Hand in My Pocket: Borrowed Player, Brand New Voice

Lauren Nixon-Matney • June 15, 2025
Hand in My Pocket: Borrowed Player, Brand New Voice

Alanis Morissette: Hand in My Pocket

Audio Book Style

I didn’t even have a CD player yet.

But I needed that CD.


I’d heard the song on the radio—probably a hundred times by then. In our tiny town, the local pop station had no chill when it came to a hit. They’d play the same song on repeat like it was their anthem. And honestly? I wasn’t mad about it. Especially not with this one.


“Hand in My Pocket” hit me like a flash of sunlight through the blinds—sharp, warm, weirdly comforting. I didn’t know what all the lyrics meant, not really. I was ten. But I felt them. I felt Alanis.


So there I was, walking through the Galleria in Houston, practically vibrating with urgency. I remember tugging on someone’s sleeve—maybe an aunt, maybe an older cousin—pleading with everything in me: Please, please, please buy me Jagged Little Pill. I’d never wanted anything more.


I knew I could listen to it on my brother’s CD player. He had one, gifted from our nanny. He said I could use it if I was careful, and that was all the reassurance I needed. I had a plan. I had a song. I just needed the album.


Someone caved—bless them. I clutched that CD like it was gold.


I remember the weight of it in my hands—the plastic case, the jagged lettering, the mysterious intensity of her eyes on the cover. It felt grown-up, dangerous even. Like I was holding something that knew secrets I didn’t yet know how to ask about. And that was kind of the thrill of it.


Back at home, I waited my turn with the CD player like it was a sacred ritual. My brother made me promise not to scratch it, not to mess with the volume, not to skip tracks too fast. I nodded solemnly and meant every word.


Then I pressed play.


And just like that, the world cracked open.


It wasn’t just “Hand in My Pocket.” It was the whole damn album. I didn’t know what she meant by “every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”… but I sang it loud. I didn’t know what irony really was—didn’t need to. I could feel it in my bones. That strange ache, that tension between being a mess and being magic. Between having one hand in your pocket and the other giving a peace sign. Or flicking a cigarette. Or hailing a cab.


“Hand in My Pocket” was the one that stuck deepest, though. There was something about that chorus, that list of contradictions, that steady beat behind the chaos. It felt like a permission slip I didn’t know I needed. A way of saying—yeah, you can be a little bit of everything and still be okay.


I sang it everywhere. In my room. In the car. Into my hairbrush. Into the wind. Ten years old and already carrying the weight of the world in my small shoulders and singing, “everything’s gonna be fine, fine, fine.”


And somehow, I believed it.


The funny thing is—I still believe it.

I still sing it.


Not just in the shower or the car, but in my heart, when life’s a mess and I don’t have answers. When I’m trying to be everything to everyone, or nothing to no one. When the bills are due and the house is loud and the dishes are piling up and I catch a glimpse of my reflection and think, How did I become a whole adult already?


That song still lives in me.


“I’m broke but I’m happy, I’m poor but I’m kind…”

It hits different now, but it still hits.


Because now I know what she meant. Now I’ve lived the tension, the both-ness of being human. Being tired and hopeful. Grateful and confused. Wild and soft. One hand in my pocket and the other holding a diaper bag… or a dream… or the steering wheel as I drive into another unknown.


There’s a kind of poetry in how certain songs become bookmarks in your life. This one marked the beginning for me. The start of caring deeply about music. About lyrics. About being a girl with too many feelings and not enough places to put them.


And Alanis—she gave me a place.


I guess I didn’t really know it back then, but the Jagged Little Pill album was possibly the first time I felt seen by a song. It didn’t care how old I was, or whether I understood every word. It just fit. Like it knew something about me before I knew it about myself.


And somehow, “Hand in My Pocket” still fits.


It doesn’t ask me to be put together or have it all figured out. It just lets me be—in the middle of things, in the middle of life. It reminds me that contradictions don’t cancel each other out. They just make us human.



I’m older now, but not all that different from that ten-year-old kid with the too-big feelings and the borrowed CD player. I’m still walking through this life with one hand in my pocket.

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