Somewhere Inside I Wanted To Smile Again
Somewhere Inside I Wanted To Smile Again
The Beatles: 'Dear Prudence' + Silence, secrets, and lies + The desire to shrink + The desire to live
‘I was like Prudence: locking myself inside my own version of the world, competing with anyone I could compare myself to, loathing myself for my perceived failures.‘
When Annie Hellman was little, her parents loaded her iPod with Beatles songs. When she was six, she deleted them. Fourteen years later, struggling to endure a hospital stay, she wanted one back.
My mom and I watched the New Jersey Parkway expanding in the windshield. We kept our eyes straight, refusing to so much as look at each other. It was one of those summer mornings where it’s already humid before sunrise, and we could still see Venus glowing on the horizon. At this point, we hadn’t really talked for three months. I’d been lying to her, lying to myself, and confronting the truth only for 45 minutes with my therapist each Wednesday. Mom had lied too, pretending she believed me. Or at least that’s what I thought back then. I realize now she always knew the truth.
We didn’t discuss where I was heading or what might happen next. We focused on the empty highway and the gray smog of Elizabeth in the distance, watching as dawn slowly turned the navy blue sky a marbled crimson and gold. In the background, SiriusXM “Sixties at Six” played hits from my mom’s bygone adolescence.
When “Dear Prudence” came on, she turned it up. “This is a great song,” she said. I had barely heard her speak for days.
The Beatles were always playing in the background of my childhood: on my parents’ stereo, in the CD player in our minivan, and on my iPod Shuffle, which was full of Fab Four songs and other hits from the Sixties and Seventies. The Shuffle was curated solely by my parents, who said I needed to listen to “real music” and “not that Disney crap.” My mom was 10 in 1963, when the Beatles first album, Please Please Me, came out. Revolver, one of my dad’s favorite albums, was released in 1966, when he was seven. I think they wanted to create a connection between their daughter, living in the new Millennium, and their own childhoods.
For a while, it worked. When I was five, my mom was my hero, so I wanted to grow up to be just like her. She liked the Beatles, so I liked the Beatles. Simple. But then I turned six, got a taste for High School Musical, and started wanting to download my own music. My parents refused. My solution: To run the Shuffle over with my bike. It didn’t break, but eventually — once my sisters joined the pressure campaign — my parents caved. I started skipping the Beatles to get to the new Gwen Stefani or Avril Lavigne. When I ran out of storage space, the Beatles were the first to go.
I’d never liked “Dear Prudence.” The lyrics went over my head, and the music felt listless, boring. But now, listening to it for the first time in 14 years, it calmed me. It didn’t feel listless anymore. It felt light. I let myself exhale, and remembered the connection my mom and I used to have, long before our years of secrecy, resentment, and silence. For 3 minutes and 55 seconds, I was able to breathe.
At the hospital in Denver where I lived for the next five months, weekends were unbearable, mainly because there weren’t enough staff members to lead the discussion groups that filled our time during the week. I rarely had access to my phone. To cope and keep myself occupied, I purchased an iPod and downloaded as many songs as I could — including “Dear Prudence.”
One Saturday, sitting in the common room, curled up uncomfortably in a cold metal chair with a plastic polka-dot upholstered seat, it suddenly felt impossible to bear my dismal surroundings: the Ikea picture frames with stock photos of leaves and rocks, the whiteboards with fading inspirational quotes, the faint lingering smell of an essential oil diffuser. All trying to obscure the fact that I was in a hospital. All failing. I could vaguely make out the Rocky Mountains through the window, but their grandeur was hidden by clouds and the harsh glare of the room’s fluorescent lights. I closed my eyes, put “Dear Prudence” on repeat, and listened as closely as I could, letting the languid sway of John Lennon’s voice drown out the pings from the nurses station.
Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day
Again and again, I held on to the song’s slow crescendo, letting each instrument added to the build-up replace another one of the intrusive thoughts urging me to shrink my body.
I later learned that Lennon wrote the song about the Beatles’ time on a meditation retreat led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They were visited there by Mia Farrow and her sister, Prudence. According to the band members, Prudence refused to socialize with the others after meditations, locking herself in her room to keep trying to reach transcendence. Lennon later recalled that she “was trying to reach God quicker than anybody else. That was the competition in Maharishi’s camp: Who was going to get cosmic first?”
I was like Prudence: locking myself inside my own version of the world, competing with anyone I could compare myself to, loathing myself for my perceived failures.
A few months ago, my therapist told me about a private session she once had with my mom. In this session, they discussed how my mom could prepare for my death. As my therapist explained, my mom wasn’t giving up on me, just trying to brace herself for the inevitable. She didn’t think more treatment would help; all my doctors had agreed that I was past the point of saving. I looked back and calculated that it was shortly after this conversation that my mom and I stopped talking.
By the time we reached Newark International Airport, the sun was rising and I, like Prudence, was being asked to greet a new day. I don’t remember if Mom and I even said goodbye. What I remember is arriving at the hospital in Denver with my headphones in and “Dear Prudence” queued up. When I listen to it now, I hear why I recovered. Somewhere inside, I wanted to smile again. I wanted to hear birds sing. I wanted to experience the world outside of myself — blues skies and sunny days — for years to come. I didn’t want to die young.
The song from my childhood — and my mom’s childhood too. The song that said everything she wanted to say but couldn’t, because she knew I wouldn’t listen. The song that she, with a little help from SiriusXM, gave me to save me.
The sun is up
The sky is blue
It’s beautiful
And so are you
It had been a long time since I thought I was beautiful. ✹