You are in the car, a year or so past the diagnosis, and the 2000 recording comes on. You knew this song. You had known it your whole life as a pretty thing about clouds. And then her older voice gets to the verse about all the things she would have done, and you have to pull over, because it turns out you did not know this song at all.
Both Sides Now is Joni Mitchell’s song about losing your illusions and finding out you understood less than you thought. It moves through three subjects, clouds, love and life, and treats each the same way: a verse of wonder, a verse of disappointment, then the admission that having seen both sides she still does not really know the thing at all. Written in 1967 when she was 23, it is a song about hindsight, about the beautiful version and the hard version of the same experience, and about the honesty of saying you were wrong. For late-diagnosed autistic adults it reads almost like a transcript of the years after diagnosis.
What the research shows
- Women diagnosed autistic after 40 described the years before diagnosis as exhausting attempts to work out what was wrong, and the diagnosis itself as a turning point followed by grief and re-evaluation. Leedham et al. (2020)1
- Adults diagnosed after 35 described the diagnosis as giving them “a way to be me”, and re-read their whole life story in its light. Lilley et al. (2022)2
- Adults diagnosed over 50 reported feeling isolated and alien growing up, years of treatment for anxiety and depression, and a diagnosis that allowed them to reconfigure who they thought they were. Stagg & Belcher (2019)3
- Camouflaging autistic traits to fit in was described by autistic adults as exhausting and as a threat to their sense of who they really are. Hull et al. (2017)4
What Both Sides Now is about, verse by verse
The structure is the meaning. Mitchell builds each of the three sections identically, so that by the third time round you can feel the pattern closing in.
Clouds. The first verse is a child looking up. The clouds are soft, sweet, fantastical, the stuff of daydreams. The second verse is an adult looking up: the same clouds now block the sun, rain on everything, and get in the way of what she meant to do with her life. Then the refrain. She has seen clouds from above and below, from the wondering side and the disappointed side, and she concludes she does not understand clouds at all. Only their illusions.
Love. The same move. Love as a carnival first, all lights and dizziness and fairy tales. Then love as performance and pretence, the version where you act unbothered so nobody sees you care. Having been on both sides, she admits she does not understand love either.
Life. The last section is the one that breaks people. Tears and fears and pride, saying it out loud, and the friends who think you have changed and drift away, shaking their heads. Something is lost in living, something gained, and the final refrain widens to the whole of life: she has looked at it from both sides and still does not know it.
So the song withholds the usual moral about experience making you wise. Experience, in Mitchell’s telling, takes the certainty of the first verse away and hands back nothing tidy: only the honesty to say so, and the strange relief of saying it. That is why it has been read as sad, as consoling, as a young person’s premonition and an old person’s confession, and why it fits all four.
The story behind the song
Mitchell has said she wrote it on a plane in 1967 while reading Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King. There is a passage where the narrator, also in a plane, looks down at clouds and reflects that his generation was the first to see them from above as well as below. She put the book down and started writing.
She did not release it first. Judy Collins recorded it for her 1967 album Wildflowers, and Collins’s bright, soaring version became a top-ten hit in the US the following year and won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance. It was the recording that introduced Joni Mitchell the songwriter to the world, two years before most listeners had heard Joni Mitchell the singer.
Mitchell’s own recording arrived in May 1969 as the closing track of Clouds, her second album, which took its title from the song and won her a Grammy for Best Folk Performance the following year. Just her voice and an acoustic guitar. It is a young, clear, slightly startled reading, sung by someone who is describing disillusionment she has mostly only imagined yet.
Then in 2000 she recorded it again, at 56, with Vince Mendoza arranging a full orchestra. That version, the title track of the album Both Sides Now, is the one most people under fifty know, and it won two Grammys in 2001, including Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. Since then the song has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Broadway performers, and used in films for exactly the moment a character realises the story they told themselves was not the whole story.
Why the two recordings sound like two different lives
Play the 1969 and 2000 recordings back to back and you will hear the song’s own thesis happen in real time. The first is high, quick and light; the lyrics about disappointment are sung by someone who has not yet been disappointed in the way they describe. The second is slow, low, worn down to something almost spoken, and every line about hindsight now has thirty years of hindsight underneath it. Same words. Different truth.
If you were diagnosed late, that is not just an interesting fact about a recording. It is the shape of your own biography. There is the version of you who lived the first thirty or forty years inside the first verse, doing your best with a description of the world that turned out to be wrong. And there is the version reading this now, who has the same memories and hears them completely differently. Both are you. The 2000 recording is what it sounds like when the later one is finally allowed to sing.
Many of us reach for music for exactly this reason: it gets to feelings that talking cannot reach, and it does the work of naming things before we have the words ourselves.
