I Like “Growing Sideways”
Hello, friends!
This week’s edition of Things I Like is about a song that aches in all the right places: “Growing Sideways” by Noah Kahan. Like much of his Stick Season album, it’s raw, poetic, and emotionally unfiltered. But this one? This one feels like it’s written from the inside of a therapy session—or maybe from the part of you that’s still deciding whether to walk in the door.
Therapy, But Make It Honest
The song opens with the kind of dark humor that anyone who’s been in therapy (or tried to explain therapy to someone else) will recognize:
“So I took my medication and I poured my trauma out / On some sad-eyed middle-aged man's overpriced new leather couch…”
From there, Kahan sketches out something deeply familiar—the messiness of trying to heal, the contradiction of saying “I’m cured” while still carrying anger and confusion in your body. There’s no resolution, no breakthrough moment. Just fragments of feeling, half-built insights, and the survival instinct of just keeping going.
“But I ignore things, and I move sideways…”
This is the line that sticks with me. Kahan isn’t talking about healing in the traditional sense. He’s talking about coping. About doing something, anything, to stay alive in the face of overwhelming emotion:
“Until I forget what I felt in the first place / At the end of the day I know there are worse ways / To stay alive.”
That line is heartbreakingly honest. It holds space for all the ways we don’t grow in a straight line. All the days where survival doesn’t look graceful or productive, just possible.
Fear, Numbness, and the Hope of Meeting Yourself
One of the deepest emotional threads in the song is the fear that, after everything, we might never truly meet ourselves:
“I’m terrified that I might never have met me / Oh, if my engine works perfect on empty / I guess I’ll drive.”
There’s something so human in that. The fear that our coping strategies—the ones that keep us moving—might also be keeping us from really feeling. And yet, the song doesn’t judge that. It just names it. It tells the truth.
In the final verse, Kahan sings:
“Yeah, it’s better to die numb / Than feel it all.”
And whether you agree or not, you know exactly what he means. That’s the power of this song—it makes space for emotional complexity without trying to resolve it. It doesn't force hope or redemption. It just sits with you.
Why It Matters
As a therapist, I think a lot about how we talk (or don’t talk) about mental health. Growing Sideways feels like a conversation that isn’t sanitized for comfort. It doesn’t promise healing tied in a bow. Instead, it offers something maybe more valuable: recognition.
If you’ve ever numbed out, if you’ve ever moved sideways instead of forward, if you’ve ever feared you were surviving but not really living—this song sees you.
Conclusion
“Growing Sideways” isn’t about triumph. It’s about endurance. It’s about the slow, uneven, sometimes numb way that healing actually unfolds. And in naming that, it gives language to something a lot of us don’t know how to say. Thanks for joining me this week in Things I Like. Until next time, remember: know yourself, love yourself, and if all you can do today is drive on empty… that’s still driving.
