Taylor Swift just rubbished Instagram and curated fame in this open letter

‘Ultimately, we post photos online to curate what strangers think of us. But then we wake up, look in the mirror at our faces, we see the cracks and scars and blemishes, and cringe’

From the editors of InStyle Words by Jonathan Borge

If you’ve yet to listen to Taylor Swift’s Reputation, just know that she puts it all out there in chronicling her love life and headline-making friendships and disputes.

But just when we thought the songs were juicy enough, we caught wind of a prologue included in the album’s accompanying artistic magazine that’s being sold at Target. In an open-letter format, Swift writes about false appearances, and how it’s tough to know who a person really is from the outside.

‘We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us,’ she writes, moving on to explain that photos posted on social media are not reality.

‘Ultimately, we post photos online to curate what strangers think of us. But then we wake up, look in the mirror at our faces and see the cracks and scars and blemishes, and cringe,’ she adds. ‘The point being, despite our need to simplify and generalise absolutely everyone and everything in this life, humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify. We are never just good or just bad.’

Most interestingly, Swift addresses her own fame and the fact that she’s been under public scrutiny since her teenage years.

‘I’ve been in the public eye since I was 15 years old. On the beautiful, lovely side of that. I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living and look out into crowds of living, vibrant people,’ she writes. ‘On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialised as “oversharing.”’

She moves on to say she’s anticipating new scrutiny with the release of Reputation.

‘When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scout the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song, as if the inspiration for music is as simple and basic as a paternity test,’ she adds. ‘There will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory, because it’s 2017 and if you didn’t see a picture of it, it couldn’t have happened right?’

The letter is one of the most emotional things we’ve seen Swift share, and the Reputation magazine also includes exclusive poetry written by the singer herself.

Talk about opening up.