From the view of what you see
I listened to Halsey’s live when she introduced the album at midnight as she was discussing each track and the meaning behind the writing process, she introduces this album as, “are you ready to cryyyy???” No Halsey. No.
She stated this was the hardest song to write, the hardest song to include, but the most important song to add. The discussion of her being very sick from treatment and physically just looking like a spider being sprawled out on the bathroom floor, feeling lifeless and looking ‘hideous’ in her mind from throwing up and being ill. This album from beginning to end is quite the storytelling journey that I feel every step of the way. Also, I never want to kill another spider again.
Lyrics
It’s four in the morning and I’m laying with my head against the toilet seat
For several days now I’ve been living here, too tired to sleep, too sick to eat
I feel like a monster and it doesn’t help that you will treat me like I’ve got the
Venom in my teeth
The visual of this first verse made want to create this image. We all have had the flu or have been in a time where we are so nauseated that we can’t keep our head up. We don’t care about germs at the time, we are just trying to get through the night. We can’t sleep, we can’t eat, and the you that is treating you like a monster is actually, yourself… not anyone else.
‘Cause I’m the spider in your bathroom
I’m the shadow on the tile
I came for shelter from the cold
And I’d thought I’d stay a while
I’m only small, I’m only weak
And you jump at the sight of me
You’ll kill me when I least expect it
God, how could I even think of daring to exist?
Looking just like this, I’m hideous
This idea of just existing, asking what did you did to deserve this? You get sick, cancer, go through chemo, and you are just trying to survive. What did you do to deserve this amount of pain, suffering.
In comparison to a being that was just born into a body, that is small, weak, but animals much larger than it jump at the sight of it, kill it when it minds it’s own business. It’s just existing – yet it deserves to die?
Ashley is a very poltical artist. And I know in this time of politics – she has made it known how mad she is. I would like to circle this idea back to transbodies and gay rights. The idea that on the first day of inauguration, Donald ‘acknowledged’ that there are only ‘two genders.’ Now if you are reading this and you do not understand the difference between gender and sex, let me educate you. I grew up in a very small – ignorant town, so I also didn’t understand. But as I went through graduate school and focused on gender and women studies I learned. In the 90’s women had this luxury of being classified as tom boy. We could dress like men, play sports, be manly, and know one cared. In today’s culture, that would be mostly, identifying as a boy. Men, sadly, have never had that luxury. Just like some girls, some boys dont like pants, like some girls don’t like dresses or being girly. Feminism has always been so important because whatever roles men can’t take on [sensitve, emotional, etc] women have to. And for too many centuries, men have been told to suppress any emotion, which is why we have many men with too many internal raging emotions who end up becoming emotional abusive or raging abusive/compulsive because they simply do not know how to process any of it.
The idea of people being born, liking colors, materials, wanting to express themselves and simply just exist, yet people want to control them, beat them up[?], take away their rights?, dare them to exist? relates to this song for me. Because it challenges someone’s idea of manly, masculine, feminine, straight, normal? Why, because they couldn’t or didn’t have the courage to have that option?
Most hatred happens because of jealousy of not being able to do it themselves or for lack of understanding.
I’m nothing but legs, they used to say
I’m nothing but skin and bones these days
You dangle me high over the drain and tell me I’m lucky
You don’t drop me there and let me wash away
Or put me on display
By trapping me forever between a glass and a dinner plate
This whole verse is this idea of being trapped in between life and death. Stuck at the will of someone else. Dangling above a drain that will wash you away, or stuck between glass and a dinner plate that will either run out of oxygen, or will be released into death, or into freedom. But nothing is at the will of your own. She is too frail and little to fight on her own because her illness has made her far too weak to fight.
‘Cause I’m the spider in your kitchen weaving webs through every year
And I worked real hard on the last one but the last one got me here
I’m minding my own business but my presence makes your curse
I should be getting better but I’m only getting worse
And, God, how dare I even think of choosing here to die?
‘Cause then I’m just a problem that you have to take outside
And I know you hate the sight of me, I haunt you when you’re fast asleep
I’ve got eight legs, a million eyes, if only I had eight more lives
‘Cause I’m the spider on the ceiling and you’re nothing but a guy
You don’t like it when I cry, you would break me if you tried
And you will because I dared to be alive
This verse describes the traces of someone. The webs are her home. The little traces of her she is leaving behind. The things she needs to survive are hers to live in, but are nuisances to those around her [or she feels]. She is working hard to perfect them but they never feel right or perfect enough.
She wants them to be right, and she is just minding her own business in doing so, but every time someone sees them – they are just a bother and they are constantly trying to clean them up or erase them. The haunting you while you’re fast asleep is kind of funny because of all of those stories we are told that when we are alseep spiders crawl in our mouth lol – but it is this idea that when you see a spider you either take it outside, kill it , or it’ll haunt you and torment you when you aren’t looking.
Even when the spider is in an untouchable place, like the ceiling, the person is still the bad guy, they’ll go out of their way to get a step ladder to kill it. They don’t want to see it have emotion because then they won’t carry on with harming it – but they will – because it existed near them.
Really in a nutshell Ashley isn’t speaking to anyone in her life, she is speaking to fate, to some higher power, and even to herself. Throughout the album she continuously has ‘a letter to god’ – asking him to either end it fast, or asking him why in general. Why carry this on – why are you making this painful. Throughout her introduction to the album she said she felt guilty, because as a child she would often feel envious of the kids who died or ended up in severe accidents in her small town because they would get attention – and she wanted that attention. So she had asked, Is this punishment for wanting that when I was little? Which was her reasoning for writing ‘hometown.’ So the album is loaded with a lot of self-loathing and questioning her past desires.
If there is a higher power – make it quick.