“What would you trade the pain for? I’m not sure…”
If you would’ve told me that my 2023 album of the year was gonna be Fall Out Boy’s newest album back in January, I would’ve said something like “sheesh what the hell is happening this year?”
Nothing could’ve prepared me for the changes that needed to happen and no amount of palatable pop music could’ve led me to the revelations I needed to experience after drunken nights where I just felt off. It’s as if I needed a familiar voice with new words of comfort to help me sort through everything that happened. And that’s where Fall Out Boy rose up to the challenge.
This year I went through the heavy task of confronting my deep seated vicious cycles by listening to my inner teenager and finally giving her space to speak her mind. I stopped trying to fit in spaces that I just didn’t fit anymore. I found myself revisiting all too familiar wounds. I let myself pursue the pleasure of heartbreak and the heartbreak of pleasure. I gave space to my creative self in ways I always longed for and now I’m left with a hunger to keep exploring the depths of my creative voice. But I didn’t set on this journey without a few semi-successful escape attempts and detours that broke me enough to come to the end of myself.
Like any kid that grew up on a healthy dose of pop punk and Fall Out Boy, of course it makes sense that I found solace in their album through the start of this inner teenager healing journey. When listening to interviews with Patrick and Pete on their process for this album, I learned that they went back to work with the producer of the legendary Fall Out Boy albums From Under the Cork Tree, Infinity on High, and Folie à Deux. This produced a sort of new nostalgia in their sound where it felt like they were really doing their iconic pop punk sound justice while still innovating their sound. And I love how that parallels what I felt like I needed to do to start healing my inner teenager.
In some way, every song on So Much (For) Stardust describes a tension I felt. And y’all, this might be the first time a spoken word Pete Wentz poem has hit my soul. I know, I can hardly believe it myself.
So now, classically, let me walk you through how each of these songs spoke to me this year.
Love From The Other Side
“Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse…”
Now this is just me really trying to soak in the main character energy of it all, but it’s kind of perfect to have this album (and this lyric specifically) follow my 2022 Album of the Year, Bad Suns’s Apocalypse Whenever. Like if you heard that album back to back with this one, it’s a perfect illustration of how the past couple years have gone.
This epic album opener captures the heartbreak of this year and the dramatic depths that came from interacting with my inner teenager. The part in the chorus where Patrick sings “and I just about snapped, don’t look back, every lover’s got a little dagger in the hand” so perfectly speaks to the way my fears of intimacy and abandonment really threw me for a loop.
When I started this year, I was fully prepared to ignore my family trauma for a season after being committed to therapy from September 2021 until the end of 2022. I was tired of being sad all the time and had learned some good coping strategies that I felt ready to take on the next season on my own. And it was working for a while! I was going to concerts, celebrating friends, and just doing some cool stuff. But every now and then I’d come home to some tension from either one of my parents coming from them acting from their traumas. No matter how much I tried to stay away from them, it’s like I was snapping back into my old high school/people pleaser self every time I interacted with them. That version of me was constantly walking on eggshells around them, unable to express herself. And that’s where my fears of intimacy and abandonment came from.
I was scared to be seen as imperfect because I didn’t think my humanness was worthy of love from my parents. And so then I was also scared of being abandoned if I tried to express myself because I had earned so much validation from living up to expectations and having people not have to worry about me.
So when I see all the things that happened this year and how the realization of the depth of these fears hung above me all year, I think about the way this song (and the title track, but we’ll get there) continually echoes “what would you trade the pain for? I’m not sure.” Because this entire year I’ve really wondered: I know this pain and fear so well, what would I even trade it for? Something pure? Something perfect? What if I feel in my heart of hearts that I’m doomed to never experience it again
Heartbreak Feels So Good
“We could dance the tears away, emancipate ourselves…”
This song will forever remind me of the time I uncontrollably cried in my friend Shannon’s bathroom in Houston during my best friend Katie’s bachelorette weekend. I was carrying so much sadness and it took Shannon and Katie asking me how I was feeling for the dam to burst.
