Currently Thinking About Guilty As Sin?

Currently thinking about ‘guilty as sin?’

Maybe it’s her reckoning with how much she blamed herself for their problems and fights in past songs (e.g., afterglow “it’s all me in my head / I’m the one who burned us down”)

And she’s finally acknowledging that not all of the guilt she felt in the past was justified and it wasn’t all her fault

So it’s “guilty as sin?” because she’s questioning it (or being sarcastic about it) like ‘oh was it really all my fault?’ (Also probs ‘oh was I really just too much to handle? Was there really no one in the world who could take it? Or could you just not take it??’)

I really do believe that a lot of folklore, evermore, & midnights is a blend of her present and past experiences/emotions inspired by her going back and revisiting her earlier songs for the re-recordings

Like tolerate it, for instance?? Really strikes me as a combination of inspiration from her previous time in an age-gap relationship and her realizing that she was feeling a lot of the same things in her present relationship

“I polish plates until they gleam and glisten” reminds me of the all too well 10 min short film

But “I made you my temple, my mural, my sky, but now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life” really feels like it was about the relationship where she changed her whole life to suit his wants/needs and made him her muse for YEARS

“Where’s that man who threw blankets over my barbed wire?” = Where’s the man I fell in love with? Also a callback to “something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire”

if there’s so much love in the world, why do so many people feel unloved?

i think it's more that there's endless potential for love in the world rather than that the love is automatically there. giving love openly is a skill, but so is learning to identify and accept that love. both actively require that you practice doing them. many of us are out of that practice--on both fronts--or simply never learned how to begin with, i think.