Tag Archives: death by a thousand cuts

Living, Op-Ed

Learning to Let Go

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The thing about writing is, when I write, I’m able to focus my mind on that task, for at least a bit. For someone who’s mind is sometimes, constantly racing, that’s a relief. The scenarios I play out in my head stop as I focus on putting words down.

It’s been a full week now since I haven’t spoken to someone I once wanted to talk to every day. It’s true what they say, the first week feels like a month. It’s strange, but it feels like forever ago since we actually did talk. I almost can’t remember what it felt like to be able to send them a message. I try to think about, if things hadn’t gone the way they had, what would we be talking about today? Would they really be interested in anything I had to say?

I keep thinking about what my younger sister told me. How if they had liked me better they wouldn’t have reacted the way they had. They wouldn’t have blocked me. It hurt to think that, but it’s probably true. Not that they didn’t like me at all, just not enough.

If you haven’t listened to the song “Death By a Thousand Cuts” you should. Lyrics that say “if the story’s over, why am I still writing pages?” “Flashbacks waking me up.” “I can’t pretend it’s okay when it’s not.” “Gave up on me like I was a bad drug.” “Trying to find a part of me you didn’t take up, gave you so much but it wasn’t enough.”

I feel like, especially that last line is so true of many of my relationships. When you give so much and it doesn’t work out. I was talking to a friend recently who’s life looks pretty fabulous on social media. Always on a trip, or fun outing with friends, but she told me how lonely she has been. How friends that have boyfriends don’t include her in some things and how another group of friends always comes along when she invites them, but they never reach out to invite her.

Friendships should always be two sided, but it feels like there’s always going to be that person who puts in a little more effort. You have to decide if it’s worth it to you, to keep putting in the effort.

I had a friend I once considered my best friend. We haven’t spoken in years and nothing dramatic happened. We were friends for half our lives, we even lived together for a time. As we got a little bit older and started getting married and having kids and she wasn’t able to be there for some pretty big events, I stopped reaching out. I found, she didn’t bother to reach out either. There was no real sadness or ill will, just a faded friendship. I hope she’s doing well. She was an important part of my life.

Part of growing is recognizing and letting go of relationships that don’t add anything to your life and instead take things away. You can lose so much of yourself when you can’t walk away. Your happiness, your time, your energy. Don’t let people who don’t appreciate you, take that from you.

When you think of the word relationship, you have to get out of the stigma that it means a romance. A relationship is anything other than a friendship, it’s how you know someone. It could be a family member, co-worker, a person you just met. A relationship can be many different things, but the simplest form is simply an association with someone. It can be someone that you never were able to form a friendship with, but you were still connected in some way.

For me, the worst part of losing a relationship is not having that potential come to fruition. It’s kind of like dating someone you imagined yourself marrying. Then you break up and it’s devastating. The future you planned for yourself, the visions you had, destroyed.

In hindsight, we can say, thank goodness I didn’t get that future. I didn’t have to go through a failed marriage or divorce. Yet it still hurts. That grief of a now different future has to be mourned. I guess that’s why John Lennon sang “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

I wonder about how other people move on sometimes. For instance, when you get mad enough to block someone, are you able to just block them out of your mind? Like ‘I can’t believe they did that, wow, so glad I don’t have to have them in my life any more,’ then just never think about them? For me? I’ve thought about them every single day. I try not to be mad at myself, I try to remind myself I was only trying to be kind and acting in a way that is familiar to me. That other people also in put in the same scenario, have stated they wouldn’t have been bothered. Yet everyone is different. So for one person it might have been a welcomed gesture, but for this person, it wasn’t.

I keep thinking about the times when it would have been okay and would it would not have. The thing is, we behave in a manner in which we are accustomed. We all grow up with not only different beliefs and morals, but are shown what’s acceptable and what’s not. So what could be very normal for one person, is unacceptable for another. It doesn’t necessarily mean either is wrong.

I go back to customs. In certain countries, people are greeted with a kiss on each cheek. Here in America? Someone might slap you for that, press charges, try to make sure you never come into a position of power. So again, it goes back to what you are accustomed to and what you deem as acceptable.

