When Walls Fall
Tom Petty gets into vulnerability and connection in “Walls (No. 3)”
Certain songs seem to find their way into my life when I need to hear their message. I’m sure God helps them along. He recently gave me Tom Petty’s “Walls (No. 3)”, a song I’d only known from the Lumineers cover (which I’d mistakenly believed to be theirs). For my own dumb reasons, I’ve generally left Tom Petty alone, so I likely wouldn’t have found this one on my own. When this song queued onto my Spotify, it became a new kind of Petty experience. The songs of his that I know tend to evoke personal memories, but hearing this one gave me the feeling that he’d written something for where I’m at right now rather than soundtracking scenes from past chapters.
I did a little research after listening to it enough times to know every word by heart, and it gave me a few fun facts: “Walls (No. 3)” is an alternate version of “Walls (Circus)”, the first single on Petty’s only soundtrack album for the movie “She’s the One”, named for a Bruce Springsteen song. Not sure why, but maybe I’ll watch the film. “Walls (Circus)” is cool too, but I like the pace of (No. 3) better. There is no “Walls (No. 2)”, weirdly. Also very fun, the backup vocals include Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. When the Lumineers covered “Walls”, it was on the first anniversary of Petty’s death to honor the late singer. I like the Lumineers version, but nothing about it has ever inspired the need to replay the song over and over that I immediately felt upon hearing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
The opening lyrics are just life: Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks. Some doors are open, some roads are blocked. Sundowns are golden, then fade away. They’re so simple and even a tad cliche in their imagery, but they capture the particular struggle of living with the light and the dark - not denying either or letting one overpower the other - in a way I needed to hear. The lines contain such simple acceptance of the inevitable rise and fall of our feelings, our sense of worth and our experience of fleeting bits of joy amidst otherwise difficult times. Some days we experience the fruits of our hard work, and some days are all hard work with little taste of the outcome we’re hoping for. Sometimes we experience exciting opportunities and success, but a lot of the time we also experience setbacks, thwarted efforts, and perceived failure. And sometimes, even when we’re going through a lot of those rock days and seeing only closed roads, we have those golden sunset moments. They don’t always last long, but we have them, and that’s something.
I’ve been having a lot of rock days lately, and I’ve now realized that when this happens, I tend to collect the rocks and let them pile up in disproportional heaps inside my walls, so much so that they start to fortify the walls, adding to their width and making them even harder to take down to let anyone in or myself out. They make it so hard for me to experience and appreciate the good things that have also been happening in my life, and when I do feel excitement, happiness or hope, I’ve had this weird feeling that I’m not allowed to have those diamonds because I’m supposed to be in the business of collecting rocks. Something clicked when I listened to Petty’s opening lyrics that just accept both these kinds of days together, and I realized my problem. When I keep my walls up and don’t communicate how I’m really doing, the hard things pile up and influence the atmosphere of the small space in which I’m keeping myself. I can see good things, but I’m stuck in my walled-in town of one with all my rocks, so I struggle to access anything that’s not a rock even though I want to. If we can let these walls down or even just manage a little opening in them, we open ourselves to a world that has space for both good and bad.
Petty promises, If I never do nothing, I’m comin’ back someday, and this line sounds so much like recovery: returning home to the place we’re meant to be. I think the opening lines describe the place he knows he’s going home to; it’s not always perfect, but it’s his. It’s where he knows he belongs, and he recognizes that the walls need to come down for him to get there. The other version - “Walls (Circus)”, as well as the Lumineers cover - has the variation: if I never do nothing, I’ll get you back someday. This one emphasizes the connection aspect of recovery. He’s not just returning home; he’s returning to someone he loves, returning to a connection he’s lost.
The refrain illustrates the simple yet kind of terrifying way this can happen: Cause you got a heart so big, it could crush this town. And I can’t hold out forever, even walls fall down. This heart illustrates the result of persistent love and connection laying siege to any emotional wall; when we experience love in any form, it’s like we open little cracks in our walls that can lead to its ultimate crumbling. There’s no immediacy in these lines; they suggest someone persisting in a stubborn existence of isolation but beginning to see that it can’t last with the presence of that much love. When we choose to love, we have to be vulnerable to let it grow. We don’t get to experience the overwhelmingly full force of love when we don’t let ourselves be honest and present with the ones we love and who love us.
We don’t necessarily have walls because we lack love, hate people or want to be alone; I don’t even believe the Grinch really wanted the kind of life he had on Mount Crumpit. If we live long enough in the walls though, they become our known world, and we don’t always know how to begin tearing that down. Petty explains the wall building philosophy, All around your island there’s a barricade that keeps out the danger, that holds in the pain. Putting up walls is the opposite of being vulnerable, something absolutely necessary for successful recovery and cultivating connections. To be vulnerable means we’re able to be hurt; it doesn’t mean we absolutely will be hurt. It’s scary to perceive the potential of harm, especially from the people we love, and putting up an emotional wall seems the safer choice in those situations. I do it because I’m still learning how to honestly communicate what I’m feeling and if I’m hurting. I put a lot of pressure on myself to show up as a better person for the people in my life, to prove to my family that I’m doing well in my recovery, to be the kind of woman that my sponsees and other people in recovery respect and can trust to help them. I know that being transparent and vulnerable is the more honest approach and definitely the more relatable, real way of being in recovery, but it’s hard to open up in the same way I don’t like having anyone see my room when it’s a mess. I’d rather wait until I’ve cleaned it up a bit and acknowledge that it used to be a little chaotic but is now at least somewhat presentable.
