Anti-hero (Sabaitide’s Version)
I have this thing when I listen to a song like a billion times just because some deep dark repressed emotion inside me that I didn’t have the words yet to describe even to my therapist can finally be expressed now that it has been beautifully said in someone else’s words. That’s exactly how I felt about Taylor Swift’s hit song Anti-hero. At first, me listening to this song was like Emma Stone’s on-screen performance of Pocketful of Sunshine from Easy A. Anti-hero was on constant repeat for me when Midnights was initially released, especially when I was the only person in the room. I spent a full week singing and adulting around my studio like no one was watching, and every time I listened to it, I felt like this darkness in me just got older over the years. As in, older but just never wiser.
In other words, maybe I’m admitting that perhaps I didn’t actually get wiser from repressing memories and emotions that I gaslit myself to hold onto as if that’s what nostalgia is supposed to feel like opposed to allowing myself to purge the girlhood trauma from my early twenties. Nostalgia, to me, is clinging to the adolescent highs of blue dreams and lavender haze. However, nowadays, Lavender Haze is more commonly known as another hit Taylor Swift song rather than a strain of weed. The nostalgia I yearn for is a high I used to feel, and every time I yearn for this feeling, it comes with the immense sadness and pain I tried to escape from at the time. By yearning for the chemical highs I once felt, I’ve actually held onto the unspeakable lows that periodically haunt me. The sadness eventually drove me mad, and I feel like I’ve been on a vain and futile hero’s journey ever since I recovered.
It’s like I’m in an alternate reality where I got my life back, but I just have to dream a little smaller on the life-long journey of finding myself again (and I can’t always tell if it’s God or Google watching over me). I used to think my ambivalence was either an artistic trait, mild dissociation, or a side effect of being an Aquarius, but now that Taylor Swift added the word Anti-hero to my vocabulary, I now painfully and accurately identify as one. According to the literal definition of the word, an Anti-hero is “a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). Well, maybe that explains why my hero’s journey isn’t working out. I’m not a hero on a hero’s journey. I’m the Anti-hero on an Anti-hero’s journey. I’m the problem, it’s me.
The ongoing plotline of my life has been that I’m going to write a book one day. However, I’m still working on it. I’m a serial creative project starter who doesn’t have enough hours in the day to complete all of my passion projects unless I can stop sleeping altogether (because then that will give me an extra 6-8 hours a day). I want to write silly and meaningful stories, I want to paint new pieces of art, and I also want to make Overachiever Magazine a better place, but then I also have to maintain this kind of double life at work where my biggest insecurity at the moment is that I haven’t actually been promoted from my entry-level positions for my creative and technical media skills this far into my career, and so I have to keep exploring unpaid passion projects because I’m not content doing what I’m merely paid for.
So work takes up 8 ½ hours of my day, an extra two hours or so of mental energy between commuting and trying to relax, an extra hour to cook and eat, and assuming I can get 8 hours of sleep and just five more minutes I swear, that leaves me with about a 4 ½ hour window for my actual personal life, Overachiever Magazine things, and a multitude of ongoing creative side projects. I’m by no means trying to complain about my life, but this brief and candid analysis of how I manage my time and energy is actually very sobering for me. So it’s like I got my old life back, but in my present reality, I’m honestly struggling between becoming a disappointed idealist and a more faithful believer. I feel like this stream of thought could get really sad if I continue to think like that. That’s why being an Anti-hero is way more fun.
As an Anti-hero, I’m equally the protagonist and the problem in my own life story and I can be cool with that because I’ve listened to the song enough times to convince myself that I came to that realization all on my own. It’s not like anything in my life situation really changed, it’s just that now, I’ve been hyped up to take ownership of my haunting underachievements because I’m an empowered woman who listens to way too much Taylor Swift. For now, at least, maybe I should avoid the novel I originally wanted to write and start with a poetry book instead. That way, I can turn my self-loathing into something more lyrically beautiful and socially appropriate. If anyone is actually rooting for me, it must be exhausting always rooting for the Anti-hero.
Song Credits: Anti-hero by Taylor Swift (2022)
