Amnesia, pattern repetition and escape in “The Big Picture”
Top 5 most DID Bright Eyes lyrics: #5
CW: CSA/rape
Welcome to my series on the top 5 most DID Bright Eyes lyrics, where we explore various elements of our majorly dissociative life through the lens of singer/songwriter Conor Oberst’s beautiful poetry.
You’ll find a full introduction with disclaimers here, such as the fact that Oberst does not have DID, as far as the general public is aware, and the fact that DID system experiences vary greatly.
Now let’s jump into the Bright Eyes lyrics with the 5th-highest DID correlation factor according to the subjective scoring system I developed for this project (vibes-based).
[You] keep trying to find your way out
Of that maze of memories
It all sorta looks familiar
Until you get up close, and then it’s different, clearly
But each time you turn a corner, you’re
You’re right back where you were
And your only hope is that forgetting might
make a door appear
“The Big Picture,” LIFTED, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Bright Eyes, 2002
Here we are kicking things off with a “maze of memories” and the strategy of “forgetting” to “make a door appear,” i.e. allow you to escape from a cycle of repeating a presumably unpleasant past. Sound familiar? That’s right, we’re talking dissociative amnesia, folks. Not literally in real life here in the song, but here in DID, yes, literally in real life.
Dissociative amnesia (caused by traumatic events rather than physical brain damage) is a DID cornerstone. Something happened to you you didn’t like? Like really didn’t like, justifiably so? And it’s happened before and it’ll happen again, no doubt? Try forgetting it. It’ll leave you ill-prepared for your next encounter, but you won’t have to deal with the unbearable pain of this one, at least not for now. As young children at the mercy of abusive and/or neglectful adults, it can be the only “door” available to us.
The lines also refer to this involuntary repetition: “You’re right back where you were,” he says. Being stuck in these patterns only creates new memories that exactly resemble the old ones. This is a big part of DID and is often the case with anyone with a traumatic childhood. People with abusive parents who end up with abusive partners. Me repeatedly finding ill-managed, male-dominated work environments full of lowlifes ready to smile at me in the halls then brutalize my child alters behind closed doors on a regular basis. That’s why I call it Abuse World, because it happened pretty much everywhere I went as I unconsciously sought to recreate previous dynamics that I thought were “normal.”
This was easy for me to do, my therapist will remind me, because I myself didn’t know about any abuse at the time. While the alters knew a scrambled version of this truth, I believe the previous context wasn’t always in reach. Anyone who’s dealt with sexual assault knows it’s hard to access the thinking mind in these moments of terror. That plus copious alter-switching1 made it extremely difficult to know what was even going on to begin with. This led to an endless string of perceived first-time assaults, with all the fear and confusion inherent in discovering the depths of cruelty in real time.
Meanwhile, on a fully separate plane, the “maze of memories” “all sorta looks familiar.” Now why is that? Familiar—sorta—but by no means fully-remembered. It’s like, why do I suddenly feel four years old? Because I was four years old, I am four years old. The alter experiencing the present interaction is still four years old just like they were last time, the time before that and all the way back.
“Until you get up close and then it’s different, clearly,” Oberst wisely continues. Yes, upon closer inspection, the memories are two different events from two different times. In my case, this was legitimately not the same guy as 25 years ago. Those men never met. I know that because I do know what’s happening, and I do know where I am. But he’s using all the same tactics, doing all the same stuff. Calling me that word. How? Why? What did we do then? What do we do now? The freeze response clicks into place in that comfortable way only nature knows how. Next alter, please!
While it’s the best shot we’ve got as chronically abused children, Oberst correctly implies that “hope” and “forgetting” are unlikely solutions to the cyclical problem faced by the capable adult he describes. “[W]ishing will just leave you empty,” he says as the song progresses. As a more active alternative, he shares how making art and standing up for what he believes in have helped him move on from lingering in these hazy states.
For me, escape from pattern repetition in Abuse World came only through the isolation of the pandemic in 2020. I sometimes wonder how other DID systems find enough safety to bring their alters into their awareness, because I got kind of lucky being forced to stay at home, the only place on earth I was truly safe.
Would love to hear from other DID systems on how they discovered the full extent of their memory maze and finally faced its contents. Would love to hear from Bright Eyes fans on how their lyrics map onto your suffering. As always, I’m assuming most people consume art to validate their suffering, but maybe that’s just me and my gargantuan backlog of suffering.
Oberst actually has a couple lines acknowledging this affliction, too. He speaks of “the sound of loneliness” making him “happier” in mourning the loss of his cousin to suicide and says “sorrow is pleasure when you want it instead” in describing the “soul singer in a session band” awash in his misery. He doesn’t say it’s a good thing, but he says it’s a thing! Can confirm. Goodbye til I’m back.
It’s different for every system, but for us one alter would complete each “step” of the assault and then hand the baton to the next one for the next “step.” From the moment the assailant’s tone changed from faux-friendly to predatory to the bleary-eyed, red-faced aftermath, several alters would have been involved, each trying and failing to prevent the inevitable in their own way.
This ensured the single memory would be chopped into so many pieces that it would be impossible to put together again, or so we thought (and hoped) at the time. Perhaps picture those trendy chopped salads and then try to make it back into a bell pepper and cucumber again. Not that anyone would want to eat an un-chopped cucumber or bell pepper, how disgusting. What I’m saying is, EMDR on memories when I was older and had more alters in place has been quite a challenge. These alters must be commended on a job well done.