I’m the problem. It’s me.
I have to credit two of my sisters for the place of this song as the first lyrics analysis on my site. One suggested I write an essay about it during a recent conversation, which finalized some thoughts I’d been trying to make sense of for my writing, and the other is the reason Taylor is on my radar in the first place. Without this sister’s commandeering of the playlist every time I drove her anywhere, I might be living an existence in which I never listened to anything Taylor Swift sings about with any real attention. This sister is the sole reason Taylor Swift earned her way to my top Spotify artist of 2021, since I really only listen religiously to Eminem and Bruce Springsteen when I’m not playing audiobooks. They came in second and third place that year, respectively, and made their comeback in 2022.
The first time I heard Anti Hero, I just remember fixating on the seeming ridiculousness of the line “sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m a monster on the hill.” I found this hilarious, to my sister’s mild annoyance. Her love for Taylor was unphased, but even she admitted the lyrics were a little funny. I used to send her texts asking if she felt like a sexy baby or a monster on a hill when I heard this song playing anywhere. That’s all it was to me for a little while: the sexy baby monster song that I could use to humor my sister’s adulation for all things Swift. It wasn’t until I was in rehab for the first time in Danvers, MA that I really began to listen to everything Taylor was singing about. I was thinking a lot more about everything then, and the recovery support staff had started playing pop music during the day in the common space, so I listened. And I finally got something out of it.
Months later, I watched the music video and felt my understanding of the song deepen with the theatrical depiction of the lyrics. The video is a little weird, but we’re weird in recovery so it works.
I don’t know if Taylor meant for any of this song to pertain to recovery; I know that she identifies as being in recovery from her struggle with an eating disorder - a form of addiction disease in itself, so perhaps elements of this song reflect her experience with the isolation and disconnect that accompany that trauma. Regardless of her inspiration, she touches keenly on the experience of so many in active addiction while also referencing the hardship for all those whose lives are affected by loved ones suffering from addiction.
We’re going to do a deep dive into the lyrics, line by line, to analyze her song as an encapsulation of the desperation and loneliness of addiction as well as the dawning self realization of early recovery and the almost hopeless hope that our support network clings to as they watch us slip time and again in pursuit of real recovery.
The Anti Hero song title draws on a classic archetype in literature: the anti-hero is a protagonist who lacks the traditional characteristics of the ideal hero. Unlike the villain, who embodies the worst qualities of society, the anti-hero functions more as the character we want to see be the hero but whose flaws challenge that fulfillment. The anti-hero is often a misfit in possession of one or more major flaws that can be his or her downfall or near ruin. The absence of morals that the anti-hero struggles to embody tends to isolate him from the rest of society, and often this isolation cannot be resolved because the anti-hero clings to this separateness as part of his identity.
The video opens on a single shot of Taylor facing away from the camera, an image that reflects her isolation and lack of identity. Taylor - the protagonist of the video - actually sings in the video (or lip syncs, but same thing for my purposes), instead of using a voice-over (which happens in videos such as All Too Well, willow, and I Bet You Think About Me - yes, I did my research. My sister will be so proud), which is an important detail. Portraying herself as the one saying all these lyrics suggests a level of self awareness in the person this video presents.
This self-awareness seems to conflict with Taylor’s struggle (I’m just going to refer to the speaker as Taylor since it’s Taylor in the video - makes it easier for my purposes). Taylor struggles with herself throughout the song/video but knows exactly why she struggles - this is the dilemma of addiction, especially for those of us in early recovery or those of us who want recovery but still can’t shake the clutches of whatever addiction has a death-like grip on us. Like Taylor, we know what the problem is and see how it’s affecting us and others, but we’re in the hardest place: the beginning.
She opens directly facing the camera now, “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” and it looks as though she’s going to confide this big secret to us: this is her problem, and she’s both telling and showing us.
I’ve heard so many times that drinking and drugs stunt emotional maturation, so this idea of aging without wisdom reflects the state of being stuck with ourselves that many of us experience. The kind of behavior that many of us in active addiction lack the skills we gain in maturing without the illusioned existence of our drug of choice. Drinking let me ignore problems I felt ill-equipped to handle, gave me a cheat sheet for proper social maturation, and let me plagiarize my report on knowing how to process and express my emotions in a healthy, mature manner. I’ve never owned a fake ID, but alcohol kind of was one for me since I truly never passed the road test of adulthood and only convinced myself that I was a functioning human because I could numb everything in me that told me otherwise.