Communication. Make those feelings known so you can be validated. Hey, you did this, it made me really uncomfortable, I would appreciate it if you did not do that again. If that person respects you, chances are, they won’t do it again.

That’s when my mind wanders back to what my sister said. Truth is, maybe they already wanted me out of their life and now they had a reason to just cut all ties.

This is where I have to remind myself that I am not a bad person. That my heart was in the right place. To learn from this so that it was not all for naught. I have to remind myself, as hard as it is, to not let it change me, just change my actions. I can still have a big heart, I can still love people. I just need to slow down, realize not everyone wants to be loved and assess each and every relationship. It’s better to be overly cautious in some circumstances to make sure the other person is comfortable. Respect boundaries and clarify them. So next time I want to mail someone cookies, I’ll make sure it’s okay with them first.

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Taylor Swift’s ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ Breaks 3 Song Standard for “All Too Well.”

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NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series started as a joke between NPR Music and artist Laura Gibson who they tried to see perform while at a bar. The atmosphere was so noisy that they could not hear her perform and joked with her that she should just come perform at their desks. Gibson was a good sport and showed up three weeks later and kicked off what is now known as Tiny Desk Concerts. 11 Years later, over 800 artists have performed for NPR Music, giving them the chance to re-imagine their songs and perform in a atypical environment.

The latest Tiny Desk Concert invited Pop Superstar, 10 time GRAMMY winner, Taylor Swift to their D.C. office to have her chance at playing the iconic gig.

“Wow, this is a lot of people in a tiny office, I love it! I’m Taylor, welcome to my Tiny Desk Concert.” She continued “It’s great to be in D.C. wow, you guys have anything exciting going on the last couple of weeks or any possible changes in play?” Swift went on to say that “Tiny Desk is one of my favorite corners of the internet. It’s an opportunity for artists to decide a different way to showcase their music… I just decided to take this as an opportunity to show you guys how the songs sounded when I first wrote them. So, it’s just me. There’s no dancers, unfortunately [laughs].”

Swift talks about the double standards in the industry

Swift then went on to introduce her first song “The Man” saying:

“I had an album that just came out called Lover [audience cheers], I’m really happy you like it. It’s one of those albums where I wrote everything on one instrument first, so it’s really fun to pick songs to do acoustically because they all started out that way. There’s a song that I have wanted to write conceptually for a very long time because over the course of my life, it has occurred to me that we have a double standard issue in our society. It’s something that I’ve thought about 7 million times a day for the last ten years of my life. I was always just wondering, ‘can I write a song about this? Is there a concise and catchy way to write a song about this? What angle would I take if I were to write a song about this? So I decided the most fun thing to do would be to imagine what my life would be like and what people would say about my life if I did all the same things, but if I was… a man.”

After finishing “The Man” on guitar, Swift handed her guitar pick to a young girl standing near the front before switching over to the piano to perform the title track “Lover.” She spoke about the song before breaking into her performance, explaining:

Taylor explains “Guitar string scar on my hand” line

“There’s a song that I wrote on the album that as soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the title track. Writing songs is strange cause it never happens exactly the same way, but sometimes it happens in a way like this weird, haunting, like you can’t really explain. Like you can’t really explain where these ideas came from and you feel like you didn’t work at all to write it. That’s the best kind of song. Then there are days, most days where you show up and the idea doesn’t and that’s where craft, you have to kind of know the craft of it. You have to try to scrap your brain for something to write cuz you’re not always going to be inspired and that’s ok. There’s a really good Elizabeth Gilbert Ted Talk about that [audience laughs]. One of my favorite things to cry while watching. With this song, it was one of those weird moments where it is just middle of the night, I’m like in my PJs, stumbling to the piano because I got this idea and the song just happened really quickly. There’s a line in the song that I’m really proud of, the line says “with every guitar string scar on my hand, I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover” [smiles]. That line is really special to me because I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing break up songs [audience bursts into laughter] and songs about things not turning out the way you want them to or songs about what you thought would be love and it turned out to not be that at all or you know just kind of the struggle of life. Songwriting is just a therapeutic thing for me. So there are a lot of things I’ve written about in my life that were the harder things I had to go through so I took that [the line] as a metaphor for the times when I was learning to play guitar and I played til my finger bled when I was a kid and I still have those marks from that and all the times I would be changing a [guitar] string and it would pop, and I still have scars from that. It’s also a bigger metaphor for, in life, you accumulate scars, you accumulate hurt, you accumulate moments of learning, disappointment and struggles and all that. If someone’s going to take your hand, they better take your hand, scars and all.”

