talk about a song. Quite possibly my favorite song ever.

It came out a year before I was born, which feels oddly perfect — like it was sitting on a shelf somewhere, waiting for me to catch up. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

I have no memory of the first time I heard it. I’m sure it drifted past me a hundred times before I noticed — in a film, in a store, in somebody’s apartment while I was looking for the bathroom. But somewhere in my twenties I actually heard it. Not just heard it. Felt it. A kind of melancholy I couldn’t place. Not sadness about a particular thing. The recognition of something true that I didn’t yet have language for.

It’s one of those rare songs that, the second it starts, my whole system changes. I drop into humility. Into a kind of surrender I don’t usually access on demand. I am, briefly, a better person. Then it ends and I go back to being whoever I was before.

The song is about clouds. And then it isn’t. Same clouds, seen from two different lives. That’s the whole move. Joni does it in four minutes.

The place I notice it most clearly in myself is when I’m judging. Not dramatically. In the small, everyday tightening that happens when I decide I already know what something means. I’ve come to think of judgment as a signal flare. It almost always means there’s a layer of complexity I’m not willing to look at yet. Or that I just don’t have the capacity for it in the moment. Either way, the flare goes up.

This is where my father comes in.

For years, I held him with a lot of judgment. Not because I was trying to be unkind. Because I couldn’t yet see him in the full complexity of his own struggle. He was bipolar. And when you grow up inside that, you don’t have the eyes — or the emotional bandwidth — to hold the whole picture. So you do what young minds do. You compress the story. You make it manageable. You decide which parent is the hard one and which parent is the safe one, and you file everything under those two headings, and you do not revisit the filing system for about twenty-five years.

The moment I remember most clearly is the one I spent years calling the worst day of my life.

I was leaving America to travel for a year. The real reason was that I wanted to be with my girlfriend in Switzerland. I was too scared to tell him that. I knew how it would land. So I told him a smaller version of the truth, and eventually the full version came out the way full versions always do.

He broke. He gave me thirty minutes to get everything I owned out of his house.

He told me I was dead to him. Out of the will. That he never wanted to speak to me again.

I filed it under cruelty. Under rejection. Under this is who he is. I carried it that way for a long time.

What I couldn’t see then — what took me years to see — was that it wasn’t cruelty. It was fear. Fear for me. Fear of losing me. Fear of a world he couldn’t reach into and protect me from. Fear that came out sideways and loud and final because he didn’t have another language for it, and because the illness he lived inside didn’t let him slow it down long enough to find one.

He wasn’t trying to end us. He was trying to hold on. He just did it with the only tools he had, and those tools were on fire.

I couldn’t see that at twenty. I could only see the thirty minutes. The boxes. The door.

The clouds, from one side.

It took me a long time to look again. And when I did, he was still the same man. Same moment. Same words. But the meaning had changed. Not because I rewrote the past. Because I was finally able to hold more of it at once.

And then the song does the thing great art does. It doesn’t end with a triumphant conclusion. It ends with an honest bow. Even with age, even with experience, even with perspective — we’re still not seeing the whole picture. We can look from both sides and still not fully grasp it.

That’s the part I love. It doesn’t resolve life. It respects it. It lets it stay complicated.

I still don’t really know clouds at all.

Both Sides Now on YouTube, Joni Mitchell