Just day’s before I’m writing this post, Twenty One Pilots released their new song, “Shy Away.” 

The song explores themes of bravery and growth, and deeply corresponds to concepts life coaches explore with their clients.

The lyrics include extremely profound pieces of encouragement for anyone who wants to find their purpose or improve their relationship with themselves.

So in this post, we’ll pick apart the beautifully encouraging message in “Shy Away,” and talk about how it can apply to our lives. 

I’ve always been a HUGE Twenty One Pilots fan, so I’m very excited to be doing a bit of an analysis of this song. 

It’s worth noting that “Shy Away” is told from the perspective of Tyler Joseph (the band’s lead singer). According to Joseph, the song “turned out to talk about being an older brother and how the only thing tougher than trying to find your own purpose is watching someone you love trying to figure out their own purpose.”

To listen to the song, check it out here: Twenty One Pilots – Shy Away (Official Video) 

Futher Context: “Shy Away” is the third track from Twenty One Pilot’s new album titled, Scaled and Icy, the song was released as a single on April 7th, 2021 and the album is scheduled to be released May 21st along with their livestream event/virtual concert on that same day. 

To make this simple, I’ve picked five pieces of the song’s lyrics to take a closer look at their relevant and powerful message.

Without further ado, let’s break it down. 

“Don’t you shy away. Manifest a ceiling when you shy away.”

When you’re shy about your passions or things that you care about,  you directly limit your ability to enjoy those things. And by that same token, the more you shy away from being your self, the less you will be able to fully explore and discover the complexities of your full self.

The word “manifest” is something that gets thrown around a lot in personal development and self-discovery circles. In those contexts, it’s usually used as a synonym for “create” or “reveal”. Many of the highest esteemed self-help gurus claim that we can manifest things by showing the universe that it’s something we’re working towards or intend to achieve.

I don’t know how true or real this is, but Tyler Joseph is so right;  When we choose to be shy about what we really want, we manifest some kind of limitation on ourselves and our lives. 

And this “creation of limitation” doesn’t just happen once. We have the opportunity to create or dissolve limitations anytime we decide between shyness and bravery.

If you look back on some of the most positive aspects of your life, you likely will be able to trace it back to a moment when you chose bravery over shying away.

Did you go after something you wanted? Stand up to someone? Speak your mind? Choose something even if someone else didn’t approve? 

These are things we do when we choose bravery over shying away.

When we do this, we raise the ceiling for ourselves, we avoid limiting the shape of our own lives.

With this line, Tyler Joseph is telling the listener to be brave in their life. He saying “don’t you shy away,” because if you do, you’ll be the one who’s placing limits on yourself.

“Searching for that feeling just like an ‘I love you’ that isn’t words.”

This description is something unlike anything I’ve ever heard, but it makes so much sense. Because when you fulfill your purpose or spend part of your life doing something that you love, the feeling you get is love. 

There’s something so warm and beautiful about being “on purpose.”

So hearing I love you from someone else (and really believing it) is not dissimilar to actually loving your life. Thus, Joseph’s description of this feeling as “an ‘I love you’ that isn’t words.”

“When you get home, you barely recognize the pictures they put in a frame.”

The cool thing about becoming yourself is that you may go through many forms or versions of yourself.

So when Joseph says you’ll get home and not recognize yourself in old pictures, what he’s really saying is that pursuing your passion facilitates an internal change that is so deep that you’re simply not the same afterwards. 

Every time you choose to be brave enough to be your true self in a new way, you go through a transformative process. It’s like the beautiful transformation of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

Once you go through enough iterations of yourself, you’ll look at old pictures and know that the person in those photos isn’t the person you are now. Sure, pieces of your old self are present, but you’re by no means the same person you were when you started your self-discovery journey. 

“Don’t circle the track. Take what you have and leave your skin on the floor.”

I interpret this lyric as being about socialization (i.e how our culture shapes us and tells us to live). By “circle the track,” I think Joseph is referring to how most people follow a path through life that was prescribed to them, not chosen by them. 

When we choose to do our own thing and select our own path, we are breaking a cycle of generations of people who never got to truly do what their hearts desired in their lifetimes.

(This is also interesting because there’s another line in the song that modifies the middle phrase: “Don’t circle the track, just break the cycle in half and leave your skin on the floor.”)

And yes, this takes a TON of bravery. But it might be one of the most important things you could possibly do, especially since it may pave the way for other people to do the same. 

The last piece, “take what you have and leave your skin on the floor” seems to be about separating two parts of ourselves: the genuine/authentic part of ourselves, and the performative/socialized part. 

Joseph tells the listener to basically keep the piece of ourselves that is true and authentic within us, and leave behind the piece of us that was created by other people’s expectations and rules for us.

“When I get home, boy you better not be there. You’re long gone. Shed your modesty.”

In this lyric, Joseph is telling the listener to get out and do whatever they need to do to truly become themselves.

He says, “boy you better not be there” because his sincere hope is that the listener will choose bravery. That they’ll go out and do what they truly want with their lives and that they’ll start now. 

I wish that every person had someone like this in their lives to tell them to be brave, to shed their “modesty” and the things that mute their true selves. 

This lyric, “Shed your modesty,” repeats many times throughout the song and between verses. And it’s a request the speaker is making to the listener. 

When he says “shed your modesty,” I believe he means “drop the things that you’ve been using to cover up your true self.” He’s telling listeners to get rid of the layers of cultural expectations that have prevented you from moving freely up until now, and then go out and discover yourself.  

If we don’t shed this modesty (the layers that aren’t authentic to ourselves,) it’s as if we’ve never had a chance to fully explore our options in this life.

In short, “Shy Away” is a call to be brave enough to be yourself, and brave enough to explore what that even means. 

Being ourselves is scary because when we choose a path that is different from what others expect, it almost certainly upsets somebody. So doing it anyways really requires that we choose to be brave. 

And I, like Joseph, want to encourage you to choose bravery. Shed your modesty, leave your skin on the floor, and keep taking steps towards becoming your full self.

I want to thank Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun for producing this song, because this is a reminder most people will need on many occasions throughout life. Thank goodness we now have a catchy song to help us hear it again and again. 

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Are you a fellow TOP fan? In what ways would you like to stop “shying away” in your life?

Leave a comment or send me a message to share your thoughts. For more uplifting content, check out some other posts on my blog, follow me on instagram @morgan_barbret, or sign up for the Self Love Atlas Newsletter!

Cheers, 

Morgan Rita Barbret