As I mentioned above, there were instances of tension with my parents’ traumas all year. Specifically what triggered me crying to this song in Houston was a wild situation that happened in my neighborhood. A few days before I left for Houston, there was a domestic dispute at our neighbor’s house that ended in gunfire. Police blocked my street until the wee hours of the next morning. It spooked my mom so bad that she wanted my brother and I to stay in the rest of the week. I could hear her war trauma in the rants she went on about the lack of safety everywhere. I mean, I agreed but also I knew I needed to focus on maintaining my own peace and needed to remind myself that I couldn’t live my life in fear. My mom, however, made it clear that she was gonna continue to live her life in fear.
That unwillingness to see another perspective or even entertain the idea of peace broke my heart. It made me see the millions of ways every single person in my family was affected by it: my sister’s estrangement from her emotionally, my brother’s mental health issues, and my dad’s emotional blockages and the concession to the fact that my mom has long held grudges against him. I felt like I was alone in a pit of despair thinking about it all in my friend Shannon’s bathroom. I remember feeling a profound sense of doom as I worried that having a broken marriage like my parents’ was bound to be my destiny.
The dam had broken, but somehow crying about it while hearing the words “heartbreak feels so good” made me able to sleep that night eventually.
This song has so many words of comfort for me in this situation. Sure this thorn in my side will forever be my “uphill battle” but I can assure you that I will be using this road “as a ramp to take off”.
Hold Me Like A Grudge
“I’m like a storm on the horizon…”
This song reminds me of leaning into my playfulness amidst couple of frustrating situations with a couple attractive men. Aka things that I thought would help distract me from my family trauma and not point me to it.
So, confession time: I fully started dating someone this year because I was trying to get someone else off my mind. I thought I was being such a hot girl as I ping-ponged playful banter between two guys for a couple months. It was harmless because I didn’t want anything serious with either of them at the time. And yes, I had expressed that to the guy I was actually dating. To be fair, the person I dated showed me what it actually looked like when a guy pursues me — not the weird mixed signals I was getting from the other guy.
And also, as soon as I ended my crush on the mixed signals guy, the guy I had dated started giving me mixed signals after claiming he wanted to be friends. Yeah, yeah I know two emotionally unavailable people in the same year, I’m in therapy trying to break this cycle now. I promise other songs on this album helped wake me the fuck up lol.
So what do I feel when Patrick sings “hold me like a grudge”? I feel the vicious cycle of me trying to prove that I’m worthy of attention to people that either don’t care about me like that or that are not actively making space for me. It’s as if I’d rather hold someone like a grudge than not having someone to hold at all.
Even the title feeling like a play on my mom’s insistence on holding grudges. Sheesh there’s so many tie-ins with this album that it’s ridiculous out here.
Fake Out
“Do you laugh about me whenever I leave? Or do I just need more therapy?”
This song really speaks to the battle I’ve faced of feeling like my issues hold me back from real relationships.
I experienced so much isolation this year as I stepped away from my community group, realized how my best friends were all experiencing some big life events that meant less time with me, and how my one situation with potential for a true romantic connection fell through.
My fears of intimacy and abandonment being so front of mind this entire year made me feel trapped in a profound way. I felt like I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone even though I was really struggling. I felt like such a downer any place I went so I either put aside my problems for the sake of being there for someone or I stayed home to sulk. 0/10, not a good way to live. It was the worst. And honestly I still feel like I’m struggling with it.
It took me forever to acknowledge what was the root of it all because I was so used to running away from feeling it all. (More on that later.) I kept trying to place the blame all on the romantic situation because that was what felt most like “a fake out”. But I knew it didn’t feel fair.
This song on Fall Out Boy’s setlist was the reason I bought tickets last minute to see them. I needed to have a moment with this song and I cried like I needed to.
This entire year I’ve been feeling like I do “gotta just figure out a window to break out” to experience love in a new way. Maybe next year.