Continuing with the theme of time, she says, “Midnights become my afternoons, when my depression works the graveyard shift, all of the people I've ghosted stand there in the room”
This line reminds me of the time warp that drinking can become. I’ve had friends recall lost days as a result of fueling a constant state of blackout, and while I haven’t lost days in that way I’ve had time cease to mean much of anything if I had alcohol in my system. Alcohol sort of functioned like a magical time machine transporting me through hours in which I didn’t want to have to feel how I was feeling. It could be three in the morning with the threat of insomnia or nightmares awaiting me in my bed, but alcohol promised to sweep us right through that scary state into something better. That’s when the loneliness really settles into your bones, when you know everyone you care about and who cares about you is sleeping and their names are just sleeping names in your phone who aren’t there in your darkest hour. That’s the cognitive distortion speaking, but it’s incredibly convincing when there’s no one awake to tell you otherwise.
Taylor flees her ghosts, just as I do, just as we all do, even tries to call for help on a phone whose cord has been cut, reflecting our struggle to reach out for help when we need it. She admits, “I should not be left to my own devices; they come with prices and vices. I end up in crisis (tale as old as time)”, which touches on the first of the Twelve Steps in which we admit that our lives had become unmanageable. Even when I stopped drinking, I had a lot of trouble letting go of “my own devices” as means of managing my life. It was only when I ceded control of those reins that I started to get anywhere in recovery. The chanted “tale as old as time” echoes the endlessly cyclical nature of the problems we get ourselves into and the deeper they pull us in when we try to keep ameliorating or running from the damage done to ourselves and others.
Running is what Taylor in the video does, and she opens the door to get away from these ghosts only to find herself standing outside: “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” This is the inescapable, most powerful ghost presence in our lives in active addiction. Like Taylor in the video, we’re both the problem and the only one who shows up (in our minds) to keep ourselves company in this graveyard shift nightmare existence, so we let the other self in.
In the subsequent couple scenes, Taylor and Taylor Two seem like they’re having a great time: taking shots and smashing/playing guitar, but the next shot shows Taylor Two teaching Taylor - blackboard and all - that everyone will betray her. The fun quickly turns to sadistic manipulation. All the while, we have the voiceover lyrics “At tea time, everybody agrees. I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” The voiceover aspect presents Taylor as taking part in this time with herself as unaware of the reality of what’s really happening. As onlookers, we can see the problem, but in active use the line where fun morphs into destruction, the lines are blurred and we don’t have the self-awareness or strength to put a stop to it. The “everybody agrees” line is great because it can function on two levels: one, being that everybody else can see the real problem even when we can’t; two, it emphasizes the feeling of otherness when we feel that everybody else is in agreement against us and in misunderstanding us.
Now we’re at the line I used to find completely ridiculous yet now view as one of the most relatable sentiments in this song. “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I'm a monster on the hill” - as specifically weird as it is, she captures the feeling of disconnect so well with this visual. It’s that way you feel when you’re looking around a room and everyone else just looks happy and perfect somehow, when their lives look like their Instagram posts: all the good with none of the bad that you feel you’ve monopolized in your life. Being a monster on the hill is what I really started pondering in rehab. I imagined this ogre-like creature sitting alone on top of this hill, and it just felt so horribly lonely, ugly and removed. A pariah ostracized by everyone on level ground who can point at it and judge from afar. That’s where the word monster derives - from the act of humans seeing something other and pointing at it in wonder; the Latin monstrare means to point out, and I think that’s how a lot of us feel when we’re operating in the drinking mindset: other and pointed at.
Now monster Taylor shows up, and she’s “Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city. Pierced through the heart, but never killed.” Giant Taylor is just great, since she literally embodies the elephant in the room feeling that a lot of us have felt before we’ve become open and honest about our drinking but have that paranoid nagging that it’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue to say something to break the fragile illusion that maybe they haven’t actually noticed how bad it is. But here we are, big as life and lurching toward the destruction of everything good in our lives, deeply injured in the place it hurts most. I’ve had my share of bruises as a result of drinking, but nothing hurts worse than knowing I’ve done something to hurt the people in my life.
