You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away?

Musings about the song of my life.

November 3 2019 — This story was written in response to a prompt about the one song that has been an anchor throughout our lives.

Many people are given a well rounded introduction to the world of music. I was given The Beatles.

My Nan and Pop, who I spent every Friday night with, loved the early stuff, and particularly the first Past Masters — Love Me Do, I Want To Hold You Hand, She Loves You, will all indelibly be linked to memories of me building a fort between their two beds. My parents, and particularly my dad, liked the later stuff — one of the earliest birthdays I remember was a Magical Mystery Tour-themed van ride, following clues to locations all over the city.

I really can’t overstate how predominant The Beatles were when I was beginning to work out what music was: they were everywhere; they were inescapable. Hence, when picking a song that has been ever present within my life, there was nowhere else to turn.

There are two Beatles songs which are currently rated 4 stars in my iTunes Library: You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away and Here Comes the Sun. John vs George, the true yin and yang of the Beatles (come at me Paul fans).

I would like to choose George, who’s music I have been gradually uncovering and growing closer with as I have grown older. But who am I kidding: I am an emo kid at heart, and John is nothing if not the first emo (park that for a later article).

And so it is: You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. An inherently contradictory song — its creation being an act of refusing to hide the wisdom of hiding our emotions — it is arguably the pioneer of one of the defining traits of pop music: the moral defiance of making public things that seem better left private.

It would be fair to say I hated high school. Hate is a strong word, but this is how I remember it: a daily battle to hide my emotions to create the impression of being cool.

I distinctly remember being scared of liking Adam’s Song by Blink 182: not just because of the emotional fragility it exposed from a trio of otherwise dick-joke-loving pop-punks, but also more simply because it was daring enough to have a piano in it.

I saw no choice but to hide my love away: yes to seem cool, yes to try and fit in with my allotted friendship group, but mainly because this seemed like the only way you had a chance with girls. The worst thing about the horridness of Treat ’em Mean, Keep ’em Keen is when you find out that it works.

I was incredibly confused about girls in high school, and things barely got better from there. It’s not that I never showed love, it’s just that it proved to be hopelessly clumsy and often destructive when I did. Choosing the wrong places and the wrong people; missing the fact that a good time for me to show my love might not necessarily be the right time for the other person.

I can probably blame this in equal parts on Ecstasy and Ego, which both had an unhealthy role in my life in my early 20s.

Looking beyond girls (mercifully), I can see that I have also been reluctant to show my love in other aspects of my life.

I have been hopeless at having close and long lasting friendships. Again, it’s not that I have never had close friends, or best friends — they just faded away, naturally, or disintegrated, because they were a terrible idea to begin with.

Hence, at some stage, I gave up. I wouldn’t say I have had a best friend, and I doubt anyone would have considered me theirs, for the last 8 years.

That sounds more depressing than it actually is. There are many people in my life that I love and who I’m sure love me back. I simply reached a stage where it was necessary to close myself off emotionally to truly vulnerable and life-affecting human relationships.

Cannabis helped greatly here: you are never alone when you are high, because the whole universe is on your side. To say it also hindered in many ways goes without saying. Nonetheless, for the company it provided in those initial lonely years, it will forever have a place in my heart.

More recently it has been religion, and developing a loving relationship with God. I can open up to Him, show Him my love, because, well, He knows everything anyway, so there isn’t much at stake.

But even that love I kept hidden away. Interestingly, that’s where writing, and more recently Medium, have come in. Just writing that I love God, knowing that it will be public, makes me uncomfortable, but I know it’s a vulnerability I need to show, to start to make my way back.

But, then it gets back to girls, where it all began.

I’m still hopeless with the opposite gender. I really don’t know where to start, and when I even dip my toes in and show just the slightest trace of emotional vulnerability, I immediately feel guilty that it is just for my own selfish reasons. That I am just making the same mistakes again.

How can I even try? I can never win…

And so, I do what John decided to do: just tell everyone who will listen about the love I have hidden away.