The clouds verse after a late autism diagnosis
Start with what the clouds are, in Mitchell’s telling: something beautiful that also gets in the way. That is the exact double nature of the years before diagnosis.
The beautiful part was real. If you are autistic, you almost certainly saw the world in the textured, detailed, saturated way the first verse describes. You noticed the gradients in the sky, the pattern in the carpet, the way a word could be tasted. The world was often too much and it was also, sometimes, more alive than anybody around you seemed to realise. Nobody should tell you the wonder was not there.
And the same years got in the way. The masking, the exhaustion, the friendships that ended without explanation, the jobs that fell apart, the decades of being treated for anxiety and depression when the thing underneath was never named.3 When you look back from the far side of a diagnosis, the line about all the things she would have done is not a metaphor any more. You can list them. The course you dropped out of. The relationship you could not hold. The years spent at 60 per cent because the other 40 went on managing overwhelm nobody knew was there.
This is the grief of late diagnosis, and it deserves the word. Research with adults diagnosed in their forties and fifties finds the same sequence over and over: relief, then a long, painful re-reading of the whole life story, then something quieter.1 Naming what the clouds cost you is part of that re-reading. It is allowed to take a while.
“I was 47. I sat in the car park after the assessment and that song was the only thing I could think of. Every verse was a decade. I cried for the person who had lived through all of it without knowing why.”
— Autistic adult, HeyASD community
If the diagnosis has sent you back through every decade with new eyes, and you are somewhere between the relief and the grief, The Unmasking Years is written for that exact stretch: the misread years, the mourning, and what it takes to come back to yourself afterwards.
The love verse: rules nobody told you
Mitchell’s love verses turn on the gap between how love feels and how it is supposed to be performed. First the fairground, then the second verse where you learn to hide that you care, to act cool, to not give yourself away.
Autistic love is often the first verse at full volume. Intense, literal, loyal, all in. And then the second verse arrives as a set of rules nobody wrote down. Do not text back too fast. Do not say the thing you actually mean. Read the signal you cannot see. Many of us have been told we love wrong, too much or not visibly enough, and spent years being accused of coldness while feeling more than the room could hold. Both sides of love, and the honest verdict that you never quite worked out the game. The game was never explained to you, and a verdict reached without the rules is a verdict on the rules.
The life verse: admitting you did not know
The last verse is where the song stops being about clouds or love and becomes about the cost of changing. Say what you feel and people decide you have become strange. Old friends shake their heads and drift off. Something gained, something lost.
Anyone who has started unmasking after a late diagnosis knows this verse in their body. When you stop performing, some people do not recognise you. Some leave. You gain a self and lose a few relationships that were only ever with the mask. Camouflaging research describes the same trade in clinical language, the mask as exhausting and as a threat to knowing who you are, and the removal of it as costly in its own way.4
And then the refrain, one last time. She has looked at life from both sides and she does not know it at all. For a late-diagnosed adult this is the most comforting line in the song, because it is permission. You did not know. You could not have known. The map you were handed was wrong, and you navigated with it anyway for decades, and you are still here. Saying “I really did not understand my own life” out loud is the first accurate sentence, and a great deal gets easier after the first accurate sentence. It sounds like defeat going in and feels, once it is out, like being able to breathe.
“The refrain used to sound like giving up to me. Now it sounds like someone finally telling the truth. I did not know life at all. I was working from the wrong instructions the whole time.”
— Autistic adult, HeyASD community
The illusions you were handed
Mitchell calls them life’s illusions. For us they were more like instructions, delivered early and often, about who we were allowed to be. Seeing through them hurts, and the seeing is also what lets the second half of life be different.
There was the illusion that if you masked well enough for long enough, you would eventually be safe. You were never safe; you were only tired, and the tiredness was the mask working exactly as designed. There was the illusion that the burnouts and the lost jobs and the friendships that evaporated were personal failures, character flaws, evidence of being defective. Look at them from the other side now: a person in the wrong environment, without support, doing far better than the circumstances deserved. There was the illusion that you were cold, when the truth is that you felt so much you had to armour it. The illusion that the diagnosis came too late to matter. The illusion that you were the only one, when there is a whole late-diagnosed generation re-reading their lives at the same time you are.2
None of those illusions dissolve on their own. They go the way the song says they go: you see the other side, you sit with what it costs, and you tell the truth about it. If you want a place to start on the childhood version of this, reframing your childhood after late diagnosis walks through it slowly.
What the 2000 recording knows that the 1969 one does not
Mitchell was 56 when she recorded the orchestral version. Her voice had dropped and roughened, partly from years, partly from cigarettes, and critics at the time wrote about a career coming full circle. What you hear on that recording is somebody singing a young woman’s words with an older woman’s knowledge, and choosing not to soften any of it.
