Black Bat Records

At the end of October — on the 31st, to be precise — my new EP Nocturnal Butterfly will be released. From a creative perspective, it’s been quite an interesting project for me. It’s essentially a blend of four older tracks that I’ve completed and shaped into their final form over the past year. Although each of them was written at a different time, they somehow belong together. All of them explore themes that have stood the test of time for me. Some of those themes are sad, but the main one — the title track — is about what chases away sorrow and heals everything. And although I wrote the lyrics and vocal melody for Nocturnal Butterfly many years ago, and Niklou breathed life into it with his music long ago, the meaning of the song didn’t truly begin to unfold until four years ago, when I met my muse. 🙂 It sometimes happens that way — I write lyrics, and they come true many years later.

But today I want to write about the final track on the EP — Shallow Grave.
I wrote the core of this song back in September 1996. I had just moved out of home and ran as far away as I could. At the time, I was living in London — before I started studying sound engineering at Morley College. Here are the lyrics of the song:

Shallow Grave

This grave is for me too shallow
This grave is for me too light 
And nice
I hate it all too bright

Put me inside I don’t care it’s shallow
I don’t mind that flowers above me
Are yellow
I don’t care if you like it
But I’m too dark and grey
But I don’t care if you really like it

This grave is for me too shallow
This grave is for me too light
And nice
I hate it all too bright

I’d love to be buried in this clay
I want to be burnt and dropped 
Into my shallow grave
And the cold shadow 
Will help me
To turn to dust

This grave is for me too shallow
This grave is for me too light
And nice 
I hate it all too bright

But put me inside I don’t care it’s shallow
I don’t care if you want it snow white
And stones yellow
I don’t care if you like it
I don’t mind if you want 
Sun to shine
I really don’t mind if you like it.

The entire text is a metaphor for how people adapt themselves to others — and in the process, lose themselves and their authenticity. The “shallow grave” represents a psychological murder committed by someone close, where a person becomes a willing victim. It’s the mental state of bending yourself to please others — whether to belong, for love, or simply because you’re so tired you just want peace. You lose yourself, and in the process — through the desire or the need to please — your personality slowly but surely turns to dust in the cold shadow of ordinariness and the absence of acceptance.

You feel a loss of freedom, a loss of your own voice, a loss of self. And what is there even to talk about? The world’s indifference to deep inner suffering, reinforced by a lack of self-acceptance and the constant attacks of a narcissistic “loved one,” builds an inner culture where what you feel, experience, and perceive seems to matter to no one. Every word of self-defense only deepens the attacks and the punishments. There’s no escape. You live in a golden cage made of nothing but words and promises. In actions, there is the cruelty of psychological murder; in words, there is “love.” The narcissist creates a breathtaking fairytale and tenderness — but in reality, it’s a shallow grave of an endless cycle of violence. The harder the victim fights back, the worse the terror and the deeper the scars on the soul.

No one emerges from that swamp without a subconscious scribbled over with wounds that dictate everything in the rest of their life.

For three decades, I didn’t realize that many things got buried in my “shallow grave”— including my desire to share life with another person. But when the magic of love appears, you’re forced to reevaluate the situation — and you wake up in horror from the routine of daily life, realizing that you’ve been buried alive. Do you have the strength and the will — after a life full of tragedy and disappointment — to dig yourself out of that grave and start anew? To go through a transformation and enter a new chapter? That’s a story still being written. 🙂

The answer to the “shallow grave” is not to destroy yourself — it’s to leave. Leave, pack your bags, close the door, and heal. The simple act of escape is the first and easiest step. The second step takes years — sometimes decades — of healing, rediscovering solid ground beneath your feet, a sense of safety, and courage. Sometimes even the courage just to open the door and go outside.

People underestimate the daily, invisible battle of victims of psychological abuse. They don’t know how much strength it takes just to get out of bed in the morning, or to take care of anything at all. Psychological abuse has far deeper and longer-lasting consequences than physical assault ever could.

The song Shallow Grave represents the suffering of the victim and the transformation of someone who has survived abuse. Nocturnal Butterfly is the light at the end of the tunnel. We never know what — or who — will give us the strength to stand up, leave the pain behind, and begin to heal.

That’s my small piece of understanding. A person who has survived violence — whether psychological or physical — even if they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, is not broken. I often hear that people with PTSD have “overreactions.” From the outside, it may look that way — but the reaction is entirely appropriate to their subjective sense of danger. That’s why it’s pointless to add more rejection, criticism, and pain — to pull the PTSD trigger with more manipulation and dismissal. The survivor has changed — and no amount of reminders of who they “used to be” will change that. They are buried alive in a shallow grave — and now it’s time to dig themselves out.

Rising from the grave is not a peaceful, meditative, or loving process. It’s a fight. And long after you’ve clawed your way out, you still wake up from nightmares, terrified that you’re still lying in it.