What’s Yours is Mine Too

Photo Credit: Haley Appell

There are times when a song hits so close to home that you feel as if the artist wrote it specifically for you. Maybe it goes even farther than that. It feels like the artist has a secret camera that has been following you around and has studied your interactions and emotions. 

And as they watch the footage, the artist writes little notes in their journal, and they use your everyday experiences as inspiration for their music. And now they released a song about you to the entire world even though you never gave them permission to do so.

But that never happened. It’s not about you. It’s about them. But once that music is released to the public, it’s also no longer theirs anymore. It’s everyone’s. Including mine. That’s the way I feel about “Debbie Darling” by Dora Jar.

In late 2024, Dora Jar released an album titled “No Way to Relax When You Are On Fire.” That’s when she decided to air out my dirty laundry on the third track of the album. Not really. But it sure felt that way.

I could only find a few interviews that she did during her album rollout. But based on what I found, “Debbie Darling” was written after a dream in which she was playing hide-and-seek with herself and was hiding in “really dumb places” like a pool of water or a box. She had this dream during a time where she started learning more about self-compassion.

“Shortly after that dream I wrote “Debbie Darling” about embracing the side of me that I wanted to hide, or I didn’t think is worthy of being seen or loved,” Jar said.

It also goes deeper than that. In an MTV interview, Jar said she spent a lot of time writing that album in her childhood home. She was drawn to going into the basement and looking through old pictures from before she was born. 

Essentially, looking back on what her parents and what their parents probably went through allowed her to give her younger self more grace. She realized that the frustrations she had in the past were valid. It was okay for that complicated part of herself to coexist with the happier part.

I definitely gathered the self-compassion aspect from the song, but I applied the lyrics to my life in a different way. That’s the beauty of music. The meaning of the song is whatever you need it to mean. It’s all up to interpretation. Here’s what I needed “Debbie Darling” to mean.

In the song, there’s a progression with the names Jar gives Debbie. She starts with “Debbie Downer,” and then the next verse is for “Debbie Daydream.” The last time she addresses Debbie in the song is when she finally calls her “Debbie Darling.”

In the first verse, she calls Debbie Downer “my bad attitude suffocating in a bubble wrap suit.” No one really knows how she’s feeling. She has kept this cynical side of herself hidden from others, but it’s so well protected that it has become hard to break free from that mindset. It is much easier to always look at the negative side of things than to remain optimistic, because there’s no fear of disappointment. It’s difficult to not instinctually remain pessimistic once you’ve kept that outlook for an extended period of time. You can’t go further down when you’re already at the bottom.

It’s a risk to dare to dream of being happier. In the second verse, Jar calls Debbie Daydream “the witch without a broomstick” and tells her to wake up the wind and “ride the raven.” You don’t have the normal tools necessary to get yourself to a happier state of mind? There’s always another way. Find it. But it won’t be from avoiding the way you feel. You have to let yourself feel the bad things in order to move past them and get to a higher place.

After a bridge consisting of beautiful and haunting vocalizations, symbolizing the journey it takes to get to a better state of mind, Jar finally gets to see “Debbie Darling.” 

It’s quiet. The music is completely absent when she says “Look who I found” for the final time. She tells Debbie, “Well I didn’t think I’d get to see you,” because maybe she never thought she’d get to that happier state again. And the song ends with a question that is so simple yet poignant:

“Are you staying or passing through?”

Will this feeling last? How long will it last? When will it become bad again? 

It represents the cycle of emotions because life does not solely have high points. It’s a wave. Things will inevitably become tough again. You have to learn how to let yourself feel your feelings without barricading yourself in with only low expectations. You have to remain strong enough to want things to get better, even when it feels like there’s no way it can.