That is the shift late diagnosis offers, if you let it. From striving to something more like acceptance. From confusion about why everything was so hard to clarity about why it was, which is not the same as it being easy. From grief that has nowhere to go to grief that has been named and can start, slowly, to settle. You cannot undo the first verse. You can sing the second one in your own voice, weathered and unmasked and yours, and that turns out to be enough.
Key points
- Both Sides Now is about losing your illusions: three subjects, clouds, love and life, each seen first with wonder, then with disappointment, then with the honest admission that she does not understand any of them.
- Joni Mitchell wrote it in 1967 after reading Saul Bellow. Judy Collins had the first hit with it; Mitchell’s own version closed her 1969 album Clouds, and her 2000 orchestral re-recording won two Grammys.
- The two recordings, 1969 and 2000, are the song’s own thesis: the same words mean something different once you have lived them.
- For late-diagnosed autistic adults the clouds are the years of not knowing, the love verse is a set of rules nobody explained, and the life verse is what unmasking costs.
- The refrain is permission. You did not know your own life, because you were working from the wrong map, and saying so is the first accurate sentence.
- Grief for what the years cost is a documented, normal part of late diagnosis. It is allowed to take time.
Questions about the meaning of Both Sides Now
What is the meaning of Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell?
It is a song about disillusionment and the honesty that comes after it. Mitchell takes three things, clouds, love and life, and looks at each from two sides: the wondering, idealised side and the disappointed, experienced side. Each time she concludes that having seen both, she does not really understand the thing at all, only its illusions. Experience, in the song, removes your certainties rather than adding wisdom, and leaves you with the truth that you never fully knew what you thought you knew. That is why it works as both a young person’s premonition and an older person’s confession.
What is the clouds verse in Both Sides Now about?
The clouds are the song’s first and clearest image of something that is beautiful from one angle and obstructive from another. Seen as a child, they are soft and fantastical. Seen later, the same clouds block the sun, bring rain, and get in the way of the things she meant to do. Mitchell got the idea from a passage in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King about seeing clouds from above in an aeroplane as well as from below. For many late-diagnosed autistic adults the clouds read as the years before diagnosis: real wonder, and a real cost.
Who wrote Both Sides Now?
Joni Mitchell wrote it in 1967, when she was 23. She has said the idea came to her on a plane while reading Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, and that she started writing straight away. Although Judy Collins released the first well-known recording, the song is entirely Mitchell’s, words and music.
Who recorded Both Sides Now first?
Judy Collins. She recorded it for her 1967 album Wildflowers, and her version became a top-ten hit in the US in 1968 and won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance. Mitchell had performed it live before that, but Collins’s recording was the one that carried the song, and Mitchell’s name as a songwriter, to a wide audience. Mitchell’s own studio version came out in 1969.
What album is Both Sides Now on?
Joni Mitchell’s original recording is the final track on Clouds, her second album, released in May 1969. The album took its name from the song. She recorded it again in 2000 with Vince Mendoza’s orchestral arrangement as the title track of the album Both Sides Now, which is the version most often used in films and heard by younger listeners.
What awards has Both Sides Now won?
Judy Collins’s recording won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance in 1969. Joni Mitchell’s album Clouds, which the song closes, won Best Folk Performance in 1970. Her 2000 orchestral album Both Sides Now won two Grammys in 2001, Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist for Vince Mendoza’s arrangement of the title track.
Why does the 2000 version of Both Sides Now sound so different?
Because Mitchell was 56 instead of 25, and because she and arranger Vince Mendoza replaced a lone acoustic guitar with a full orchestra. Her voice had dropped by more than an octave over the years, and she sings the 2000 version slowly, almost speaking some lines. The effect is that the lyrics about hindsight are finally sung by someone with hindsight. Many listeners find the later version more devastating for exactly that reason: the words have not changed, but the person singing them has lived them.
Is Both Sides Now about autism?
No. Mitchell wrote it in 1967 about illusions in clouds, love and life, with no reference to autism. But late-diagnosed autistic adults often hear their own story in it, because the song’s structure, wonder, then disappointment, then the honest admission that you did not understand your own life, is close to the sequence many of us go through after diagnosis. The re-reading of a whole life in the light of new information is one of the most consistently reported experiences of adults diagnosed in mid or late adulthood, and this song describes that re-reading better than most things written about autism directly.
Why does Both Sides Now make people cry?
Because it names something most people have felt and few have said out loud: that growing up did not deliver the understanding it promised, and that the beautiful version of things and the disappointing version were both true. The song gives permission to hold both at once without resolving them. Add the 2000 recording, where an older voice sings a younger woman’s words, and the effect is of watching a whole life collapse into four minutes. If you are late-diagnosed, the tears usually come at the line about all the things she would have done.
If you’ve lived this.
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