“It sounds like an anthem of overcoming. It's an admission of our vulnerability as human beings. I love a breakup anthem, and I didn't believe myself enough to write one without footnotes. So the song dresses vulnerability as dance-pop: a steady beat holding up every I don't need you, while the lyric keeps slipping uncertainty underneath it.

People say you need someone else to be happy, and I agree. We also need so many other things around that. Happiness can be shared, it can feel most real when it's shared, and it's better when you know you can have it without that something extra. We carry this eternal ache. A suitcase of traumas, fears and reservations that never gets emptied. From the day we're born it only gets heavier.

The narrator has the whole kit for independence: cool built like armor, lipstick, glitter, discipline. She can dance under the lights and kiss somebody else tonight. And still, when the lights go low and blue, she's a little scared. The chorus admits the real fear: being that whole. The bridge brings back Tastes A Little Like You, with his name showing up in someone else's mouth, and asks why being complete feels like standing without skin. Even the last lines hedge. I'll be whole, at least I hope.

So instead of treating independence as look at me, I'm unstoppable, I went to Sade. Whenever I saw people listening to her when I was younger, it felt incredibly chic, the peak of maturity. At my age now, still growing up like everyone, I hear in her the softness, the calm and the temperance of acceptance. Life rarely turns out the way we want, and we can still admit what it brings us and decide what to do with it.

We can be alone. We will be alone. We have to learn to be alone. And sometimes we simply don't want to be, even for a little while, even knowing we could. Walking home with someone at five in the morning is a small thing to want, and it's in the chorus for a reason: it's the ride back home, with company. The childhood idea that we need someone to be happy and the bruised, post-trauma idea that we need nobody both miss it. Maturity is knowing we can, and that even when we think we can't, we'll have to be happy on our own. The real change for me was separating wholeness from never needing anybody. I want to be complete enough that closeness becomes a choice, and stops being life support. And then: what if we don't want to? What about the days we don't want to? That's where this song lives, and that's why Sade, whom I love, became the way to bring vulnerability and maturity together.”