Heaven, Iowa
“The chemistry is a mess it seems, but me, I’m still a sunbeam…”
This song speaks to the pain I felt from the dating situation I’ve mentioned. In essence, I experienced an unexpected connection that was almost so deep it scared me.
I went into this situation with no expectations and was honestly pleasantly surprised at how fun it was after the first date. It was the second date, however, that made me realize that something special was brewing between us.
All of a sudden it was like all my demons and fears started inching closer and getting louder. The thoughts of ‘this is too good to be true, something’s bound to go wrong’ started to take over as I held onto cautious optimism. When he started pulling away because of a so-called busy life season, my self-fulfilling prophecy came true…and I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to tell him about my demons and fears. No, this rejection was all too familiar and I knew how to cope with that because I wasn’t as invested as I thought I was. Yeah, thank God it didn’t go the other way because I wouldn’t have known how to cope with having to take off my masks.
Now, he didn’t tell me that he stopped liking me and I’ve seen him be very nervous around me since I agreed to be friends with him. At first I liked knowing I had power over him like that. But when his inconsistency started to trigger my abandonment issues, I started to spiral. And the intensity of that compounding the other tense situations I’ve described is what pushed me to restart therapy.
Nowadays I feel like we’re “scar-crossed lovers”, paralyzed by our issues. I’m slowly developing the courage to confront him about the ways he hurt me and how I need to take space away from him as a friend if he’s not willing to work on his inconsistency. I don’t know what the future holds here but I do know that I have to explain this all to him and prioritize my self-care for the foreseeable future. I’ll learn nothing from this situation if I do comfortably ghost him. Guess that’s my way of shaking things up and seeing “what comes down”.
So Good Right Now
“I cut myself down, cut myself down, to be whatever you need me to be…”
It is comical how this song so perfectly describes the first half of the year. I had ended a season of therapy at 2022 with the intent of taking care of myself in new ways. But before I knew it, I was starting to ignore familiar patterns for familiar coping mechanisms. I was bottling up the thoughts of my inner child and my inner teenager, especially when my parents’ tendencies started to affect me.
So what exactly were my tried and true coping mechanisms? Running away, going to concerts by myself, filling up my schedule with things that look like self-care but actually put me in a dissociative state, hanging out with people out of obligation (because they have to know I’m as cool as I want them to think I am), and isolating myself from people I actually care about because I always feel like a burden. Essentially doing all that until “the engine just gives out”.
There’s such a grim self-awareness in this song that I love because it captures the almost numb feeling of feigned self-awareness from the first part of this year. The funny and twisted thing about that was that I really did think I was doing so good. I felt self-aware-ish but I wasn’t living in dread (until my parents would do something that would trigger me). I felt fine and present (after I classically dismissed my emotions). Lol yeah, I knew I was running away for a long time but I didn’t think it would all come crashing as hard as it did. This song just feels like a funny ode to the ways I was saving face earlier this year.
The Pink Seashell (ft. Ethan Hawke)
“It’s all a random lottery of meaningless tragedies and a series of near escapes…”
Classically Pete Wentz, this song is actually a movie monologue set to music. Pete stated in an interview that this is from the movie Reality Bites, which I don’t know much about since I hardly watch movies, but I can see how this fits in the album.
Like this monologue, I found myself reflecting on my childhood in a really sad way. It’s been echoing in my head since that time in therapy where I saw and admitted to myself that the reason I’ve been stuck in these cycles with emotionally unavailable people has been because my parents were emotionally unavailable to me. There’s a sense of doom that accompanies the thought that nothing matters but what makes it fit in the album, at least how Pete explained it, is that there’s a focus on moving on from it in little ways. I like to think that it’s as easy as that.
I Am My Own Muse
“I’m just trying to keep it together but it gets a little harder when it never gets better. I’m trying…”
Now this is where I claim the theme song to this new emerging era of me. It’s funny because I remember thinking when I first heard this song that I wasn’t gonna relate to it. I loved the title and wanted to relate to it but I didn’t see how it captured the sentiment of the song. Until this year really kicked my ass.
