A little house down my suburban street, when I was a kid, had peeling paint, and curled up shingles, and an overgrown yard.
There was a formerly white wooden fence, about 3 feet high, with a gate that was falling off. Cats wandered in and out of the foliage. Trees, which had grown on their own, partially obscured the house from view. You’d think it was abandoned, that nobody lived there. Someone did, though. She lived there with her cats, all of which she had taken in, out of compassion for them.
The person that Rachel Newnham’s “Nobody Loves You Like I Do” is written to, is maybe kind of like that house, or its homeowner.
Sometimes I feel like I am that house, to be honest. Somewhere inside, someone resides, emerging once in a while for supplies. But challenges have been overwhelming. The outside world has taken over. Life itself is obscured.
“Nobody Loves You Like I Do” is written for a lover who is a little lost, and is feeling rather unloved within the world as a whole. It is a song of support, offering space, time, and encouragement.
Newnham brings reminders of the good times, of that core of intimacy and care, of the person who resides within the ramshackle retreat, and she gently calls to them. She calls to the weary soul in the darkness, bringing a soft glow of comforting light.
Nobody knows what we’ve been through
People do get burned out. What seemed like a monumental and important effort gets lost, and the results we wanted don’t seem to match the energy we expended. You need someone to come alongside, to really see you, to say “Nobody loves you like I do.” You need someone to give you gentle encouragement, but also time and space, “while you heal.”
When I first heard this song, it was after my family and I had been through two emergency evacuations due to forest fires, in the space of a month’s time. After the fire danger subsided, over a period of a few days, as much rain fell in our province as usually falls in a month. That brought various different sorts of flooding to much of our town, although our home, luckily, escaped damage.
We got through that crisis, but after that, there was still work to catch up on, family and community members needing support, taming an overgrown yard, and household maintenance requiring attention as well. We were, comparatively, far better off than others. I felt, though, like I needed to put a damper on my own expressions of fatigue and stress, given the relatively greater concerns of others around me.
Even when you successfully meet challenges, your energy can be drained, time can be siphoned away from other essential tasks, and you can be left with a need for physical, mental, and emotional recovery.
When a crisis has passed, the need for replenishing depleted energy, for recovering and finding the internal spark again, continues. That’s when having that support, someone alongside you, feels really important. Maybe you can come up with the energy to meet a crisis, but after that, you get lost in the news cycle. You may feel like nobody loves you, but Rachel Newnham sings the edit that you need to hear – “nobody loves you like I do.”
