Jenny Lewis / Girls, Vol. 2: All Adventurous Women Do... (Music From the HBO® Original Series) / 2014
Completely Not Me
haunted, remorseful, quietly harrowing
A confessional account of a frightening psychological or physical breakdown, told retrospectively as an apology to a partner who witnessed it. The song treats the episode almost as a near-death experience, with the speaker's sense of self detaching from her body, and ends in a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation rather than explanation.
mental breakdown dissociation shame and confession illness and caretaking identity rupture
Who's speaking
First person, addressed directly to a partner who stayed by her side during the crisis; the narrator is retrospective and self-aware, admitting fault, which makes her a reliable but guilt-ridden witness to her own unraveling.
What happens
The song opens with a recollection of a night when the speaker nearly died or felt she might, describing an out-of-body sensation. A doctor's voice enters, addressing the partner directly and suggesting there's nothing to be done but wait. The speaker describes her physical state as feverish and delirious, pushing her partner away even as she needed him. The chorus repeats as a kind of mantra of apology, and the song closes by restating the near-death image, this time more finally, before trailing off on the identity-rupture line.
How it's built
Built on short narrative verses that alternate with a looping two-line chorus repeated with increasing insistence, mimicking the circularity of trauma recall. The final verse mirrors the first almost exactly but shifts the verb tense, marking a kind of closure or finality. The song ends abruptly on the refrain alone, without resolution.
Section by section
Opening verse
“saw my soul hang heavy”
The speaker recalls a night of crisis using language that blurs the line between fever dream and genuine spiritual event. Describing her soul as visible and weighty externalizes an internal collapse, setting up the song's central metaphor of self-estrangement.
First chorus
The hook functions less as a hook and more as a confession repeated like a mantra. It frames the whole song as an apology for behavior the speaker herself doesn't recognize as her own.
Second verse
“leave her here and wait”
Introducing the doctor's voice pulls the scene outside the speaker's fractured perspective, emphasizing how little agency she had and how frightening the situation looked to those around her. The clinical detachment of the medical advice contrasts sharply with the intimacy of the relationship being addressed.
Delirium passage
The physical description of shivering and rolled-back eyes grounds the abstract soul imagery in bodily horror, while the detail of pushing the partner away reveals the cruelty illness can produce even toward someone trying to help.
Closing verse
The return to the opening image, now stated as fact rather than possibility, suggests the speaker has stopped minimizing what happened. The song ends without a resolving line, leaving the apology suspended rather than accepted or forgiven.
Craft
- out-of-body imagery
- The recurring image of a soul or spirit hovering above the room literalizes dissociation, turning a psychological state into a visual, almost supernatural picture.
- refrain as confession
- The repeated couplet functions like a plea entered into evidence—each repetition reads as the speaker trying to convince both her partner and herself that the person who caused harm wasn't truly her.
- reported speech
- Quoting the doctor's words shifts perspective mid-song, letting the listener see the scene from outside the speaker's own fogged consciousness, which heightens the sense of helplessness.
- tense shift
- Moving from a conditional near-death image to a flat declarative one in the final verse closes the narrative loop and suggests the speaker has come to accept the severity of what happened.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about a severe psychological break—possibly tied to fever, breakdown, or a psychotic episode—witnessed by a partner and later processed through guilt and apology. An alternative reading could frame it more literally as a near-fatal illness, with the 'soul hanging above the room' as a classic near-death-experience trope rather than metaphor for mental illness; the lyric is ambiguous enough to support either, and Lewis offers no explicit diagnosis.
Context
Released as part of the soundtrack for HBO's Girls, the song fits the show's interest in young women's instability and self-destruction, though there's no confirmed biographical link between the lyric and Lewis's own life. I don't have reliable details about the song's recording circumstances beyond its soundtrack placement.
Listen for
- the hovering, almost liturgical repetition of the chorus
- the shift from pleading to flat statement in the final verse
- the doctor's voice breaking the first-person frame
- the contrast between clinical language and intimate address
- the song's refusal to resolve or reassure by its end
About Jenny Lewis
Jennifer Diane Lewis is an American singer-songwriter and actress. She is the lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and keyboardist for the indie rock band Rilo Kiley, as well as a solo artist.
b. 1976 / United States
Full biography and catalogue