delu’s yapping town

I’ve been listening a lot to twenty one pilots lately. I've always liked them, ever since my sister would put on blurryface and vessel in the car during trips and we would argue about the lyrics of Ride, but was never an actual fan, even if i loved the music (at least the little i knew of). I didn't really follow them or even payed too much attention to what the songs actually meant. But lately I’ve been trying to get to know their music more. Especially after Breach dropped. It’s the first album of them that I listened in full on release and i loved it. After that I listened to the debut for the first time, tried to actually listen the songs i already knew, and fell in love with the sound of songs i didn't know before. Overtime I started to wonder about the meaning of those i couldn't understand just by listening and began looking it up. However, just listening to the songs without reading the lyrics or searching the meaning of them, means that sometimes I mess up the lyrics, which I recently found out happened with At the risk of feeling dumb, mainly with the chorus. It was actually a really small detail, but it changed my entire perception of the song. The song, as I understand it, is basically about urging someone to check in on their friends, even if it feels awkward, because feeling stupid is better than losing a friend to mental health struggles. It becomes kinda obvious when Tyler sings "At the risk of feeling dumb, check in". However, I would sing that particular line as "At the risk of feeling dumb again". This small, minuscule even, mistake, made me think that the entire song was from the perspective of the friend that doesn't want help, you know, the one Tyler’s urging us to check on. Instead of understanding it as "check in on your friends even if it feels dumb because avoiding that feeling is not worth losing them”, I interpreted it as "don't drop your plans to check on me. I won't ask for your help and risk feeling dumb for it later on. Suffering alone is better than losing a friend" (i admit, the writing of line that comes after doesn't make much sense then and i actually struggled to make complete sense of it before haha). I don't even know what point I'm making with this post. I just thought that it was an interesting mistake. Especially because it changed my perception of the song but it didn’t really changed the meaning. After all, I was just singing from another perspective. And the funny thing to me is that, before realizing all this, I really related to this song— that feeling where deep down you want to open up but won’t because you know later you’ll feel stupid, that you’ll probably regret it and don’t want to feel like a burden— but now that I know the actual meaning I related to it even more. Now listening to this song feels almost like a conversation with myself, because i’m both the friend that wants to be checked in on but actually please don’t, and the friend that wants to be good friend but never ends up checking in on her friends because it just feels really awkward.