The phone call I save for last. The one where nothing gets fixed, and somehow everything quiets down.
This song came out of a week where I genuinely did not know what to do. Nothing in particular had broken. That was almost the problem. It was the kind of week where the noise was inside me, not outside, and I couldn't find the thread back to myself.
I tried the things that usually work. I went for walks. I wrote pages in my notebook that did not lead anywhere. I made coffee I forgot to drink. And eventually — the way I always eventually do — I started calling people. Because when I cannot see things clearly, I borrow other people's vision until my own comes back.
When friends aren't quite enough.
Wine, warmth, open arms. The girls always come. And still — sometimes the noise will not let me go.
My girls came over. They always come over. They brought wine and the specific kind of fierce, no-questions-asked love that good female friendships are made of. They sat with me on the sofa. They let me talk in circles. They held my hand. They told me I was being too hard on myself, that the week was just a hard week, that I was allowed to fall apart a little.
It was the right thing. I do not want to write a single sentence in this post that takes anything away from how essential those friendships are to me. They are the reason I survive most of my weeks. They are the women who have seen me ugly-cry and still text me the next morning to ask how I'm doing.
And — and this is the honest part — sometimes that kind of love is not the one I need.
Sometimes I need to be loved by someone who is not interested in making me feel better. Someone who will look at the thing I am avoiding and name it. Someone who will not collude with the story I am telling myself, because they can tell, the same way they have always been able to tell, that the story is not the truth.
That, for me, is my dad. And that is the song.
The phone call I save for last.
"Far". The three-letter button I press when the others haven't worked. He never picks up on the first ring. He always picks up.
He lives about five thousand miles from me. Not next door. Not a short flight. A real distance — the kind where time zones get involved, where you have to think about whether it is too early or too late to call, where seeing each other is a thing that has to be planned months in advance.
And yet — this is the part I think a lot about — he is the closest person to me, in the way the word closest actually means. Not nearby. Not most available. Closest. The one whose voice can change the temperature of the room I am sitting in, even though the room I am sitting in is on a different continent than the room he is sitting in.
I save his call for last for a specific reason. When I call my dad, I am out of options. I am not calling him for company. I am not calling him to vent. I am calling him because everything else has failed, and I need someone to tell me the truth, and he is the only person I trust to do that without softening it.
He never picks up on the first ring. He always picks up.
What he said that started this song.
I had been talking for maybe fifteen minutes, going around something that I knew I was going around. He was doing his thing where he doesn't interrupt — that long, listening silence that lets you actually hear yourself for once. I had gone all the way around it three or four times.
And then he said, quietly: "Honey, you're in your own way again."
That sentence is in the second verse of the song, almost word for word. I didn't even rewrite it. I just put it down because it was already perfect. He said it the way he says most things — slow, certain, with absolutely no interest in performing wisdom. He just said the true thing. And I sat with the phone against my ear in my kitchen, and something in my chest finally loosened.
That is the entire reason this song exists.
It is a song about the very specific feeling of being lovingly, completely, unflinchingly seen — by someone who has no investment in flattering you, and every investment in your becoming more yourself.
"He doesn't fix it, doesn't soften what he sees. He just lets the silence hold it till I see."
How the song fell into place.
Two instruments. The guitar in my lap, the contrabass leaning beside me. The whole song wanted to be small.
I wrote this one quickly, by my standards. I think because I wasn't really trying to write a song — I was trying to describe the call. Once that became the spine, every section fell into the place it needed to be in.
The first verse is the build-up. The week piling up. The kind of tired I don't know how to wear. My girls arriving with wine and warmth and the noise still not going anywhere. I wanted to be honest about that, because I do not think it makes friendship any less holy to say that there are some things even the best friends cannot fix. They are not supposed to. Different people are for different rooms.
The pre-chorus is the pause before I call him. "There's a voice I haven't dialled yet." I think most people who have someone like this in their life will know exactly what that pause feels like. It is the pause where you decide whether to actually pick up the phone, or to keep pretending you can figure it out alone.
The chorus is the moment after he picks up. The room turning soft. The way he doesn't try to fix the thing. The way he just stays there on the line until the part of me that has to be the loudest finally goes quiet.
The second verse is the conversation itself. His refusal to wrap the hard thing in shine. The exact sentence he said — "Honey, you're in your own way again." That is the centre of the whole song. Everything else circles around that one line.
The bridge is the part I had to be brave to write, because it names the thing I am still learning. "You taught me how to step out of my way / To live without the need to win." My dad is, without ever having used the word, the person who has taught me the most about ego — about how much of suffering comes from the small, daily insistence on being right, on being seen, on being the one who knows. He doesn't lecture about this. He just lives it. And in the bridge I finally put words around what I have been watching him do my whole life.
Five thousand miles runs through the whole song because it is the central paradox I am still trying to understand. The person who knows me best lives further from me than almost anyone in my life. And it does not seem to matter, the way you would think it would matter. It only matters when I want a hug. The rest of the time, the distance disappears the second he says my name.
Why this sound.
I knew from the first verse that this could not be a big song. It could not have any kind of production weight. The whole point of the song is intimacy — one voice on one end of a line, one voice on the other end, the slow steady patience between them.
So: fingerpicked acoustic guitar, walking upright bass, my voice close to the mic, and almost nothing else. The contrabass is the entire emotional foundation of the song. It does not play many notes. It does not need to. It just holds — exactly the way my dad's voice holds a conversation, with that slow, low steadiness underneath everything.
I asked an old friend to play the bass. We recorded it in my living room one afternoon. He arrived early. We had coffee for an hour before we plugged anything in. That hour — the not-playing — is probably why the song sounds the way it does in the end. By the time we picked up the instruments, we were already in the right room.
Where I learned to breathe.
After the call. The kind of stillness that only really arrives when you have finally stopped arguing with yourself.
The title arrived almost last. I had four other working titles and threw all of them away. They were too clever. They were trying to be poetic in a way that this song is not, in fact, trying to be.
"Where I Learned to Breathe" is the literal truth. I did not learn how to breathe from any of the things you might expect — not from yoga, not from therapy, not from any of the meditation apps I have downloaded and deleted over the years. I learned it from a man who has never said the word mindfulness in his life, who would probably roll his eyes if I said it to him now, and who has been teaching me, slowly, for as long as I have been alive, how to step out of my own way long enough to actually hear the room.
I think there is a particular gift in being raised by someone whose love for you is not performative. My dad would not say he loves me on a phone call. He would not need to. The whole call is the love. The slowness of it. The way he doesn't rush to my side of the argument just to make me feel better. The way he tells me when I am being ridiculous, and the way he laughs, very gently, while doing it.
This song is for him. He will probably listen to it once, say something kind but not effusive, and then ask me how my week has been. That is exactly the right response. That is the whole point.
If you have someone like this in your life — someone whose voice is the place you go when you have run out of your own — call them. Not next week. This week. Put the coffee on. Let it be ordinary. The ordinary, I have come to understand, is the entire gift.
If you've listened to the song already — thank you. If you haven't, it's here. Best with a cup of something warm, on a slow morning, with someone you love within reach — or on the other end of a phone.