I love Petty’s next lines: sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you cry, half of me is ocean, half of me is sky. He doesn’t explain why you’re happy or you cry, just that it happens. Sometimes I’m so happy and just want to share that feeling with everone, and other times I shut down or start crying for seemingly stupid reasons or none at all. And I can’t bring myself to just tell people I’m sad in those times because I feel this need to explain myself. Even when I’m able to take the step of admitting that I’m struggling, I find myself grasping at every possible reason why even if it’s not really why I’m feeling the way I am. This time of year brings up a lot of difficult feelings and thoughts, and I honestly don’t have a clear explanation for a lot of it other than knowing it's partly related to past trauma. That’s my way of pinpointing a clear reason for feelings that I think need an explanation for their existence. A lot of recovery is like that; recovery from any addiction inevitably involves trauma, either from personal experiences that influenced our slide into addiction or from our experience in that harmful, destructive way of living for so long. Even months or years removed from that cycle, we have all these feelings and don’t always have a reason for them. It’s OK to have them; it’s not OK to hide them.
The line half of me is ocean, half of me is sky is such a beautiful way of representing how we know ourselves and let others know us. The half of us that is ocean implies that a great part of ourselves is hidden - our past, our feelings and thoughts, etc. For whatever reason - good or bad - the greater part of who we are doesn’t surface in every interaction we have with others, but it’s there nonetheless. We ourselves may not even grasp the full depths of our ocean half; we have feelings and thoughts we don’t understand, events we don’t have explanations for, and capacities for love, joy, sorrow and strength that we haven’t even tapped into yet. We can choose to just let those deep sea creatures alone, or we can explore them. The sky half of us is the part that we access when we practice transparency, clear communication and honest presentation of ourselves to the world. The imagery works so well because it gives us that harmonized scene of a wide sky above an ocean, each reflecting the other even if one appears a little darker and more chaotic or texturized than the other. Both are boundless and expansive, and we have to embrace both to really love ourselves and let ourselves be loved.
Petty also touches on acceptance, change and growth. He says, some things are over, some things go on, part of me you carry, and part of me is gone. I never really listened closely or examined these lyrics before; I assumed they described a relationship ending and didn’t give it much thought. But now I see them as describing growth, how we move forward with ourselves and in our communities when we’re able to go through this process of breaking down walls and becoming vulnerable. If and when these walls fall down, we let people see us as we are: the good and the bad with no excuses. If we’re doing the work of recovery and taking the steps to leave resentments and harmful practices in the past, our people will see that. I think a lot of the struggle in sharing our stories and opening up is a reluctance to forgive ourselves for past wrongs and mistakes, a struggle that makes it hard to believe others have the capacity for forgiveness and understanding as well. Forgiveness of self and others involves recognizing that while we may be the same people we’ve always been in some sense, we’ve also left behind so much of the person we were by stepping out of the cycle of addictive behaviors. We have to be able to separate the things that are over from the things that go on if we want to step into the world that lies beyond our personal town line. We have to acknowledge the pieces of our story that have shaped us into who we are today, but we don’t have to let past mistakes define us.
We hold onto a lot, for better or worse. That line part of me you carry may suggest a struggle to let go of the past, but it also gives us the image of carrying something good in our hearts. Our knowledge of and love for the people in our lives holds all the ways we’ve come to know them. When I reflect on people in my life, I sometimes see this visual scrapbook of memories that have contributed to the way I feel for each of them now. If I’m feeling love, I see the good - a phrase from a conversation, a smile after a long time away, a good hug, or a familiar gesture or habit. Those are the good pages, and I’m in a place now where most of my scrapbook consists of these kinds of thoughts. But when I’m feeling hurt by or resentful of someone, I tend to see the moments that led to the pain. If I can’t forgive the harm or at least accept my part in it and release the resentment from my mind, I continue to carry those painful parts of the other person in my heart and let them linger there alongside the good parts. If I fail to forgive or accept, those parts infect my perception of others and close me off from being present and open minded. I do the same thing with myself. Depending on the day, I’ll let certain experiences replay in my mind, and sometimes they’re not the ones I want to factor into how I see myself today. If we expect others to let parts of our stories be over and recognize that the ugliness of our past is gone, we have to let it go as well. We don’t deny it or lie about them, but we also don’t need to continue carrying them with us into the world we’ve decided to live in when we choose the path of recovery over retreating back into addiction.
I was recently at a meeting where several people shared that they’d been struggling with uncomfortable, painful and confusing feelings. They voiced something honest, even if it wasn’t pretty, and it takes courage to do that. It gave me (and I think many others) the courage to follow their example and admit to my own struggles. I just hadn’t wanted to be that girl in the gym scene in Mean Girls, the one who “doesn’t even go here” and just has a lot of feelings and is asked to leave. But we’re not in Mean Girls, and when we can own something true and connect with others by doing so, we do go here. We belong when we share with honesty and don’t hold back details that we fear will influence others’ perceptions of us in a negative way. One thing I’ve recognized at meetings is that the shares that resonate most with me are the most honest ones, the ones that admit to the struggle even with the progress. When we see other people taking that kind of brave step outside their walls and being vulnerable, it encourages us to do likewise. We’re far more likely to go outside our walls into the space outside when we can see others out there waiting for us. We can’t just wait inside our walls for a hero to break them down and save us from ourselves. That would be nice, but we owe it to ourselves and others to do something on our end. If we do the work of letting go of our rocks and tearing down the walls they’ve enforced, we not only free ourselves; we let ourselves be part of that force that helps others be vulnerable and open to connection as well. I say this knowing full well that I haven’t been doing a great job of this in my own life. And if you’ve read this far and are in my life, I’m sorry for that. This is for you. It’s not much, but it’s something.
