You understand yourself and your life better
Dave's got a nice write-up on the complexities of Ashlee Simpson's "Shadow" over on heat six of the poptimists Best Song Of 2006 (something of an embellishment on his post about Autobiography back in '07):
This also sets the stage for the Big Story of Autobiography, which is that Ashlee is finding her life a little easier to bear with each passing day, barring the occasional relapse. Not much easier, and I think on the whole things are still a fucking mess, but it's the point in your life where you realize that the quality of your life is improving -- not because of any one transformative change, but because you understand yourself and your life better than you could when you were (a bit) younger. I seem to constantly go through cycles of this, but there's a definite break between adolescence and post-adolescence where I could at least see, e.g., that my feet were on the ground even though I'm stuck. In "Shadow," every day is getting a little worse; we're left to imagine, without much description, what it might have felt like (and I can assume that a lot of people felt it themselves, whether they were the Ashlees or the Jessicas in their family, or something else altogether) to slowly lose yourself, or realize you never really "knew" yourself, and then slowly build it up again.
(But you should read the whole post.)
This also sets the stage for the Big Story of Autobiography, which is that Ashlee is finding her life a little easier to bear with each passing day, barring the occasional relapse. Not much easier, and I think on the whole things are still a fucking mess, but it's the point in your life where you realize that the quality of your life is improving -- not because of any one transformative change, but because you understand yourself and your life better than you could when you were (a bit) younger. I seem to constantly go through cycles of this, but there's a definite break between adolescence and post-adolescence where I could at least see, e.g., that my feet were on the ground even though I'm stuck. In "Shadow," every day is getting a little worse; we're left to imagine, without much description, what it might have felt like (and I can assume that a lot of people felt it themselves, whether they were the Ashlees or the Jessicas in their family, or something else altogether) to slowly lose yourself, or realize you never really "knew" yourself, and then slowly build it up again.
(But you should read the whole post.)