this is me trying
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- this is me trying / Labyrinth (Eras Tour, Gelsenkirchen)
- this is me trying / Daylight (Eras Tour, Miami Gardens)
Sister Songs
Anxiety manifested as exhaustion, the speaker is doing their best under the sustained weight of depression and inner turbulence. The admission of effort itself is the emotional content: 'I was so ahead of the curve the curve became a sphere' captures the disorientation of a mind that cannot stop.
“shiniest wheels, now they're rusting”
The speaker's self-portrait of decay. Shiniest wheels names what she once was at her best, and now they're rusting marks what she has become under the weight of sustained effort without recovery. The rust here is not inflicted from outside but the consequence of the speaker's own failure to tend to herself: the caring stopped, and she corroded. The image does the same analytical work as the motif's charge across the catalogue - passive ruin, the shine that was there and is no longer.
“I'm here in your doorway”
The doorway as the furthest the speaker can manage to come. Standing in the threshold rather than entering, she registers an attempt at reconnection that has reached the boundary and stalled there.
“Pulled the car off the road to the lookout”
Pulling the car off to the lookout as the paused drive of someone barely holding on; the car stopped at the edge marks the speaker's standstill, the engine off at the brink.
“Pouring out my heart to a stranger but I didn't pour the whiskey”
Names what the speaker has not done, the bartender's gesture refused as proof of trying. The line uses the whiskey not as consumption but as restraint, the bottle uncapped only in the negative. The pour the speaker has held is the song's most concrete claim about effort.
“And it's hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound”
Vulnerability-inside-the-party register, the party as social membrane the speaker cannot navigate while raw; the simile (open wound) names what makes the public space unbearable. The line states the threshold the speaker has not crossed even when physically present.
trying register
“I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere / and I've been meaning to tell you, I think your house is haunted”
“I've never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try” — mirrorball
Community reading places mirrorball's triple repetition alongside this is me trying as a two-song trying-register pair within folklore itself: both songs locate the effort in a speaker who is working visibly hard at something that reads as easy for others. Patreon commenter Alexis Luna frames the two songs as part of a three-part trying cluster with Mastermind. The proximity within the album (tracks 6 and 9) intensifies the pairing.
the threshold plea, retried in a wearier voice
“But I'm here in your doorway”
“Betty, I'm here on your doorstep” — betty
The threshold plea recurs across the album: James on Betty's doorstep with his apology, and this is me trying standing in the doorway with another, the same posture in a wearier voice. The community hearing places the two thresholds in series, the teenage apology retried by an older speaker less sure of being let in.
the gifted child stunted by early maturity
“I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere”
“Growin' up precocious sometimes means Not growin' up at all” — But Daddy I Love Him
Community readers pair "growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all" with this is me trying's "I was so ahead of the curve", the two lines naming the same arrested development: the gifted child praised for early maturity and quietly stranded by it, the performance of being grown standing in for the stages it skipped.