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IT ENDS WITH US (2024)

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This is basically my current workplace's culture. Especially shown in my manager's behavior. I am working on finding a way out and I know Jesus is leading me out of this place for something more meaningful.

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Was I Made To Die

Yesterday I felt overwhelmed by everything going on in the world. I've been overwhelmed for a while. I live in America and I am overwhelmed by the upcoming election, the murderous police brutality that Sonya Massey faced, the genocide going on in Gaza, and the wars in both the Congo and Sudan. And of course, I'm always overwhelmed by my own sin. I cried out to God over and over again "Why was I made to die?" I meant this because each day my sin makes me die and I need to rely on God's grace, it makes me feel both helpless and at times hopeless. I want to stop sinning and I want to see God's justice prevail instead of the world's evilness. I know of the countless Bible verses that say God will bring evildoers to their knees, that justice will always prevail, and that He comes by the sword. But I couldn't help but ask God, when?

Because to me it felt as though evil was prevailing and justice was failing.

But then I found another song stuck in my head "Born to Die" a Christmas song encompassing how Mary must have felt when Jesus was born. Each day we kill ourselves with our own sins and each day Jesus saves us, an everlasting gift of life. Jesus lived in the same "bodily tent" as us, his own apostle plotted to kill him. Jesus says: "No one has greater love than this: than to lay down his life for his friend." John 15:13 So it was probably the worst betrayal for him to be sold out by a friend. Jesus understands like no other how evil this world is, he understands our sufferings, and he feels our pain. He feels the world suffering. I often get caught up by the weight of what's going on in the world that I forget what I'm up against. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." Ephesians 6:12

God promises us everlasting peace and life through Jesus Christ. God promises that blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

John 16:33 tells us that the battle is already won: "You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world."

We were not made to die. We die because of our sins, but we were made to serve in the greatest kingdom there ever will be, The Kingdom of God. The world's evilness might be too much for us to bear, but it is not too much for Jesus, for he's already conquered it all. We must stay focused on what's at hand, and what's really at stake. Our souls.

Lord, I pray a prayer of surrender I pray that all reading this surrender to you. Lord, we are not fighting earthly evils but spiritual evils that you've already defeated. We have been born again in you, we have light because of you, we have hope because of you, we have EVERYTHING because of you. I surrender my anxieties and I encourage those reading this to do the same. We lose peace when we forget your holy name but Lord we pray to remember it. To remember that you've already won and that the Devil will never defeat you. Amen.

I was made to break free from my sins. ⋆.˚🦢⋆࿐♡⋆.˚

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being this young is art…

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The Story So Far // Watch You Go

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and I hope it’s SHITTY IN THE BLACK DOG

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“I will never straighten my hair to impress a guy ever again.”

— Taylor Swift talking about straightening her hair (x)

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los angeles

florida!!! - taylor swift (feat. florence + the machine)

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dancing phantoms on the terrace, are they secondhand embarrassed?

@lgbtqcreators creator bingo: typography

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just trying to process these lyrics and how they’re actual poetry

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The Tortured Poets Department is a great reminder that women don't owe the world pretty. Taylor Swift doesn't owe anyone an easily digestible pretty pop album wrapped in a bow with short songs you can make TikToks to. She's allowed to present something raw, uncomfortable, and vulnerable to the world.

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Sorry but if you're clowning on "down bad crying at the gym" then you've never lived. Like go have a breakdown in the grocery store dairy aisle like a normal person.

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now I'm down bad cryin' at the gym everything comes out teenage petulance fuck it if I can't have him I might just die it would make no difference

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On Fame and Normalcy as Context for Critique of TTPD It's surprising for me to see critiques of the album that essentially say, "We all know she's extremely rich and famous, so why is she pretending to be having the human experience?" Because this album reaches us within the real-world context of Swift's fame, we can't help but see her experiencing that fame out of the corner of our eye as we listen. But I'd argue that we need to ignore that glimmer over there and focus instead on how the songs make us feel and what they are saying within their own context—to consider the album on its own terms as a work of art.

In our culture, fame and wealth represent a kind of transcendence. One of the reasons prosperity gospel works so well is that the ideology of the last century has solidified the conflation of attaining wealth and attaining heaven—which was previously considered a mythological,* posthumous state. What surprises me about these critiques of Swift's work is that they don't seem to be able to question this inner ontology.

