I am a Rock

A Rock Feels No Pain (And Other Lies I Told Myself) 🪨

Isolation, Emotional Armor, and the Long Work of Becoming Reachable

Paul Simon wrote “I Am a Rock” in 1965, when he was 23 years old, nursing a broken heart in a bedsit in England. He was alone and far from home and apparently feeling it pretty hard. The result was four minutes of winter that somehow still sounds exactly like the inside of a closed door.

I came to Simon and Garfunkel the way a lot of people do, through my parents. “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of Silence” were in heavy rotation in our house growing up. “I Am a Rock” was always the one that hit differently. Even as a kid, I felt something in it that I did not have words for. I just knew the narrator was not doing well, despite how confidently he kept announcing otherwise.

The song is narrated by someone who has decided people are not worth the trouble. He has books and poetry and won't cry and does not need friendship or love. He has built walls, a fortress deep and mighty, and he has decided this is strength. The famous final lines, “A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries,” land like a door slamming shut. You are supposed to hear them as a declaration. I have always heard them as a confession.

Here is what I know about the fortress strategy: it works, right up until it doesn't.

I spent years doing a version of what this song describes. Not the dramatic hermit version. I showed up to things, made people laugh, kept most of the hard stuff where nobody could see it. The walls were internal. I was present in the room and absent everywhere that mattered. Somewhere along the way I had learned that being genuinely known by people was too risky. If they knew the real version and left anyway, there would be nothing left to protect.

That is not strength. That is a very elaborate kind of hiding.

There is a line I keep coming back to: “I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain.” It sounds like a conclusion. It is actually a wound talking. Nobody who truly did not need connection would bother writing a four-minute song about not needing it. The very existence of the song is evidence that Paul Simon was not a rock and not an island. He was a 23-year-old kid who was lonely and hurt and putting the best possible face on it.

I recognize that move.

Depression does this thing where it makes isolation feel like the logical response to the world. It tells you that you are protecting people from yourself, or protecting yourself from people, and that this is responsible and even noble. It dresses withdrawal as wisdom. It makes the closed door feel like a reasonable architectural choice rather than a symptom. Anxiety adds its own layer, all the ways connection could go wrong, all the ways being known is a liability rather than a gift.

I believed those things for a long time. The cost showed up in my marriage, in my parenting, in the relationships where I was physically present and emotionally somewhere else entirely. Donna has stayed. Dylan and Reese still call. I am still working on understanding why I was so committed to a strategy that kept the people I loved most at a careful distance, and still learning how to build something different in its place.

Therapy helped me see that the wall-building was not a character flaw. It was a learned response. At some point, being closed off had been useful, or at least had felt that way. The problem is that the response never updated. It kept running the same program long after the original threat had passed, applied indiscriminately to everyone who got close. That is a reasonable description of what emotional armor does when you wear it past its expiration date.

What This Song Got Right 🎸

“A rock feels no pain.” That is technically true. A rock also does not feel anything else. It does not feel a dog putting his head on your leg in the dark. It does not feel the particular relief of a conversation where someone finally gets it completely. It does not feel the specific kind of gratitude that comes when someone stays, when they know the hard version and they stay anyway. Those things require being reachable.

I am still working on being reachable. I am a lot better at it than I was. The walls are lower. Some of them are gone. There are still mornings when the pull toward the island is strong, when closing off feels safer than showing up, and I have to make a deliberate choice to do the opposite. Those mornings are probably never going away entirely.

The song gets something right, though. Closing yourself off is a choice. That means opening back up is also a choice. Paul Simon figured that out eventually. He kept writing songs, kept letting people listen, kept being known. That is the part that does not fit in a four-minute track about a rock. It takes a lot longer than four minutes.

It turns out I am not a rock. Most of us are not. We just get very good at pretending.

Take gentle care of yourselves and of each other.

Keep going,

Blake

Disclaimer: While music can be a powerful tool for emotional well-being, it is not a substitute for professional mental health support. The information in this blog is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or professional advice. I am not a trained mental health expert. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified therapist or counselor. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. You can also contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.