This Song Is For Everyone Who Thinks They're Forever Alone

Colleen Green's "Deeper Than Love" is so accurate in describing what it's like to feel insecure and terrified of intimacy that it's kinda terrifying.

Colleen Green’s second album I Want to Grow Up is basically a quarter life crisis set to catchy ‘90s-style alt rock.

Hardly Art

She starts the record off with a bold resolution to change – "I want to grow up / because I'm sick of being immature / I wanna be responsible / and I'm so sick of being insecure" – and the rest of the album shows how that's easier said than done. She sings about dating fickle dudes and dealing with crushing anxiety, and trying to break out of bad habits and negative thought cycles. The album is brave in its unflinching honesty and inspiring in its commitment to changing toxic patterns.

“Deeper Than Love,” the centerpiece of the album, is the darkest track on the record, and the one that delves deepest into the root of Green’s insecurities.

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It’s about wanting to experience love and have a real relationship, but knowing that you’re absolutely terrified of true intimacy because you’re convinced no one would ever love you if they knew who you really are.

Hardly Art / Lyrics by Colleen Green

It's a painfully honest song, and Green holds nothing back – the music is stark and cold and brutal, and it's actually kinda terrifying to listen to it. She sings "I don't wanna think about it, it's too scary" in the first refrain, but that's before she even gets to the really agonizing stuff about bad sex and self-loathing. The song is like those those times when you can't fall asleep and your mind just starts running through disaster scenarios and picking apart everything you hate about yourself. It's like picking at a mental scab.

Admitting to these thoughts is not easy, but it's so common to feel this way. Green is obviously pretty horrified by being this emotionally unavailable, but this song is clearly coming from a place of wanting desperately to fix this problem. In the first verse of the song it seems like the question she's asking is whether she'll ever get it together enough to have a real romantic partner, but by the third verse it's a bit more complicated. She's scared of intimacy because she wants to protect herself, and the distance she puts between her and other people has become a sort of survival instinct. At the end of the song the question becomes more like – is it worth "surviving" and keeping yourself "safe" to live like this? The answer is definitely no.