by Oli Ingledue

Ten months older, I won’t give in

Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it

Taylor Swift

Truthfully, I do not remember exactly where I was when I first heard Taylor Swift’s “Clean.” I was probably in my mother’s car, on some long trip between my hometown and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I do know that it was 2014 and I was listening to 1989 for the first time, reinvigorated by Swift’s lyrical prowess and pop-synth that brought me nostalgia for the ‘80s music my parents raised me on. When I first heard the song, I was only 11, yet even then, I was longing to be “Clean” of things that I had not even realized were tarnishing me. I didn’t understand why it immediately meant something to me. I know for sure that “Clean” did not hit me as hard on the first listen as it would on the 1000^th. But that was the day I began to grow from a confused and scared child into a broken teen and eventually a healing young adult, and “Clean” led me the entire way.

You’re still all over me

Like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore

Taylor Swift

To me, “Clean” represents what it’s like to try to move on from a damaging event. Clean’s first verse describes the depths of what I call post-despair, a stage of pain that comes right after the worst moments. Post-despair is when you feel like you’re still being smothered by your sadness, but only because it only just left, not because you’re still feeling it. You’ve been rubbed raw and now all you can do is be numb and think about how much it sucked to be in that situation, whatever it may have been. There’s this overwhelming sense of responsibility, because now you have to actually deal with yourself rather than be a carcass floating through life, feeling so much of only sadness it might as well be nothing. I’ve found the post-despair to almost be worse than the despair because you’re so much more conscious of your situation. The reality often hurts even more than being in the midst of your emotions.

Then the chorus comes, and it gives you a glimpse what the healing process is like. How, when you finally accept responsibility for yourself and begin to clean up your mess, you start to drown in it again. You’re not falling back into sadness, but you are facing it head-on, using all your powers of self-love, introspection, and healing to try to grow from this hand you’ve been dealt. And it is at that point when you realize that facing the situation with a clear head is somehow worse than living it. You see everything for what it was, and you have to reckon with the horror of it all. When I find myself in this stage, I’m usually staring at myself in the mirror after a good cry, looking deep into myself for how to be okay again. It’s that introspection, which Swift describes as the rain, that slowly begins to wash you clean.

Rain came pouring down

When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe

Taylor Swift

The second verse and the pre-chorus describe the anger you feel once you realize the horrors you’ve faced. Once you realize that no one should experience what you did, there is a burning fire to avenge yourself. Someone has to make it right and your instinct tells you that to do that, you must fight. So, you scream, and you sob even more, and you punch pillows and walls and roofs, and you throw away photos and clothes and all it does it make you angrier because you cannot fight your way to peace. You don’t know that yet though. All you know is something hurt you and you didn’t deserve it and how could you ever be okay with that without destroying the source? Eventually you punch all you can punch, and you sob until you’re dehydrated, and you realize you’re still not there yet. So, you think, well that must not be what I need to do, and you keep going. Then is your second chorus, your moment of clarity after drowning in anger when you realize that there’s still more work to be done.

The water filled my lungs, I screamed so loud

But no one heard a thing

Taylor Swift

The first verse took us through post-despair, the second verse through anger, and the bridge leads us to the crux of it all, the moment when you finally become clean. When you realize the good, the bad, and the in-between can coexist in your past and all you can do is be better for it. When all the sorrow and anger have settled you admit to yourself that you can long for parts of the past and still understand that you never truly want to go back. This is the most important part of moving on because this is the first moment in the process where you address your truth with some nuance. You can finally admit that you don’t have to feel only one way about what happened. Despair, post-despair, and anger are not your only options. You can miss the past and never even consider going back. Which brings us back to the quote I began with.

Ten months sober, I must admit

Just because you’re clean, don’t mean you don’t miss it

Ten months older, I won’t give in

Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it

Taylor Swift

I spent most of my life feeling dirty, tarnished, and I had no clue why until 2015. When I moved to Chapel Hill in 2013, I began to realize a lot of things about myself that I’d always known but never had words for. By 2015 I knew some reasons I felt tarnished at a young age. I was depressed, closeted, and traumatized by things a child should never have experienced. In 2015/2016, every time I heard “Clean” I desperately longed for the feeling Swift sings about, that final moment after you made it through the thick of it and now you can breathe again. But I just wasn’t there yet. Middle and high school came and went like buckshot comes and goes through the skull of an unsuspecting deer. I felt more tarnished leaving than I did going in and it seemed life was on a slow slope downward. So, I continued to long. I begged God for relief and freedom and peace and most of all to be Clean. My broken heart combined with my unrelenting mind and my neglected body meant I was as “unclean” as I’d ever been; I wasn’t even at the overarching post-despair yet. I know now that I wouldn’t get there for a while, that my true Clean would not come until the fall my senior year of high school begun.

