“I hate that I made you love me / Sorry if I made me your type,” she sings on the chorus. “Yeah, I hate that I made you love me / 'Cause I barely tried.” Like many of her best lyrics - “Break up with your girlfriend, 'cause I'm bored” and “You'll believe God is a woman” come to mind - that chorus makes Grande the most powerful person in the world, and everyone is cowering beneath her.
“It challenges this ... I call it the quiet expectation of giving to the point of exhaustion-you know what I mean? To the point where you sometimes don't recognize yourself ... or your selfhood is compromised,” Bilal added. “And so the paintings, they kind of became my way of telling those stories, my story and the stories of others.”
Most of us have been trained since childhood to account for our choices. The cumulative message is: your decisions require external approval to be valid. By adulthood, this becomes an invisible reflex. We over-explain our "no." We pre-empt judgment with disclaimers. We narrate our reasoning to coworkers, friends, even strangers - not because anyone demanded it, but because silence feels dangerous.
I've been seeing this guy for the last two months. The other day, I found out that he was posted about in a social media group, and I found out by lots of my friends texting me to tell me what had happened. The comments were horrific, saying that he was well known for using cocaine and cheating on ex-girlfriends. I didn't want to believe it but some girls shared screenshots of what he was sending them as recently as the last couple of weeks.
Being hurt by others creates many challenges. How do I right the wrong? Can I get the person to change? Importantly, can I forgive as a way to guard against unhealthy anger? If so, what are the protections of which I need to be aware so that the forgiveness can be healthy and not damaging either to the one who acted unfairly or to me? We will consider seven themes for protecting yourself as you forgive.
