Apparently I’m everyone’s emergency contact although nobody remembers me filling out the paperwork. A friend can call me sobbing at one in the morning and I’ll stay on the phone until she can breathe normally again, then three days later I’ll mention that my own life is eating my ass alive and get a heart reaction. Cute. Somewhere along the way I trained people to expect empathy from me like it came with unlimited data. KAYTIE’s Dirt lives in that ugly little realization, when you notice everyone has been wiping their shoes on you and you have been holding the fucking door open. She wrote the song from feeling hurt by people who have walked all over her, and the lyrics make one thing painfully clear. She knows the pattern is happening and she still has no clue how to stop volunteering for it.
Somewhere at a music festival in Italy, KAYTIE sat down at a piano pissed off enough to write Dirt, which is already a better use of festival downtime than losing your friends and paying eighteen dollars for a drink. The chorus relies heavily on repetition, with “dirt, dirt dirt” and “learned, learned, learned” turning the words into the kind of thought you repeat because saying it once clearly failed to fix anything. I like that tension. She is singing about being emotionally flattened while the track keeps enough movement underneath her to stop the whole thing from crawling into bed and giving up. There is some fucking bite left in her even when the lyrics say she is exhausted.
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She gets to the unfair part fast with “but it’s fine for me to empathize, it’s fine for them to cry out their eyes / and i don’t say a word i let them walk all over me till i’m dirt.” I know that arrangement way too well. You become everyone’s unpaid emotional customer service department and suddenly your availability is treated like a utility. They call, you answer. Your own shit catches fire and somehow everybody’s phone enters Do Not Disturb. KAYTIE sounds pissed about the imbalance, but she also knows she has helped build it by never saying the fucking word no.
That self-awareness makes the chorus work harder with “i haven’t learned, learned, learned / that the people who use me aren’t worth, worth, worth / All my time, time, time.” She already knows the lesson. Knowing it has apparently done fuck-all to change the behavior. That feels painfully real because boundaries are adorable in Instagram graphics and considerably harder when somebody you care about is crying into your phone. KAYTIE keeps giving people time after they have already proved they spend hers badly, and she hates herself for continuing to do it.
The lyric that really gets nasty is “pretend that they don’t like me so i don’t have to cry.” That is rejection with a head start. Decide they never cared and you can skip the humiliation of admitting you cared enough to be hurt. I have pulled versions of that shit myself, mentally downgrading somebody before they get the chance to disappoint me because apparently pre-breaking your own heart counts as risk management now. The strategy sucks, but I understand the appeal. If you convince yourself nobody liked you in the first place, losing them supposedly costs less. Your nervous system eventually sends an invoice anyway.
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KAYTIE gets even more exposed when she sings “because my intrusive thoughts don’t represent myself / and it makes me hate myself, it ruins my mental health / that nobody wants to try to understand what i’ve been dealt.” She is asking people to see a person underneath thoughts she does not identify with, while feeling like everyone around her has already decided who she is. That makes the earlier complaint about being misjudged feel much heavier. Then “everybody thinks that they’re so perfect when i look in the mirror, i’m still lost and hurting” brings comparison into it too. Seriously, nothing improves a rough mental-health day like deciding everyone else apparently received the fucking instruction manual you missed – am I right?
KAYTIE is a Cincinnati singer-songwriter and pianist who has been writing since childhood with a catalog already numbering in the hundreds of songs and that volume makes sense when you hear something as emotionally specific as Dirt. She writes from inside the feeling instead of waiting until she has cleaned it up enough to sound wise about it and her own description of the song is blunt – she was hurt and annoyed by people around her and felt like she had been walked over her entire life. The finished lyric keeps that frustration messy, which suits a songwriter who seems far more interested in getting the feeling out than pretending she has already graduated from it.
The outro refuses to fake some shiny breakthrough with “Cry cry cry, it’s the story of my life” before ending on “but im depressed, can’t get out of it, pretend that they don’t like me so i don’t have to cry.” She is still in the dirt. I actually respect the hell out of that because sometimes awareness arrives months before behavior changes. I am better at resigning from unpaid emotional customer service than I used to be, and I still occasionally pick up a shift for somebody who has never covered one for me. Dirt understands that knowing people are walking over you does not automatically get you off the fucking floor.
