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the family archive lyrics
BY JUSTINE THOMAS
Left school at sixteen
Some say it was so wrong
But all of this journey
I wouldn’t have
couldn’t have
The life I’ve known
Words bled from pages
Traces of judgement
They lied with calculations
Parading as affirmations
Pages one through a hundred twenty five
Oh how I long to read such a curious find
Oh how the mob boss had a devious mind
Chorus
I survived
The family archive
The journals of
Mass deception
Pages bled
Tales read
The truth just lies
In our crazy eyes
I survived
The family archive
Married at twenty
Some say I was too young
But all of this journey
I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have
Done it alone
We swam with pirates
Spreading their virus
We hung with manipulators
Parading as fucking savors
Pages hundred through a thousand sixty-five
Barely mentioned
footnotes between the lines
Yet the silence freshly wounded my mind
Chorus
Records spun
Full of
Unsealed crimes
Irony strikes
In the souls
Bound inside
I must confide
With the cyanide
I’ve made mistakes
That are lost in time
But none are the ones I was judged for
Because I swore behind closed doors
To put my trust in secret accounts
Offshore
The truth just lies
In our crazy eyes
The truth just lies
In our crazy eyes
Oh I survived
The family archive
Chorus
Oooo ooo oooo
I survived
The family
archive
the journals of family secrets
about the song
When I was a little girl, I used to wander into my grandfather’s office every morning, whenever I came to visit. Blurry eyed, I’d look at him and see him typing away on his computer. I’d ask him what he was writing and he’d say, “his journal”. He wrote in it every single morning – he never missed a day. I’d naively ask him, “Can I read it?” In which he’d respond, “No. Not until I die. Then you and everyone else can read it.”
I wondered at the time what he wrote about. I imagined the journals full of blissful memories. Fun days we had together. Our outings to McDonalds or playing ping pong in the backyard.
Throughout the years growing up, my family was always the outsiders in the family fold. For whatever reason, we were never embraced. Family gatherings were awkward and I often lonely. My grandfather though would always sit and talk with me and I felt our relationship was meaningful. He always seemed too intrigued by analyzing life to judge anyone for living it. Or so it seemed.
When my grandfather passed away, I was already in my 30s – and needless to say, for myself as well as all of my relatives, we had all been waiting a very long time to see what was in these journals. I expected diary entries. Some drama here and there. Some negative thoughts, surely. After all, I wasn’t a naive little girl anymore and understood that journals are full of various feelings and emotions.
What I didn’t expect though was two shelves of hardcover novel style books, dated for each year, complete with an author’s page and prologue – as if my grandfather expected these to one day be published for the world to read.
If I thought I was already shocked, that shock had nothing on what I was about to find inside those pages.
The pages weren’t just full of my grandfather’s thoughts. They were full of secrets. Every secret every family member had ever trusted him with was in there – for everyone to read. Private moments that should never have seen the light of day. Recorded and transcribed phone conversations. A private diary note he stole from mother and rewrote into his book. Then, for the cherry on top: scathing thoughts about us all. Not just a random bad day here and there. Repetitively. Day after day. Year after year.
I suppose I can consider myself lucky. I’ve always had trouble expressing my feelings and trained myself growing up to keep them to myself. Because of that, my secrets – my stories – weren’t in these books. Of course, on the flip side, he considered me to be extremely shallow for that reason. When issues would arise, he would jump to the conclusion that family members were mentally ill. That I was mentally ill. Mainly, because I had a mind of my own.
It was ironic. The pages were full of judgement and yet he knew very little about me. He forgot to mention the day I was even born. Only a few entries later did I get mentioned, like I was an afterthought. There were also things he denied saying over the years, but it was right there in the pages. Written down. Saved forever.
Reading those books – it felt like our lives was one big social experiment in his eyes. He was trying to decipher how people think… more accurately, how they feel. Because he couldn’t. He had closed off his emotions after the tragedies he faced as a child and he spent his life trying to piece together human emotion. For his final hurrah, sharing these books was the icing on the cake. How would the family respond when discovering 40 years of family secrets written down for everyone to read? He would never know the results but he died knowing what he would unravel.
I spent my life fearing being judged for the choices I had made. Being considered a “high school drop-out” because I left school at sixteen for reasons out of my control. Being considered “too young” when I married at twenty. Being considered a “failure” for not succeeding at certain dreams – at least not yet.
I also spent my life desperate to feel included. I grew up always having to be the independent glass child (more on that in the upcoming lyrics for my song, “Hurt”). On both sides of my extended family, I never felt embraced. This led to a very bad situation in my early 20s when I worked for a mentally abusive boss. He reeled me in with the claim that we were a family. I was so desperate for that feeling, that the moment even a sliver of that idea was dangled, I ran to it. And I got destroyed for it.
At the root of the song, The Family Archive lyrics are about the complexities of family and generational trauma. We imagine an ideal of family being the people who always protect us. Love us unconditionally. But so few of us actually experience that. Whether it’s immediate or extended family. We face judgement from people who never get the chance to know us – and then we spend our lives trying to find people who will embrace us instead. In the end, who we are, isn’t up to any of these people to decide. It’s up to us. Ourselves. To embrace who we are. Our stories. Our lives. We are the only ones who truly know ourselves.
In the end, the truth just lies in our crazy eyes.
