Me, Mitski, and Our Inevitable Mortality

“Moon, tell me if I could, send up my heart to you, so when I die, which I must do, could it shine down here with you?”

“My Love Mine All Mine” is the third and most popular single from Japanese-American songwriter Mitski’s album The Land is Inhospitable And So Are We. The lyrics I quote are repeated in the first and second verse, while the refrain “…Cause my love is mine all mine … nothing in the world belongs to me, but my love, mine all mine, all mine…” forms the chorus of the song.

Mitski has been my absolute favorite musical artist since 10th grade. I discovered her through Youtube, with the music video for “Your Best American Girl”. In it, Mitski stares blankly at the camera — her deep and melancholy voice reverberating through the studio — as a white couple passionately makes out, an American flag wrapped around their shoulders. I remember watching the video over and over and over again, bringing myself to tears each time. Mitski was singing about my life. No, I had never loved an American boy per se, but perhaps the “boy” is not the point of the song; the boy is merely an allegory. Mitski’s poetic lyrics, vigorous instrumentals, and powerful vocals took me back to when I was a little Chinese girl growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood on the suburban outskirts of Vancouver, Canada.

Like “Your Best American Girl”, many of Mitski’s songs, including “Francis Forever”, “Washing Machine Heart”, and of course “My Love Mine All Mine” seem to be typical love ballads on the surface, but under closer inspection, reveal themselves as profound explorations of what it means to exist as a woman in a man’s world, a person of color in a white world, and a human being in this chaotic universe.

In “My Love Mine All Mine,” Mitski implores the immortal and eternal moon to take her heart up with it, so that she could love the world forever whenever the moon shines down on it. The question is rhetorical in nature, but it does prompt listeners to confront what is arguably the most important question of human existence. That is — how do we cope with the reality of our own inevitable mortality?

As an an overtly philosophical and imaginative person since I was a child, mortality and death have always fascinated me. When I fell to the deepest pits of my depression, as my then undiagnosed Bipolar II Disorder ran its course, I brought myself to draw open the curtain, and look death right in the face. I ruminated over my own death, weighed my options, compared methods, planned out the time and place. It was like gazing into that Nietzschean abyss; the darkness enveloped me. Then when my eyes grew tired and I turned back, I realize that the world was not so frightening after all. No, it was not frightening at all, compared to the endless black void of the abyss.

So I chose life, if just for a little longer, for the abyss is always there, waiting for me, waiting for all of us. Like Mitski, I looked to the moon — I wondered what I could do to make my minute time here just a little more worthwhile. 

Mitski chose love; by loving others, she could transport a bit of her soul beyond herself, beyond her death. For me, the answer lay in art and academia. I sometimes joke with my friends that my goal in life is to have a Wikipedia page about myself. I wanted fame, but not the idolizing and intrusive kind, with fanatical masses screaming my name. I wanted fame not for myself, but for my ideas. I wanted there to be a lively discourse around my paintings, my illustrations, my poems, my essays, and my novels. I wanted my philosophical, historical, political, and psychological theories to be cited and criticized by scholars after my death. I wanted bring down the ivory tower, to educate the masses so that the world could be a little more just and democratic. I wanted to be Marx, Woolf, Van Gogh, Plath, Shakespeare. I wanted to be Mitski.

“Moon, tell me if I could, send up my mind to you, so when I die, which I must do, could it shine down here with you?”