She can still write a good break up song!

Swift then took off her jacket and joked about costume changes fans are used to seeing on tour. She switched back to guitar while describing the inspiration behind her next song “Death By a Thousand Cuts.”

“So, over the course of the years that I’ve done interviews, which I think is about 15 or 16 years now, I’ve gotten a question over and over again that has the potential to seriously deteriorate my mental health [she tries to say light heartily]. The question is ‘What will you ever do, if you get happy? Like what will you write about? Will you just never be able to write a song again?’ It’s an interesting question, in the interviews, when I would get that question, as a young person, I kind of would just be like ‘well, I started out writing songs about things I had no idea about. I started writing songs when I was 12 years old and they were usually about heartbreak and I had no idea what I was talking about, but I had watched movies and I had read books, so I would grab inspiration from character dynamics, as you do. So I would say in the interviews, probably just do that, if stuff is going on in the world that’s not just happening to me, maybe I could get inspiration from that. Then I’d go home and I’d be like ‘what would happen if I was ever happy? Would I not be able to do the thing that I love the most in the world? Oh my God. Would I not be able to write breakup songs anymore? I love breakup songs! They’re so fun to write.’ So then I happened to be writing this album Lover which is a very very happy, romantic album. In my life, a few of my friends had been going through breakups, like one of those breakups where you need to talk to your friend all the time, because they need to talk about it all day, every day. So I was having a lot of conversations about breakups, I watched movies that were really well done about breakups, in some of the books I was reading there was some good breakups happening. So this all culminated and I’d be waking up one day with all these heartbreak lyrics in my head and I was like ‘It’s still here! Yes!’ So I ended up writing a song that was a breakup song on the Lover album that I was like this song is my proof that you know, I don’t have to stop writing songs about heartache and misery. Which for me is incredible news.”

Although typically the Tiny Desk Concert series stops after three songs, they made an exception, for fan favorite “All Too Well” to which Swift returned to the piano to sing. Swift explained about her decision to play the song off her 2012 album Red:

Taylor Swift doesn’t google herself, but her dad does.

“I was thinking about how it’s almost Autumn, that’s like my favorite season and people on the internet have been like kind enough, in amongst people who care about my music, to associate Autumn with one of my albums called Red. I guess it’s just a very “Autumny” album. I was thinking about that, how it’s so nice, the crisp fall air is happening. You know, I don’t google myself ever, I recommend you not do it either, but my dad does [audience laughs]. He will like send me, links to things, every once in awhile I’ll see that, but that’s the only way I get my news. He sends me these lists that are like, very nice, like ranking my songs, that’s really nice of people to do, I really love that people do that, I find it really nice and I’m grateful that people care enough to rank my songs. There’s one song that I’m particularly proud of because when the Red album came out, there was this one song on the album where I was like ‘I’m the only one who loves this song this much but it’s only because it happened to me and it’s personal. No one else is going to like “All Too Well” as much as me [audience cheers]. When it came out on the album, like slowly but surely, over the course of that album’s life and beyond, you guys have made that song something way more than I thought that life of the song would be. I’ve just had so much fun playing it in concert and just like screaming it with you guys. The fact that this song went out into the world and it’s just, I think it’s usually #1 on any list that’s like saying what my songs are, which is great, and I’m happy that my opinion lines up with your opinion on that because that was probably my favorite song on Red. So I figured that maybe I would play it for you…. Here’s a sad song about Fall.”