just floating around in here

Meet me at midnight…

…for the Lavender Haze music video premiere (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

taylor.lnk.to/lavenderhazemusicvideo

Here’s the teaser trailer for the videos I’ve made for Midnights 🌌 Thank you Amazon for premiering this, the first video for Anti-Hero will be out tomorrow at 8am ET. And Midnights will be here SO SOON!!!

https://taylor.lnk.to/taylorswiftmidnights

I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit

— Elif Batuman, The Idiot

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

sometimes you just want to lie down and read a book

Midnights, the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life, will be out October 21. Meet me at midnight.

Pre-order now: https://taylor.lnk.to/taylorswiftmidnights

— Jean Rhys

lonely girls my beloved. i see you staying in your room, i see you standing in grocery store aisles feeling the sudden wave of isolation wash over you. i understand how badly you want and how bad that makes you feel. i get it. we're not alone. but we are.

Virginia Woolf〡Selected Prose; Mrs Dalloway

it is hard to explain without sounding vain or stupid - but the more attractive others find you, the more you're allowed to do. the easier your life is.

i have been on both sides of this. i am queer and cuban. i grew up poor. for a long time i didn't know "how" to dress - and i still don't. i make my sister pick out any important outfits. i have adhd in spades: i was never "cool and quiet", i was the weird kid who didn't understand how "normal" people behave. i was bullied so hard that the "social outcasts" wouldn't even talk to me.

i got my teeth straightened. i cut my hair and learned how to style it. i got into makeup. it didn't matter, at first, if i actually liked what i was doing - it mattered how people responded to it. like a magic trick; the right dress and winged eyeliner and suddenly i was no longer too weird for all of it. i could wear the ugly pokemon shirt and it was just "ironic" or a "cute interest."

when i am seen as pretty, people listen. they laugh at my jokes. they allow me to be weird and a little spacey. i can trust that if i need something, people will generally help me. privilege suddenly rushes in: pretty does buy things. pretty people get treated more gently.

i am the same ugly little girl, is the thing. still odd. still not-quite-fitting-in. still scrambling. still angry and afraid and full of bad things. of course it became my obsession. of course i stopped eating. i had seen, in real time, the exact way it could change my life - simply always be perfect, and things can be easy. people will "overlook" all the other things. i used to have panic attacks at the idea others would see me without makeup - what would they think? even for a simple friend hangout, i'd spend a few hours getting ready. after all, it seemed so obvious to me: these people liked me because i was pretty.

i worry about how much i'm being a bad activist: i understand that "pretty" is determined by white, het, cis, able-bodied hegemonies. if i was really an ally, wouldn't i rally against all of this? recently there's been a "clean girl" trend which copies latinx aesthetics: dark slicked-back hair, hoop earrings. i almost never wear my hair like that; i can hear the middle school guidance counsellor advising me that i might fare better if i toned it down on the culture.

the problem is that i can take pretty on and off. that i have seen how different my life is on a day where i try and a day where i don't. i told my therapist i want to believe the difference is confidence, but it's not. and when you have seen it, you can't unsee it. it lives inside your brain. it rots there; taunting. i get rewarded for following the rules. i am punished for breaking them. end of story.

pretty people can get what they want. pretty people can feel confident without others asking where they got their nerve from. pretty people can be weird and different. pretty people get to have emotions; it's different when they get aggressive, it's pretty when they cry with frustration.

of course people care about this. of course it has crawled into you. of course you want to be seen as attractive. it's not vanity: it's self-preservation.

— Anais Nin

Spooky Paintings by Dillon Samuelson // Ingmar Bergman, from the film Ansiktet ( Svensk Filmindustri, 1958)

girls who learned all their vocab from books and are now constantly embarrassing themselves by pronouncing words slightly wrong in conversation

Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed, 1967

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries