this is me trying

“Could've followed my fears all the way down”

Angela & Uncle Jerry identify depression as a central force in the song. Uncle Jerry reads the speaker as possibly suicidal, noting that pulling the car off the road to the lookout and the phrase 'all the way down' suggest a descent toward ending one's life. Taylor herself, in the Long Pond discussion, describes the first verse as someone in a life crisis who drives to a cliff and sits in the car contemplating what to do. Uncle Jerry's concluding statement names the song as examining 'what happens when success doesn't come' and 'how do we live with regret,' answering those questions with the bare minimum of 'keep trying.'

“I have a lot of regrets about that”

Angela & Uncle Jerry identify self-reflection as one of the poem's driving forces. The speaker interrogates her own behaviour in real time, admitting that her words 'shoot to kill when I'm mad' and acknowledging regret about it. Uncle Jerry notes the line appears twice in the song, first about the fear that the other person wouldn't care if she came back, then about the damage her sharp tongue has done. This doubling creates what he calls a 'confessional' quality where the speaker is honestly naming her own complicity in the deterioration of her relationships rather than blaming anyone else.

“They told me all of my cages were mental”

Angela & Uncle Jerry read the song's speaker as someone whose psychological barriers have become self-imposed prisons. Uncle Jerry discusses the paradox of a cage that is explicitly described as mental rather than physical, noting that 'clearly some of the worst cages are in fact our mental cages.' The speaker catalogues her own contradictions: she can write beautifully but claims not to know what to say, she was ahead of the curve but ended up behind her classmates. This self-aware inventory of her own paralysis, combined with the anticipation of rejection ('I didn't know if you'd care if I came back'), fits the pattern of anxiety as a sustained state rather than a momentary response.

“Pouring out my heart to a stranger But I didn't pour the whiskey”

Angela & Uncle Jerry spend considerable time unpacking who the 'you,' the 'stranger,' and the 'they' in this song might be. Uncle Jerry proposes that the stranger could be a literal bartender, the significant other who has become a stranger through emotional distance, or the speaker herself, since she no longer recognises who she is. The 'you' could be a romantic lover, a family member, a friend, or a former version of the speaker's own self. He argues that this deliberate ambiguity strengthens the poem because it allows readers to project their own experiences into it. Angela adds that the song could be about pandemic isolation, addiction recovery, or the general experience of feeling behind your peers, and these readings coexist rather than cancelling each other out.

“You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town”

Uncle Jerry reads the bridge line as the past made inescapable. The addressee returns as a flashback, and because the town has only one screen there is nothing else to watch and nowhere to look away. He connects this to the song's opening in the middle of the action, where stories of the past intrude on the present, and calls this the line that makes the poem. The memory is not recalled by choice. It keeps running, and the speaker's narrow world offers her no alternative to watching it.

“I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting”

The car stands for the speaker's life and forward momentum. Shiny wheels represent her earlier success, youth, and social status; rusting wheels represent stagnation, deterioration, and neglect. Uncle Jerry notes that wheels specifically signal movement, so rusting wheels mean she has stopped moving forward.

“Pulled the car off the road to the lookout”

The road is the path of life, and pulling off it represents stopping the journey, taking a detour from the forward motion of living. The lookout is both a literal scenic overlook and a metaphorical vantage point from which to assess one's emotional crisis.

“They told me all of my cages were mental”

The cage represents the speaker's psychological barriers, limitations, and restrictions. That the cages are explicitly named as mental creates a paradox: a physical image (cage) is described as non-physical, yet the mental cages are shown to be the most confining of all.

“And it's hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound”

The open wound is a simile for raw, exposed emotional pain. Everything the speaker encounters at the party picks at her vulnerability; she is unprotected and everything hurts.

“You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town”

The small town with its single screen represents isolation, a narrow world with no escape from memory. The one screen means there are no choices, no other roads. The speaker cannot avoid the flashback because there is only one place to see anything, and it always plays the same reel.

“You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town”

Uncle Jerry identifies alliteration with the F sounds in the bridge line about a flashback in a film reel, noting 'flashback' and 'film' as linked by the F sound. He calls this line one of the poem's finest and attributes much of its beauty to the accumulated sound devices, including this alliteration.

The F alliteration binds 'flashback' and 'film' into one sonic unit, reinforcing the cinematic metaphor that makes this the song's most vivid image.

“I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting”

Uncle Jerry identifies the car/wheels imagery as metaphorical, with the shiniest wheels representing the speaker's former success, youth, and social status, now deteriorating into rust and stagnation. He notes the antithesis between 'shiny' and 'rusting' and traces how this car metaphor grows across the song into an extended pattern: the wheels (momentum), the road (life's path), the lookout (emotional reckoning), and pulling off the road (stopping life's journey). He argues the metaphor system is consistent and never drops, calling it a conceit.

The car metaphor anchors the song's central argument about a life that has stalled. The physical vehicle becomes the speaker's life trajectory, and rust becomes the visible cost of neglect and depression.

“I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting”

Uncle Jerry identifies a caesura in this line, noting the break created by the comma after 'wheels' that divides the line into two contrasting halves: the former state (shiny) and the present state (rusting). He argues this pause is meaningful because it asks the reader to stop and reflect on the shift from who she was to who she is now.

The mid-line pause enacts the break between past success and present deterioration. The speaker cannot move from one state to the other without stopping to acknowledge the distance between them.

“Could've followed my fears all the way down”

Uncle Jerry identifies the phrase 'all the way down' as ambiguous, asking whether the speaker means sadness (being emotionally downcast), literally looking down from a height, or the ultimate act of jumping off the cliff. He deliberately leaves the question open, suggesting Taylor wants the listener to sit with the ambiguity. Angela agrees, noting that the lookout itself is ambiguous, meaning simultaneously a scenic overview, an emotional stocktaking, and a warning ('look out').

The ambiguity allows the song to hold its most serious implication (suicidal ideation) without stating it outright, respecting the listener's intelligence while keeping the emotional stakes as high as they can be.

“So I got wasted like all my potential”

Uncle Jerry identifies this as a pun built from the cliché 'wasted potential', noting that Taylor splits the phrase apart and reactivates both meanings of 'wasted': literally drunk, and squandered or expended uselessly. He calls this 'typical Taylor', recognising her signature move of taking a dead phrase and making it alive again through wordplay. He also identifies the simile ('like') that holds the two meanings together.

The twisted cliché compresses the speaker's self-destruction into a single line: the drinking and the squandered talent are the same act, named by the same word. The pun makes the connection between substance abuse and wasted gifts feel inevitable rather than argued.