The next line - “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism” - is one with which I’ve come to identify especially after doing my fourth step writing. For those who aren’t familiar with the Twelve Step program, the fourth step involves writing out our resentments, fears and conduct, and then analyzing our role in each of them. It’s truly illuminating, and I came to realize that my own selfish motives and fears caused a lot of the pain in my life. I found that I’m really talented at playing the victim in the theatrical version of my life as narrated by my addict self, and my people pleasing habits reinforce this language, which another woman in the program called fluent victim-ese. Sensing that my drinking created a heavy shadow in the lives of my loved ones, I’d strive ceaselessly to be generous with my efforts and gift-giving in shallow attempts to prove my love for them even as I selfishly clung to the real things they needed from me: my sober, engaged presence. I made myself the center of the universe in my head, watching every action and word of others as ones committed in orbit around me and translating their lives as lived in reaction to me. That’s narcissism at its finest, but for the longest time I viewed myself as unjustly wronged that they would choose to talk about me or exclude me from anything. I expected results for giving gifts I didn’t suffer to part with, and I genuinely believed I was altruistic in my efforts because I let the Taylor Two version of me convince me so.
Taylor then brings back a line from earlier in the lyrics: “I wake up screaming from dreaming one day I'll watch as you're leaving”, emphasizing the truly haunting nature of this fear. This was always a big fear for me: the terror of the people I loved most seeing me for the ugly person I am in addiction and leaving me because of it. I have lost people as a result of my behavior when drinking, and even when I haven’t completely lost people, I’ve definitely lost their trust. The ironic quality of this fear is it doesn’t always stop us from drinking even though we know what we have to do. I think there must be more to that than just the drinking. I think there is a part of me, of us, that genuinely believes that sober or not, we are unlovable at heart, and we must do everything in our power to hide that truth from others and ourselves. The drinking is part of our desperate and severely flawed coping strategy to cope with this cognitive distortion.
I’ll look at the chorus now, since it deserves a bit more attention than previously received. The lines everybody knows either from the radio, die hard Swifties, or unavoidable memes: “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me. At tea time, everybody agrees. I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” It’s not just the drinking, the depression, the loneliness, the past trauma, or the plethora of bad days and experiences - it’s me. I’m the problem. These other things are excuses I’ve used not to look at the real issue at hand, which is my own state of disconnect from myself, others, and God - my Higher Power. It’s my inability to recognize that I’ve been chasing an illusion of consciousness and connection rather than pursuing the real thing. And I realize what she means by that last part, just how exhausting it must be for the ones who are really rooting for me, for us. Our friends and family want us so badly to succeed despite ourselves, and they have to watch time and again as we fail without knowing the depth of why we fail. We hardly know ourselves.
That’s the essence of the line “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.” We will look at every burning reason in search of an answer for why, why we use, why we self harm or indulge in whatever form of addiction that afflicts us, but we can’t really look at ourselves because we don’t know ourselves. I’d have days when my face in the mirror felt unrecognizable; it was a mask I felt obligated to further mask with makeup if I was to let anyone else see it because I just didn’t like what I saw. That visual distortion echoed the internal dysfunction I felt at the time, though I couldn’t really see that either. Whereas makeup provided a temporary fix for the ugliness that my drinking self convinced me stared out of my mirror, alcohol masked the ugly self I felt lived behind that face.
The presence of multiple Taylors in the video represents this understanding of self that we come to realize in recovery. There are two selves: the self in active recovery - the real self - and the addict self. I love the part in the video when Taylor Two creeps up behind Taylor in the bathroom mirror after weight shaming her and smiles evilly at the result of her criticism. This is the addict self whom we welcome as the most dependable company in our lives, the voice whispering in our mind that we’re never enough and whose counsel we’ve come to believe as the most true thing in the world.
The video ends with Taylor and Taylor Two swigging wine on the roof before they spot Monster Taylor looking forlorn and lonely as she lumbers toward them. Rather than running from her like we saw all those sexy babies do earlier, they wave to her to join them. They welcome Monster Taylor, and their embrace of this monster version of themselves illustrates a hard truth that each of us has to face: we have to not only acknowledge but accept the monster, the ugly part of us that we want to run from but that constitutes a core piece of our identity. The monster doesn’t need to define us, but what we do with the monster does.
My monster has a lot of faces, and I’ve learned that welcoming the monster doesn’t mean celebrating it or choosing to be the monster; it means nurturing it by taking the steps best suited to living healthily with it. For my alcoholic monster, I’ve invested in working the Twelve Step program. For grief, I accept it and am learning to process it in a way that lets me feel rather than pushing it aside. It’s not an easy process for either of these, and I’m still learning to accept the other monsters, but at least I know what I need to do. You have to welcome the monster, wave it over to join you even if you feel like you’re sitting alone on a roof sometimes. Maybe don’t share a bottle of wine with it if alcohol is your issue, but share your life with it.
