Why is that funny? Loneliness, laughter as armor, a closet floor, and the three verses. | Music Therapy | Vancouver, WA |

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I sat in my therapist’s office and laughed.

I laughed while I told her my kids were struggling. I laughed while I told her I couldn’t sleep. I laughed while I told her I had a list of things I needed to do and absolutely zero desire to do any of them.

She looked at me, tilted her head, and asked: “Why is that funny?”

I didn’t have an answer. Not a real one.

The real answer, the one I couldn’t say out loud yet, was this: if I don’t laugh, I will cry. And I genuinely don’t know if I will ever stop.

Here’s what no one tells you about loneliness.

We think loneliness looks like isolation. An empty apartment. Friday nights alone. No one to call.

But the loneliness that actually breaks you? The kind that hollows you out slowly, quietly, over years?

It lives inside a full life.

It lives in the middle of a house full of people who need you. At a dinner table surrounded by your family. In a group chat that never stops pinging. At the school pickup line where you smile and wave and ask how everyone’s doing.

It lives in the gap between who everyone thinks you are and who you actually are.

That gap is where the loneliness lives. And for a lot of women, maybe for you, that gap has become so wide, so normal, so just-how-things-are, that you’ve stopped noticing it’s even there.

Except at 11pm. Except when the house finally goes quiet. Except when someone asks how YOU are and actually means it, and you have no idea what to say.

I remember one day so clearly it still sits in my chest.

I walked into my closet. Turned the lights off. Shut the door behind me.

And I laid down on the floor and sobbed.

I stayed there for hours. Hiding. On the floor of my own closet, in my own house, in the life I had chosen, the life I had been so sure I wanted, wondering how on earth this had become my life. How I had become this person I didn’t recognize.

I had the house. The family. The life that looked, from the outside, exactly like the American Dream. I should have been grateful. I should have been happy.

Instead I was on a closet floor in the dark, completely alone, thinking: I must have done something to deserve feeling this way.

That thought, I must have done something to deserve this, is one of the cruelest lies that exhausted, under-expressed women tell themselves. And I believed it completely.

The humor is the tell. And I say this with so much love, because I lived it.

When you can describe your own devastation and make it funny. When you can talk about something heartbreaking with a laugh and a wave of your hand You have gotten very, very good at protecting yourself from your own feelings.

The laughter isn’t denial exactly. It’s armor. It’s a way of keeping the feeling at arm’s length so it doesn’t swallow you whole.

So you laugh. You make a joke. You add one more thing to the list. You stay busy. You scroll. You say “I’m fine” with such conviction that you almost believe it yourself.

This is survival. You learned it because at some point, it was the only way to keep going.

But the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Laughing it off, pushing through, staying in motion, and still ending up on the closet floor wondering when things are going to feel different.

Something has to change. Not your circumstances, necessarily. Not your whole life. But something in you has to decide: I am done not being seen.

Years later, I was in my music therapy program.

The assignment was simple in theory: write three songs in one week. Different lyrics. Different chords. Different styles. Different instruments. Record them and submit.

I sat down to write. And I wasn’t planning on writing this. But sometimes lyrics just pour out, and these ones wouldn’t stop.

The style we had been studying had a specific structure: verse one is where you’ve been. Verse two is where you are now. Verse three is where you want to go.

Past. Present. Future.

I wrote three verses in one sitting. And when I was done, I realized: I had just written the entire arc. From the closet floor, to the cracking open, to the other side.

My story in the purest form, simple, raw and real.

Here are the lyrics. And here is me singing them.

It is in the original submitted form. It is not a performance. I didn’t re-record it. I didn’t perfect it. I sat on my couch, turned on a camera and played.

I’m sharing this because I know some of you are in verse one right now. Some of you are somewhere in verse two. And I want you to know that verse three is real. It exists. I’ve been there. And you can get there too.

Verse 1 Where I had been

Standing here I feel so alone

Surrounded by all these people

How long can I feel so numb

How long can I pretend

That I’m okay

I’m not okay.

This is the closet floor. This is the therapist’s office. This is the laugh that covers the cry that has nowhere to go. This is every woman who has ever been surrounded by people and felt completely invisible.

Verse 2 Where I was

I’m breaking out of these walls I’ve made for myself

I’m letting the light come through

I don’t want to feel so numb

I don’t want to pretend

That I’m okay

I can be okay.

This is the moment of decision. Not fixed yet. Not there yet. But done pretending. Done with the performance. The walls starting to crack, not because someone broke them down, but because I finally stopped holding them up.

Verse 3 Where I was going

It’s clear to me that I’m different now

I’ve stepped up ready to shine

The numbness now faded away

No more playing pretend

Cause I’m okay

I’m better than okay.

I’m better than okay.

This is the other side. Not a perfect life. Not the absence of hard days. But a woman who has reclaimed herself, who is no longer performing, no longer hiding, no longer shrinking to fit a life that was never really hers.

Listen to me sing it here → [Song]

Where are you right now?

If you’re in verse one, surrounded by people, feeling invisible, laughing off the things that are actually breaking you. I want you to hear something.

You are not broken. You are not ungrateful. You deserve happiness. It is not outside your reach.

You are a woman who has been giving everything and being seen by no one. Including yourself. That is a signal.

Verse two is available to you. Not someday. Now. It starts with one decision: I don’t want to pretend anymore.

That’s it. That’s the whole door.

You don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to know what comes next. You just have to be willing to stop laughing off the thing that’s actually hurting you, and let yourself feel it, even for a moment.

Verse three is waiting. I promise.

One small invitation this week.

Not homework. Just this:

The next time you catch yourself laughing at something that actually hurt, pause. Just for a second. Don’t force anything. Don’t spiral. Just notice there’s something underneath the laugh. Something real. Something that’s been waiting patiently for a little air.

You don’t have to fix it. You just have to let yourself know it’s there.

That’s verse two. Right there. That small, quiet moment of honesty with yourself.

That’s how it starts.

FAQ

Can music therapy help with loneliness?

Yes, and in a specific way that talk therapy sometimes can’t reach. When you use music intentionally in a therapeutic setting, you can access and express feelings that words and humor have been covering up for years. The song above is a real example: I didn’t plan to write those lyrics. Music pulled them out of me.

Is it normal to feel lonely even when surrounded by people?

Completely. This type of loneliness, invisible in a full life, is one of the most common and least talked-about experiences for women, especially mothers and caregivers. You’re not unusual. You’re just honest.

I’m not musical. Can music therapy still work for me?

Yes. You don’t need to be musical. You don’t need to sing or play an instrument. Music therapy meets you exactly where you are, with whatever relationship to music you already have. The goal is expression, not performance.

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