Taylor Swift feels "so lucky" to have a successful career in the music business.
Taylor Swift
The 27-year-old singer has admitted there are positives and negatives to being thrust into the limelight, and though there is a "beautiful, lovely side" to being in the public eye for over 10 years, which has enabled her to release hit tracks and entertain fans, she has admitted there is a downside to her job, which sees her songwriting "trivialised", and her "mistakes" used against her.
Speaking openly in a note she penned and included in hard copies of her new album 'Reputation' sold at Target stores, it read: "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 loving, vibrant people.
"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'."
But the 'Shake It Off' hitmaker believes people have "chosen to show" certain characteristics, and social media allows people to "curate" a vision of themselves they want others to believe is the "truth".
She continued: "This is the first generation that will be able to look back on their entire life story documented in pictures on the internet, and together we will all discover the after-effects of that.
"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.
"We are never just good or just bad. We are mosaics of our worst selves and our best selves, our deepest secrets and our favourite stories to tell at a dinner party, existing somewhere between our well-lit profile photo and our drivers license shot.
"Let me say it louder again, louder for those in the back ... We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us."
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