As I resolved to work through my vicious cycles, I started to see that this song would mean a new version of me was about to break through. The deconstruction of the old people pleaser version of me meant rebellion. It meant leaving things I thought I once held dear. It meant saying no to perpetuating cycles that kept me down. I felt like I took off my “good girl” costume and revealed I had a villain’s outfit on the whole time.
As I unpacked my word of the year “devotion” I became aware of the ways I had twisted my devotion to things I claimed to care about. I had to own up to the fact that just about everything I was devoted to had to do with the idea of saving or maintaining face. I got angry as I saw everything that kept me trapped in this misplaced devotion. But I got angry at myself above all for going along with it for so long.
Thankfully I’ve finally started to own and appreciate the fact that I get angry. My anger tells me what I actually care about and what my heart actually breaks for. And if it is God’s work in and through me that I want to be most devoted to, then that means doing something productive with my anger. I have words to say to people. I have causes to invest in and speak up about. I have songs to write, produce, and share. And fuck it, I am my own muse. Needless to say, this song is carrying me out of this year to the next. And it’s so bombastic that my inner teenager loves to hear it drive me into this new season of growth.
Flu Game
“I’ve got all this love I’ve got to keep to myself, all this effort to make it look effortless…”
On the note of my misplaced devotion this year, I’ve come to realize just how much love, effort, and energy I’m willing to give. It’s funny reflecting back on the relationship with the person I dated this year and how it fits in context with this song.
I’m tempted to only think of singing this song in spite to that person because of the way they fumbled even a friendship with me so badly. But at the root of it all, I have to remember myself and my misplaced devotion too.
The truth is I’m more mad at myself for seeing these messed up behaviors play out in my myself than what time this person might have wasted. This song reminds me of how rich I am in terms of love, effort, and energy and how I can’t let that go towards just maintaining my perception to others or getting someone to like me. And it makes me kinda angry to realize how I’ve been misusing those gifts. I’m still learning how to properly distribute them. Definitely a challenge for next year.
Baby Annihilation
“The first time I took the mask off, just had another one on underneath…”
I never thought I’d find myself relating to a Pete Wentz poem, but here we are. There’s an urgent sense of doom in the instrumentation that so beautifully mirrors the way Pete describes the need for “a little annihilation”. It’s almost delicate in its approach and I feel that on a deep level.
In so many ways, it feels like I’ve needed to blow up my life this year by leaving things I used to hide my identity and devotion behind. It’s as if my inner teenager was saying for years ‘hey, there’s something about these things that are feeding your sins and vicious cycles and the only way to rebuild is to tear down.’ There’s so much wisdom in that and I’ve been scared of doing it for so long because I was scared of what people would perceive. I’m learning to not care about that anymore and the challenge for next year is to live detached from people’s expectations of me.
The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years)
“And I miss the way that I felt nothing…”
This song HURTS. There’s a lot of themes of addiction in this song and while I may not have dealt with that directly, there’s a sentiment in here that I feel in my bones.
In realizing that I spent a good chunk of this year running away from my deeper issues, I also realized how I’ve actually been doing that for the last 10 years. Yeah, it’s almost been 10 years since I went off to college in a fit of spite and disillusionment from my parents admitting that they never really loved each other. At least how I grew up thinking they loved each other.
This song really speaks to the compounded sadness and grief I’ve been running away from. I never let myself cry about the fact that they not only they lied to me but they also dismissed my emotions and that’s why I couldn’t even express my sadness to them. I really miss the days I wasn’t so self-aware. I miss the days that I didn’t know how fucked up my parents’ relationship was and how that fucked me up. Generational trauma is really the bitch that keeps on giving. And as a result I’ve been addicted to being trapped by that trauma.
