"I Knew You Were Trouble" by Taylor Swift

I'm trying to get the T-Swift outta the way early, for your sakes. As I've mentioned, Swift is a music video savant and there are plenty of her music videos I could've chosen for this theme. Not only do they showcase her ability to bring her vision to life, they also bring to light her biting self-awareness, her humor, imagination, and attention-to-detail. She's an artist who has been consistently forthright about how deeply her art is manifested as an expression of her life. Watching her videos is like watching how she imagines how her life is unfolding. They are a distorted fantasy, because they are all so much more beautiful than how I'm sure the experiences were. That's how art is. The best of it is born out of our darkest moments. It's able to shed light on those shadows and bring back joy where we only thought there would be pain. It does this a thousand-fold and more. And, if it's strong enough - if the idea, the feeling, the lesson is pure enough - it graces it's creator with immortality. Regardless of whether or not we remember their name, we'll be able to look, listen, or read their art and be stirred to the same emotion the artist was feeling when they created it.

I hope you enjoyed that paragraph, because that's as serious as we're getting today. I chose this song due to the sheer ridiculous-ness of the video. People forget Taylor is a Sagittarius, but her goofiness and optimism is what takes the edge out of what is genuinely a terrible situation, which we'll get to later.

Picture it - Coachella, 2012. It was a crazy time. It was one of the hottest summers on record, the second unsuccessful Spiderman franchise was just barely hitting theaters, and everyone was watching a meme where President Obama is singing "Call Me, Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepson. In fact, everyone was singing "Call Me, Maybe" that summer because, despite it's all around pop awful-ness, it's a national treasure. The world both does and does not deserve that song. What was I talking about? Oh yes....the "I Knew You Were Trouble" video. The intro to the video is ridiculously long - it lasts nearly two fucking minutes. For the record, I hate music videos with long, cinematic intros. This one gets a pass because it's hilariously confusing but if any musicians are reading this - don't fucking do that to your fans. They will seriously skip the video and look for a lyric video that cuts through the nonsense.

This is where our story begins. Taylor has just woken up in the middle of fucking Death Valley, tent debris everywhere, and she starts on a good long ramble. This, my friends, is a metaphor for her relationship with the guy she's singing about. The desert imagery is telling - in dream interpretation (which, among my renewed esoteric interests, is now one of my hobbies), deserts represent feeling unloved and unwanted. If there is someone else in the desert with you, that person is usually the person who is making you feel that way. Often, dreams like this signify that you feel burdened by this person. I'm going to take an educated leap and say that this symbolism carries over into the video. Taylor's rant is fairly personal, despite how pseudo-deep it sounds. In it, she acknowledges some key details - 1) she didn't trust her instincts, 2) she felt out of control, 3) even if she's kind of glad it's over, she still misses him - or who she was when she was with him, and 4) she made a mistake and she learned a valuable lesson. Never lose yourself in someone else. That was her fault, not his.

I think part of me knew the second I saw him that this would happen.

It's not really anything he said or anything he did,

It was the feeling that came along with it.

And the crazy thing is I don't know if I'm ever gonna feel that way again.

But I don't know if I should.

Moving on - Taylor meets a drug dealer during one of the shows. Let's talk about this drug dealer. He's hot - way hotter than a drug dealer at Coachella should be. Side note: The actor who plays the "bad boy" in this Taylor Swift video also played Dorian Gray in "Penny Dreadful," so that should give you an idea of how attractive he is. Eternally youthful, mischievous smile, creepily mesmerizing eyes whose color hovers in between green and brown (depending on his mood). Add in tattoos, guy-liner, and man jewelry and he's basically irresistible to a naive 20-something girl on a road trip. Sure, every girl knows that the fedora and wearing suspenders over a wifebeater should have been her first clues he was a major douchebag - but we've all been there, so we can't judge. Hindsight is always 20/20. Anyway, we see snippets of their relationship, which looks pretty insane from the get go and automatically, you can see it wasn't going to be Taylor's jam. Some moments look alright - maybe even romantic - like the cuddling in bed and the matching tattoos. But the rest of it was bullshit. Getting in trouble with the cops, starting fights with biker dudes who could definitely kill the skinny motherfucker, and when he gets bored, he moves on to the next girl with low self-esteem.

You may notice that I keep calling the guy a "drug dealer." That's only half a joke - the other half is the very real effect of love addiction, a characteristic of codependent relationships, especially when a narcissist is involved. These relationships move really fast - like saying "I love you" after three weeks fast. Usually what happens is that one person "love bombs" the shit out of the other person until they are hooked (and depending on how much trauma the person has gone through, this can be disarmingly quick) and then begins to test their boundaries by becoming more and more ambivalent about responding to the other's needs within the relationship. This is when the abuse usually starts - gaslighting, verbal abuse, withholding affection and/or sex, isolation, silent treatment, jealous accusations, and sometimes, even physical violence. However, every so often, the narcissist will do just enough love bombing - a nice dinner here, a small gift there, a compliment or two - just enough to give the codependent person hope that the other person will change back into that loving person they initially knew. Unfortunately, that never happens. What does happen is the codependent person loses their entire identity - including connections with friends and family. In order to keep getting validation and "love" from the other person, they will try their best to conform to be the "perfect" partner. Change their clothes and appearance, hide their opinions, compromise all their needs and boundaries - all for a few crumbs of approval. In the end, it does no good anyway, because once the codependent is depleted of all self-worth, the narcissist will usually move on to someone else. Sometimes they'll come back, especially if the codependent person seems to be doing well (because how dare they move on with their life!) but it will never become a healthy relationship. I have a lot of compassion for Taylor because the experiences that prompted her to write this song probably completely fucked up how she perceived what a healthy relationship should look like. Indeed, many people have difficulty after a codependent relationship because a healthy relationship often feels "boring."

No apologies. He'll never see you cry,

Pretends he doesn't know that he's the reason why

You're drowning, you're drowning, you're drowning

Now I heard you moved on from whispers on the street

A new notch in your belt is all I'll ever be

And now I see, now I see, now I see

He was long gone when he met me

And I realize the joke is on me, yeah!

The irony is we're pretty sure this song was written about John Mayer, whose image (at least in the beginning) was built on being the sensitive Nice Guy. This is a misnomer, because these guys are definitely the worst. As most girls are aware, the Nice Guy often feels more entitled to female attention than run-of-the-mill assholes do. In addition to that, men who describe themselves as a "nice guy" often have an inferiority complex, which can often lead to over-compensating with hyper-masculine behaviors, such as emotional distancing and promiscuity. The thing to understand about human interaction is that people treat others the way they feel about themselves. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy in the worst way - they leave first because they expect others to abandon them, they treat others with cruelty because they perceive those that have treated them with cruelty in the past as superior, and they don't care about other people's feelings because they ignore their own. When confronted by another's Shadow like this, it is tempting to turn our anger and resentment inward at ourselves. What is so unlovable about me that they would treat me this way? What did I do to deserve this (because I surely must've done something to deserve this)? This is a slippery slope that ends in getting trapped within our own shadow. A shadow that, if left unchecked, could leave us just as cold as the other person (and Taylor spent many years very publicly stuck in this tailspin). So, what do we do? I, personally, have found much solace in the Ho'oponopono meditation, the Hawaii'an practice of forgiveness. It consists of repeating the following mantra: I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. With this mantra, the practitioner is forgiving themselves for their part as much as forgiving the other person. Self-compassion is the root of self-worth and self-esteem. It's also essential for the integration of the Shadow.

"I Knew You Were Trouble" Video