The lesson should be that her continued focus on the subject matter at hand reveals a truth about life—as all great art does: nothing saves you from the mundane experience of being a human, nothing removes precarious emotions and irrational, unobtainable desires. These are the burdens we all bear, they are the landscapes we all walk through. At the bottom of art is the desire to establish, I think, a shared humanity. In which the artist can express their humanity and reflect the audience's humanity back to them. With a receptive audience—and I believe the Swifties are a receptive audience—the artist can see their humanity reflected back in the shared humanity experienced by their audience.

I'm skeptical of serious or intellectual (as opposed to political or social) art critique in general because it essentially investigates and unpicks whether a work of art has accurately explained the human experience. Honestly, what the fuck is up with that? The experience is what it is, what comes out of a human is an accurate human experience.

The continued resistance to seeing Swift as a human woman is a resistance to letting go of the idea that success can end suffering, which is an innate, built-in feature of having a human form.

I think the impulse to see Swift as a god on the part of some of her fans is also tied to this resistance. It's completely natural to see god in the sublime—an impossibly high waterfall laced with rainbows; a mountain view on a clear, bright morning; black storm clouds like a floating city in the summer sunlight—and Swift's presence and her work is sublime. But to place the onus of the sublime on Swift alone is also unfair to her as a human being who will, inevitably, experience the quotidian, petty, and disappointing like the rest of us. The roots of the sublime, for Swift, and for her fans, have always been firmly planted in the mundane.

I'd like to enter into evidence the lines, All my friends smell like weed or little babies and You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratched your head / You fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever and Now I'm down bad crying at the gym.

Swift has become more and more comfortable with, and skilled at, reporting from the front lines of being inside an average moment. Not a moment so sparkly that you're [dancing] in a storm in [your] best dress / Fearless. Not a moment that you're willing yourself to capture it, remember it! Not even a moment as romantic as dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light. It's not rare, but the narrator's there, we're there, and it's real and true in a way that poeticizing it any further would obscure.

To be an artist, Swift must be a person, as all artists must—it's our burden to be (maybe) more human than everyone else because it's our role to connect people to their shared humanity. Artists have to be open to the whole world of experience like a tide pool that lets things flow in and lets them flow out again.** Therefore, it's imperative to engage with The Tortured Poets Department as if it was written by a human woman who is an artist and not by Taylor Swift the brand, the star, the god.

It's this aspect of the her, the work itself, that is immortal and transcendent. To reference "Clara Bow" and it's allusion to the passage of female stardom, I'd like to say that Stevie Nicks (also referenced in the song along with the eponymous actress) may not be the sensation that she once was, but decades after her public "peak" Nicks' work has played a pivotal role in the development of my sonic tastes (via the way her style has inspired artists like Swift herself), my self-image, and my emotional world. Nicks' fame is not gone, it's just underground living in the subconscious of thousands of listeners like me who treasure every sublime and mundane artistic decision she made years ago.

I hate to make the parallel, but I will anyway because I love this text: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius—yes, the one that every philosophy bro in your life has told you to read—was a journal that Aurelius kept around 161 to 180 AD. The man was the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the biggest deal, the apotheosis of then-contemporary manhood. And his journal is filled with pep talks and frustrations, urging himself to get his shit together, to get out of bed on time, to stay resilient to conflict and criticism. Normal, everyday human stuff.

He writes, "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?'

So you were born to feel 'nice'? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”

Swift, hopefully, will continue to fix her quill, fountain pen, or glitter gel pen on her pedestrian experiences and inner feelings, expressing them as stories about other similarly flawed, confused, boring, passionate, loving, ambitious, sad, supportive, imaginative, foolish characters through her music. After all, she must continue to go to work, as a human being, just like the rest of us. And in sharing that work with the world as a human woman—not a god or an icon—we get the gift of experiencing a unique facet of our shared humanity in all its messiness and strangeness and contradiction and paradox and inadequacy and wonder.

I want you to know / I'm a mirrorball / I'll show you every version of yourself tonight.

More TTPD reflections under {#an experiential read of the tortured poets department} follow along!

Notes

*Mythological here referring to the mythology-as-worldview/ontology/truth that's upheld by religion or folk spiritual belief systems.

** This is a metaphor from Anne Lamott in this podcast episode: https://www.cathyheller.com/2021/03/how-to-quiet-your-inner-critic-stop-procrastinating-on-your-dreams-anne-lamott/ (a perfect listen for any artist who feels too sensitive for this world)