pivot

I enjoy watching the Swiftologist, he’s incredibly intelligent and articulate, and I feel a kinship in how seriously he takes his favorite topic. Taylor Swift’s career is his special interest, but he also makes content on everything else in the pop music zeitgeist. There was one video, though, that rubbed me the wrong way, at least in its framing. 

It was – “How to Murder Your Career – Demi Lavato and the Disney Curse”. I have a soft spot for Demi while Zach definitely doesn’t, but I still stand by the critique that conflating the ups and downs of someone’s life with the arc of their career is somewhat dehumanizing. Maybe that’s not quite right…I don’t necessarily blame Zach in this case, but in general for pop stars, or even just celebrities in entertainment, your life and existence is judged by your career. It’s measured by a shallow binary of “success” and “failure”, a “rise” and “fall”. As if a normal human life isn’t complex and messy and never a straight line. 

When you put someone on the world stage,  and treat every unsuccessful pivot as a mistake, you are making it hard for people to take creative risks. Failure leads to breakthroughs. But also – sometimes declining in relevance is not failure, or a mistake. Line-go-up acclaim wise is not the be-all measuring stick of someone’s LIFE. It’s a story that is weird and unexpected and is never going to follow a smooth arc- that’s what makes it more real, more exciting, more human. 

I think Demi also has bipolar like me, and that may be the worst mental illness to have as a celebrity. The delusions of grandeur that  can come with mania are probably magnified x1000 when you have a large following – a bubble of uncritical support, and people cheering and laughing at the spectical. A regular crash is devastating enough, but add in the very public humiliation – it probably feels like laying and crying naked in the town square, rather than your kitchen floor. I remember watching Gabbie Hannah have what looked like a multi-day episode on tiktok, and I just could not imagine me at my worst being broadcast to the whole world. The youtube video would be, “Robyn: The Plutonic Ideal of Wasted Potential”.