Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve watched everyone DNA-test Taylor Swift’s new songs from the Encore. And even though Taylor herself has said she hates when people do that, I think there’s a reason beyond the credits. There’s so much more to each of these songs than who may have influenced her when she wrote them. People are scratching the surface and missing what it’s actually about.
When I first started listening, Patient Zero captured me immediately because it’s so open about what it’s about. But as I went through this series, I realized Pink Clouding had the most depth of all of them.
Pink clouding is a term used heavily in the addiction community, but people outside it never really knew what it meant. And I know that, because everything I’ve seen written about this song quotes the exact same Google AI answer you get when you type in “what is pink clouding.”
I’ve been mapping the spiral for years, for myself and for other people, and one glaring piece was missing until this song came out. And that’s what completely knocked me on my ass, because I found a hole in my own framework.
The original spiral said:
Ashes: the crash, when functioning finally runs out.
Ember: the first flicker of seeing where you are.
Flame: the mask burns off.
Rise: you get to be who you are, and you get back there faster each time.
As I listened to these four songs and arranged them, in my own order, into quite literally a perfect spiral, I realized what my map had been missing all along.
The ashes are not always a crash. Sometimes the ashes look like a huge surge of energy and the ability to do so much more than you ever could before. And actually feel good about it.
When I first mapped the spiral, I built it from my own two big identity spirals, my divorce and my layoff. Both started in a negative, hollow place. The ashes were emptiness. I felt like there was no hope. But Pink Clouding showed me you can be in the ashes and still feel good. You can feel great, even think you’re doing amazing things, and yet still be living your life slightly to the left. Happy, but empty. Happy, but still not you.
The reason pink clouding still lives in the ashes is the cost that comes when those pink clouds begin to clear. When they clear, you start seeing the emptiness. You see that what you’re doing isn’t actually moving your life forward or addressing the elephant in the room. She even names it in the song, gray-rocking where the arrow hit. Gray-rocking is a term that comes from abusive relationships where you act completely unfazed or uninterested in what the abuser is doing. When you’re pink-clouding, you’re gray-rocking yourself. You use those pink clouds to ignore the real wound.
When I was in one of my ashes stages, I turned to research. I wanted to know everything about what I’d gone through, what complex trauma was, how it happened, where it came from. It felt like moving forward. But what I was really doing was staying in the exact same place, looking busy. Staying up too late. The same way I threw myself into writing late at night and called it progress.
That brings me to Patient Zero, the ember. The first time through, I saw myself in it, which hit hard enough. But by the third or fourth listen, I caught what it was doing, then the video just brought it straight to the eyes. In the video, Taylor’s ghost is handing Dakota Johnson ember after ember, and she doesn’t see them at first. That’s how it works. The flickers come while you’re still in it, and the whole task is taking a second to notice them.
Then Babylon, the flame. The performance starts peeling away. The watches, the lifestyle, the image built to portray a certain life, all of it burning away. And what’s left underneath is what got abandoned a long time ago. Love. The truth of who you are. Listen to the choruses. It goes from “‘til it’s gone” to “it’s almost gone.” Almost. It’s not gone yet. Even when the performance burns off, something is still underneath to find.
And Cleveland is what is underneath. The Rise. People are going to say things. People will always have opinions. But when you’ve burned away everything you hid behind to avoid criticism, you get to stand there and say, "I am who I am." Take it or leave it.
That’s the whole spiral, right there in four of, probably, the most criticized songs. Critics have taken a lot of different views of this album, but almost all of them land on the same note. They say it’s too simple. I’ve even seen social media takes saying she had to dumb it down so Travis could understand it, which is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard after diving into these songs. They aren’t simple. They’re clear. And clarity is what you get when you finally have enough time to sit in the rise, not before it. They say she self-references, but who actually knows what, or who, she’s referencing. She’s even said some of the songs are about friends, and people still won’t let it go. And then they say it’s superfluous. But I think that’s the whole point. Time after time, you see them judging the outside and missing what the song carries underneath.
Patient Zero, the ember. Pink Clouding, the ashes. Babylon, the flame. Cleveland, the rise. It’s not a straight climb. It’s a journey you go on time after time. The rise isn’t a finish line. But you learn to get back there faster every time.
So take a second and look. Where are you right now, in the bigger spiral and the smaller ones? Even if you feel good, are you happy ashes or sad ashes? Or are you mid-flame, everything barreling down around you, and you don’t know what you’re going through?
That’s the question this whole series was for. Where are you right now?
