#491: Harry Style, ‘Fine Line’

Columbia, 2019

Ever since the start of the pandemic, I have felt like I was shoved off a horse and I landed face first in some perfectly placed mud on the set of some period film made in the 90s. I had a very clear trajectory. I had a plan, the means for said plan, and a lot of people backing me up.

There are days when I feel fine and I am able to just move through the morning into the evening. Other days, I am reminded how completely floundering I am and how forgotten I feel.

Today is one of those days. I think I should start therapy again. A lot happened in Arizona that I haven’t really processed that I think I need to process. I felt abandoned and unprotected. The systems that should have protected me just didn’t. It did not matter if I went through all the right channels to get the support I needed there, the systems were broken.

It’s not just in that small town in Arizona. Arizona made it real to me, a very privileged white woman from middle-class suburbia. Arizona taught me what it feels like to have unstable housing, to feel unwanted, to have rumors spread about me as an outsider, to be gaslighted and then patted on the back for “doing such a great job.”

It’s not just Arizona. Arizona was a cool lab for me to learn how it feels to be in a system of no accountability to fall back on.

I now look at the world with this new framework. I am renegotiating my health and my finances with this new understanding that very few people “get to win” in this system. Affordable housing is a joke and so is financial independence as a young millennial under crippling debt.

I need to go to therapy again. I’m spiraling.

Today’s album was Fine Line by Harry Styles. I listened to this whole thing - which is not as upbeat as I remembered - while laying on the couch, white-knuckling a bone my sister’s dog was chewing.

I am angsty as hec* and what a blessing to go through it listening to a teen dream.

I want to marry Harry Styles and I want to be Harry Styles. It’s a tricky game for my heart.

If I have to burn with the world as we know it, it might as well be to this album.

Top songs: This time around, Fine Line hit different