Jed Wolf

My first memories of sobbing were in wet beds. When my wailing attracted my parents, their raging made me vomit. When they slammed the door, sometimes leaving me no choice but to sleep in my own mess, I learned to dissipate my frustrated energy by rhythmically moving my limbs. To this day, a jiggling ankle or wrist brings me back to those nights.

Three decades later, my nights follow a familiar pattern. I fall asleep around 9:30, then lie awake from midnight onward, listening to podcasts for three or four hours until I drop off. With only one good eye, I can no longer read for very long and without distraction, my brain can easily spiral into dark territory.

It oscillates—the left side haunted by primal fears, the right side obsessively designing gardens and crafting philosophies. Sometimes the halves merge as I twist in bed, traversing mountainsides and old haunts like the intimate chambers of my heart. I’ve been hardened by early injustice, becoming sarcastic yet strangely resistant to cynicism. During these nightly narrated vigils, lying horizontal and susceptible to deep anxiety, it becomes too easy to wonder if I—or others—are monsters.

Last night, before resetting my 45-minute podcast timer for the fifth time, an early song I’d written surfaced. “For some reason,” I thought, hoping some divine intervention had prompted this reminder of my early penchant for sentimentality.

This Song

You seem to have purpose and you work real hard.
Can I be just like you?
I’ll clean my room and I’ll rake the yard,
But there’s always too much to do.

I don’t wanna do it. Don’t make me feel wrong,
But I just can’t rake very long.
All that I know about my purpose in life
Right now is to sing this song.

I’ll go to college, and I’ll work for a grade,
But I’ll never get a degree.
I’ll keep on changing each plan that I make
For security.

I don’t have a plan and I might be wrong,
But I just can’t plan any longer.
All that I know about my purpose in life
Right now is to sing this song.

Sometimes I feel like a bird trying to fly
With no feathers or air.
I’m down on my knees and you want me to try
A more practical prayer.

I dream of a place where I let it all go
yet follow the sound of your call.
Flying above everything that we know
as if we know nothing at all.

I say, “Dad, there’s nothing. Where do we belong?”
And you say, “Jed, nothing is wrong…
Sing your song.”

I remember bursting into tears while writing the last line. “Sing your song” was a desperate wish. My insecure, judgmental parents—blamelessly convinced I was the source of all their misery—never considered embracing me in any way. They wouldn’t have advised self-acceptance, but “sing your song” was the only lyric that fit.

Lying there last night, replaying the last verse in my head, I felt a raw surge of emotion hearing my father who’s been dead for many years say “nothing is wrong.” I lingered in the sickening discomfort, feeling my demons lean in until the artificially soothing addition of “sing your song” dissolved the tension. Without those final words, “nothing is wrong” sounds like “Nothing’s wrong god damn it! Why the fuck are you crying?” Knowing my father was incapable, I rescued myself with my imagination.

Recalling my parents’ relentless gaslighting, I realized how close to breaking I was when I wrote it thirty years ago. But that manufactured hope—the resolutions and rescues I’d weave into my dark songs from then on—literally saved my life transforming victimhood into survival like lullabies.

Now, as my phone floods with devastating news and friends seethe with dread, I still hear in them how I parented myself. They remind me that art can transform isolation into community, providing what we need if we listen to shift.

Some sleepless nights, when rambling narrators lose my attention and demons begin closing in, I invite them under my covers to spoon. We lie there together, dreaming of things yet unwritten, until the first Carolina Wren breaks the dawn silence with its fiercely demanding song.