Everyone has experienced it: You’re at a party, tired, quiet and pensive — your social battery long drained — as you realize there’s something aching inside you that is deeply and painfully sad. 

Natalie Mering, otherwise known as popular folk-pop artist Weyes Blood, reflects on this experience in her song “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” and takes it one step further with the realization that crippling loneliness is a universal human experience.

Her sentiment that everyone experiences this pain because we fail to empathize with the experiences of others is expressed in the lyrics:

“Mercy is the only /

Cure for being so lonely /

Has a time ever been more revealing /

That the people are hurting /

Oh, it’s not just me /

I guess, it’s everybody /

Yes, we all bleed the same way.” 

While the dreamy glaze of this song adds to the sensation of a dissociative state similar to the one in the party scenario that Mering describes, it leaves the listener with a solution to their loneliness and possibly even a powerful call to action.

Mering calls for a universal human empathy. She asks us to take a look at the people around us and ask ourselves if we truly are alone when everyone else is also drowning in the gray of a modern world.

So next time you are feeling particularly wallflowerish for the night, remember Mering’s message that everyone who dances past you is probably feeling just as blue. Because of that, you are never alone. 

Wallflowers and sad extraverts alike should check out the song and keep an eye out for Mering’s upcoming album, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, set to release Nov. 18.