Disclaimer: I discuss themes related to suicide in this article. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out for help. International resources can be found at befrienders.org.

I was back home from dinner with friends, killing time in front of the TV before bed. The next suggested video started. The guitar rhythm was about to take me back, but the first verse stopped me.

“Rows of houses all bearing down on me
I can feel their blue hands touching me”

In my college years, this song felt melancholic, the music video mysterious, artsy, and innovative. Watching it now, in my mid-forties, I realized I had never looked beyond its surface. Or maybe I couldn’t at the time.

The video opens at night in a trailer park in a barren landscape. A man, perhaps in his thirties, lets himself fall backward from a trailer. Until the very end, he seems to move through a kind of purgatory, confronting unresolved parts of his life.

This is a trailer park people live in. Not a place for camping or fun. Not a single smile on anyone’s face. Young, able-bodied men sit in chairs doing nothing.

We see the man as a child in the trailer park too. A child who seems to have grown up around things a child should not grow up around. Dogs only a leash away. Objects being thrown around, barely missing him. There is not a single expression of emotion on the child’s face. As if he had learned early that feeling less was safer.

At one point, the man finally finds the courage to run away from all of it. The child sees this, lifts the stool onto his back, and runs the other way. Maybe he had already run before, carrying a piece of home with him. Or maybe, in that moment, something in the man finally broke free from the wounds of childhood. In the next scene, feathers are floating around the neighbor who had been sitting nearby, as if a bird had just taken off in a rush. Then it cuts again: wind in the man’s hair, his hands stretched forward, almost as if he is flying, yet still on the ground.

Watching these scenes unfold, it begins to feel less like the story of one man and more like the outline of a life millions inherit without choosing.

“This machine will, will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under.”

That line felt particularly heavy against the backdrop of my own ease. A prime steak and a glass of French wine from dinner earlier that night still sat warmly in my belly. I did not grow up rich, but I had what mattered. Food, schooling, and, most importantly, parents who loved me. That foundation, along with hard work and some luck, kept me on this side of the machine.

But the other side was never entirely hidden from me. In my teens, I worked summer jobs at my father’s shop. I operated heavy machinery around dangerous chemicals and dust. At lunch I shared bread with other workers, listened to their struggles, and understood even then that for some people, hardship was the structure of life. In their stories there was anger at luck, anger at not being heard, and beneath both, a weary sense that this struggle had been written into their fate.

“Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under

And fade out again
And fade out again”

On this side of the machine, there is often an expectation that the other side stay in line and make peace with the place assigned to them. And if they hope to cross over, they are expected to do it without complaint, as if effort alone could outrun history, class, misfortune, or neglect.

By this point, the song could have ended in surrender.

Yet when everything seems lost, it chooses to end with love.

The same love I saw at the end of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. When everything was collapsing around the migrant workers of the 1930s, one of the main characters, Rose of Sharon, had just suffered her own devastating loss. She had nothing left. And yet she found something to give to another human being.

Something of herself.

Something human.

Something out of pure love.

The man in the video never escapes that life. At the very end, though, he does the opposite of his opening fall. He jumps and rises in a way people do not normally rise, in a way no one else in the video ever does, despite all their efforts to jump higher.

For a moment the weight of the ground seems to finally let go.

And the last words remain there with him.

“Immerse your soul in love.”

“So I cut the shackles and changed my name.
And I shed my past like skin on a snake.”

The song, run away girl by Alice Merton tricks you at first. The beat skips, her voice lifts, it sounds like freedom. But once you listen to the lyrics carefully and hear the crack in her voice under that fake cheer, you can’t unhear it.

The “visualizer,” which should have simply been called the “music video,” refuses to let you miss it. For three minutes and fifty seconds, the same short clip loops until it is burned into your eyes. Merton, in loose white clothes, runs across a dirt field. Arms wide, a skip in her step, a quick turn, then back again. And cut. Back to the start. Over and over.

Her cuffs are stained. The dirt sticks. The field is barren, with scrub trees, maybe a lake in the distance, maybe nothing. She is running, but she is not moving. The image is cheer painted over entrapment.

“But I came so far to get lost at sea
Oh, where the hell am I supposed to be?”

Watching her stuck in that loop, I felt the urge to look at my own life. I thought about how far I’ve come, sitting in my air-conditioned condo, streaming this video over high-speed Internet on a high-tech flat panel screen, bluetooth headphones on, a fancy drink in my hand. I live in a bubble. And in that bubble it is easy to forget the reality of most people on Earth.

Driving through small towns, I used to ask myself, why do people live here? Some are content. But some would leave if they could. The thing is, Mustafa, those who want out are often stuck. They did not have access to the resources you had.

Not all shackles are external. I used to look at brilliant minds moving nowhere and wonder, why can’t they just…? Not everyone is raised with the same confidence. Trauma and fear can run deep.

You might have been handed this life on a gold platter, or you might have worked hard to get here. Either way, if you are sharing this bubble with me, you were probably never trapped. Not everyone is as lucky, and not everyone who works hard breaks their loop.

Not everyone sheds the dirt off their cuffs.

…and Merton gets it.

“…the signs light up, ‘This way to gold’
But I’m attached to my worst enemy
Oh, who the hell am I supposed to be?”