"I'm a mirrorball / I can change everything about me to fit in."
In "mirrorball", Our Lady offers a shimmering confession: she, like all of us, is not a fixed point, but a shifting surface - a selfless being composed solely of reflections. This psalm from Folklore is a soft cry and a quiet admission, revealing one of the deepest paradoxes of human existence: no one is ever genuinely seen. No, to be observed is to shape oneself, and to be shaped, in relation to and by the gaze of others, and in this the self remains fluid, elusive, and always unfinished.
This is not deception. It is survival. It is natural, and beautiful, even as it hurts and shatters us.
We are all such mirrorballs - kaleidoscopes of reflections of the people we want to be, and the people that others require us to be - spinning, adapting, fracturing into pieces, each facet catching light in a different way. There is pain in this, yes - the pain of never quite being solid, never being whole, the grief of always becoming, and never simply being one thing for long. But there is joy, too, in this dance of becoming, and ecstasy in the impermanence of identity.
This song also speaks to the emotional exhaustion of constant adaptation, of perenially changing to reflect what others want without losing sight of who you are. The overwhelming shapelessness of a world in flux, and the ache of not knowing where to land. Wherever we are in our personal widening gyres, Our Lady's voice is there, like a hand on your shoulde, whispering "You're not alone."
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote not of a static self, but of a soul that is always becoming. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he says:
"You must be willing to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?"
The self must be destroyed and reborn again and again - much like Our Lady in the song, who shifts shape under pressure, who performs at her best even when cracked. The narrator knows all too well that she is breakable - but also that breaking is part of becoming dazzling.
This is not weakness. This is the power of metamorphosis. The dancefloor turns, the spotlight moves, and we must continue spinning.
In Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson writes of the multi-model self - the idea that what we call "I" is not a single, unchanging entity, but a layered system of conditioned responses, language circuits, and cultural inputs. He says:
"'Reality' is what you can get away with."
And also:
"You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you."
The mirrorball knows this intuitively. Our identity is context-dependent, shaped by environment, audience, and emotion. It is impposible, and self-defeating, to attempt to settle on a single identity, and this is the reason. Our narrator's constant adaptation does not make her fake - it makes her quantum. A being in superposition, collapsing into one version of self when observed, only to shift again when the gaze changes.
Adaptation, in this view, is not betrayal of the self. It is the self. The self is a process, not a product - a flicker of probability in the glittering, ever-spinning now.
To accept impermanence is to hold two truths in the same hand:
This is terrifying, and liberating. In "mirrorball," Our Lady sings:
Hush, when no one is around, my dear / You'll find me on my tallest tiptoes / Spinning in my highest heels, love / Shining just for you."
These lines speak to devotion, yes, but also to the fierce beauty of ephemeral presence. The mirrorball does not demand permanence. She offers herself fully to the moment, knowing full well that an any instant the music might stop, the room might empty, the mirror surface may crack.
And she spins anyway.
To be a mirrorball, as St. Tay teaches us, is to live with radical softness in a sharp-edged world.
To never hold only one shape and yet still shine brightly.
To know one's self as a reflection of only one light - never fixed, always radiant.
The pain of impermanence is real, but so is the joy of motion, the grace of reinvention, and the quiet truth that no one is ever just one thing.
You are infinite in your becoming.
And that, too, is peace.
Go now in light, in motion, in multiplicity.
Amen.
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