Until I tell you about my healing, I should tell you about how any of this relates to my creativity. If you couldn’t tell, I like to write and I like to do it dramatically; specifically, I write songs. My lifelong inspiration is Taylor Swift because of her ability to tell an artistic narrative; telling my own artistic narrative is one of the only ways I’ve ever known how to cope. I started writing seriously in middle school as a coping mechanism in the hopes that it would get me closer to my own Clean. It did, in a lot of ways. “Clean” kept me and my writing optimistic, a reminder that there was a calm wading pool at the end of the rapids. So, I wrote optimistically. I did my darndest to see the good in everything while still trying to face all my pain. I wrote about how I was hurting but trying my best and how all I wanted was to make it out okay. One of my earliest lyrics reads “I’m waiting for life to let me go,” a desperate cry to finish the despair and the post-despair and the anger so I could finally make it to the peace. My writing was where I put all my pain until I knew how to get rid of it.

In the Fall of 2020, I was doing the worst I’d ever been, a true testament to my statement of my life being a downward slope (more like a downward waterslide, with waves and turns but still churning endlessly for hard ground). To make a long story short, I had a bad relationship with love, family, myself, and unfortunately, drugs. When a bad night almost became my last night, I decided to go to the psychiatric hospital. That was when I both literally and figuratively became Clean. I started new meds, got a new therapist, and really began to work towards happiness (now that I actually knew how). The hospital provided me with the foundation for building my own sense of Clean, the peace I’d been longing for since I was 12. I learned how to love myself, others, and work towards a better life. When I left the hospital two weeks later, I was fundamentally changed. After going through withdrawal and being stripped of my access to the outside world, I understood the gravity of what I was doing to myself. The most important thing I learned was that I didn’t ever want to do it again.

My post-despair lasted from October until January, as I was still very much mentally consumed by my own pain. I cried, I hardly ate, and I was constantly on edge. It was grueling and scary, but it was necessary. Luckily, my anger did not last as long as the post-despair. I only spent about January into March angry at the world for the cards I’d been dealt. But I’d already been angry for so long that I don’t think I had much punch left in me. And when you’re on the right meds with the right therapist and working on your relationships with people, it’s hard to feel angry. I was working so hard towards being Clean it was all I could think of. Most of spring I spent realizing how I could miss parts of the past but still never want to return. There were people, places, habits that I felt a sick sort of nostalgia for, but I didn’t give in. I had worked too hard for my own happiness to give it away. My Clean is both literal and figurative, I’m clean of drugs, self-harm, abusive people, and all else that has hurt me. The past doesn’t feel like a plague anymore, it just feels like part of my life. Somehow, I gave myself closure after spending years wishing others would give it to me. It isn’t something I could describe in detail because it happened so gradually and naturally. But it was there. I was on the cusp of moving on into a new life.

Truthfully, I don’t know when the final shift happened. I am not at all sure when I became the Clean that I feel I am now. Maybe it was when my ex-partner’s birthday came and went, and I didn’t pay him any mind. Maybe it was the night I came out to my mother on a whim, and she embraced me lovingly, telling me words I had only ever dreamt of. Maybe it was when I thought about relapsing and simply didn’t because I knew it couldn’t ever be worth it. I’m inclined to believe it was a mix of all those examples and every other milestone I reached. Whenever it was, I don’t think I would have ever gotten there if I hadn’t spent years of my life writing my way through pain. I don’t know if I would have ever realized that being Clean was an option if the song hadn’t told me it was something worth fighting for. Swift sums it up better than I could, “Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.”

Taylor Swift. “Clean” 1989. Sony Music Entertainment, 2014. CD.

Written for LANG 120 with Ayelet Even-Nur