I’m at a place where I can’t even picture myself carrying this deep grief and having it manifest as a dissociative sadness or a spiteful anger. I live with this constant fear that someone will find out I’m not as joyful or put together as I’ve been known to be. But as the thesis of this album poses, “what would you trade the pain for?”, I feel like that’ll almost be the journey of next year and the future to come. I want to be excited for it. I just worry the grief is too much for me.
What a Time To Be Alive
“When I said ‘Leave me alone’, this isn’t quite what I meant…”
I seriously cannot believe 2019 will be 5 years ago next year. I’m not romanticizing that terrible year but I’m saying it’s kinda wild how I used to operate then and how I’d be if the 2020 pandemic hadn’t happened. Like would I have had the appropriate space to break down over my terrible job? Would I have had the space to actually let myself be angry about the breakup I went through? Would I have ended up where I am now? Confronting the root of the issues that plagued me even then?
As distorted as my sense of time is as a result, the character arc of the last 5 years has been painful but necessary. And that’s exactly the spirit that this song hits.
It’s so bombastically upbeat in an ‘it’s the end of the world as we know it’ kind of way. Looking back at it all, it really was before my “dreams started busting at the seams”.
So Much (For) Stardust
“I used to be a real go-getter, I used to think it’d all get better…”
No song could really close out the rock opera that is this album like the title track. This song is exactly how I’ve been feeling lately as I’ve been reflecting on the way this year went.
Again there’s the urgent sense of doom in this song that captures the way I’ve had to reckon with all that I need to let go of: from the “dreaming of spring” (aka when I was dating my former lover) to the ways I “used to think it’d all get better”. It’s as if I’m now properly grieving the old people pleaser version of me (and all her destruction).
I also like how it echoes the “I don’t have the guts to keep it together” sentiment as in “I Am My Own Muse”. But instead of being angry about it, there’s the resignation to acceptance of it.
This song has me reflecting on what stardust and a star really are. Here’s a really beautifully applicable definition from NASA: “Stars are born within the clouds of dust and scattered throughout most galaxies…turbulence deep within these clouds gives rise to knots with sufficient mass that the gas and dust can begin to collapse under its own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, the material at the center begins to heat up. Known as a protostar, it is this hot core at the heart of the collapsing cloud that will one day become a star.”
I like to believe that all this pain and pressure I’ve faced has a purpose. I don’t exactly know all the ways that’s gonna manifest. There’s definitely still part of me that’s scared of seeing the ways that’ll all manifest. But I’m starting to believe now that when God called me to be a light on a hill, maybe He didn’t mean a candle in the wind or a small bonfire. Maybe he meant me as a star.
And if that is true, then I can say that my cloud has definitely been collapsing this year. And it’s about damn time that it did.
So yeah, so much for stardust. I thought I had it all when I was pretending to be a star but really was just a bunch of dissociated and fragmented dust. But also, maybe there’s so much more to come by letting the heat rise in my core and letting that transform the dust I used to be. Maybe it’s just a matter of time until I find the place I’m meant to really shine.
Closing Thoughts
It feels insanely poetic of me to compare myself to a forming star — but that’s how I feel coming out of this year. The gravity of this year has created such an intense pressure in me that I have no choice but to give into the rising heat and explode. All these cosmic metaphors feel really in line with me starting my Saturn return journey.
All in all, I can’t help but be thankful for it all. As painful as it was, I got to the end of myself where I looked in the mirror and said I just can’t live like this anymore.
This album has meant so much to me as I’ve handled the journey that this year had for me. And it really just goes to show that I should never underestimate the genius that is Fall Out Boy. I’m endlessly fascinated at the ways their songs can hold so much meaning with such memorable melodies and arrangements. This album was really a rock opera and it soundtracked my life so beautifully this year.
So here’s to next year, when I have no idea what is coming for me except therapy and doing some scary things in the name of growth. 🌟
If you’re looking for albums I enjoyed listening to this year, I have those too and broke them down by season:
SOUNDS LIKE FEELS LIKE 
2 Comments