Songfacts®:

• This driving rocker finds Type O Negative lead singer Peter Steele in a bad place. The song tells a story about a guy who falls asleep in the snow and dies alone, which might be an allegory for how he was feeling. Steele openly struggled with depression and had a tendency to pour his ravaged heart out in his songs. He also battled drug abuse and was trying to get sober.
• The music video stars Dan Fogler, who later played Luke on The Walking Dead. We see him come home to his ordinary life, but then he sets up a camera and films himself dressed up as Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Eminem, and Britney Spears. At the end of the video, he plays one more character: Peter Steele.
• "I Don't Wanna Be Me" was the only single released from Type O Negative's sixth album, Life Is Killing Me. Their breakthrough came with their third album, Bloody Kisses, in 1993. Up until then, Peter Steele was still working full-time for the New York City parks department while making music on nights and weekends. They fit in well with goth culture (Steele was 6' 8", brooding, and could sing like a vampire), but could also play to the hard rock/metal set - they were a main stage act at Ozzfest in 1997. Their next releases did well, but popularity didn't make Steele happy and had the downside of enabling his drug habit. The band released another album, Dead Again, in 2007, but in 2010 Steele died of heart failure at 48.
• Over two decades after its original release, "I Don't Wanna Be Me" achieved a milestone that had previously eluded Type O Negative's singles catalog. On June 15, 2026, the song was certified Gold by the RIAA for accumulating 500,000 certified units in the United States.
  
  The award marked the band's first-ever RIAA single certification. While Type O Negative had already earned Platinum status for their breakthrough 1993 album Bloody Kisses and Gold certification for 1996's October Rust, none of their individual songs had previously reached a certified sales threshold.