SZA’s Twitter Is Leading Me on a Spiritual Journey Up Emotions Mountain

“Art can heal your soul,” said Aristotle, or actually maybe that was some anonymous person on Pinterest. And it’s true: Generation upon generation of emotionally ravaged people have leant on music, theater, literature, opera, um, finger painting (I don’t know!) to assuage and reflect whatever’s broken inside them. Shout out to the Ancient Greeks for squeezing toxic emotions out through catharsis, or to the doubly blond pairing of Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey for swerving romantic curveballs in the time-honored romantic comedy tradition. Somewhere along that spectrum, there’s something beautiful, or at least relatable, that can help you through whichever kind of feelings have trapped you.

And now we have a new guide to take us up Emotions Mountain. Recently, this tweet by musician SZA went viral:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who has the least extra expectations of romance of all? I doubt I need to explain the appeal of this tweet, but for those in the back, this The Secret–style call specifies only the most modest requirements—a mere booty rub, just some attention. Stop looking at her! That’s too much. She doesn’t want to get married. No need for brunch or anything like that; she can fix her own towel rack. Don’t get it twisted: It’s not that she doesn’t think she’s worthy of more. Unafraid to put out an ask for the baby-bear amount of affection, SZA’s also like, “I don’t need that 24/7 kind of deal, okay?”

Obviously, there’s a difference between an extremely good-looking and talented celebrity with 2.3 million followers tweeting their most ¯_(ツ)_/¯ feels and, say, me semi-desperately looking for a booty-pat from anyone. SZA already has a lot of good stuff going on: cover stories, a starring spot on Black Panther‘s breakout song, a summer festival schedule rapturously received. (That’s just 2018; the year before was a firestorm of Grammy nominations, Obama family plaudits, and high Billboard rankings.)

Yet despite the differences between SZA and les plebs comme moi, the message resonated, like one of those alarming restaurant pagers—to the tune of 226,000 Twitter likes. Even for us digital denizens lower down the food chain, it spoke a truth, recognizing that in this economy—emotional, spiritual, financial, political—all we can hope for, at the very most, is the smallest thing that we want.

Look, there are no heroes. Even Barack Obama was at best a 7.5 out of 10. All your faves are cute, but they also have private islands where they’ll retreat come the tides of climate change. (No, you won’t be allowed on.) Famous people can get engaged within six weeks of knowing each other, but does it actually mean anything? Pessimism, if not outright nihilism, is the only correct emotional state these days. Nothing is good—yet all we’ve got is this moment. What can we hope for, when even the concept of fantasies has been dashed?

SZA knows. She knows that the walls are closing in and we’re oscillating like pixels in a stamp-sized game of Pong. She knows that we’re starring in Emotions 8: I Guess That’s Fine. And her whole Twitter feed is just as quotidian and poignant as that uber-popular tweet.

Feeling lonely, despite a covetable mane of hair and outsize talent?

Is that blood moon + Mercury retrograde combo pushing you down with its cosmic callousness?

What else would you expect from the woman whose music elevates the weirdness of the in-between, making it magnificent? Unlike pop’s easy highs and sad-girl folksy lows, SZA’s debut album CTRL refracts all the colors of the middle, replete with anthems of sub-heartbreak confusion and pre-breakthrough stagnation. “Better day than yesterday…I just take it day by day,” she shrugs in Obama fave “Broken Clocks.” Could “Drew Barrymore” be the first ever song about the low-stakes wheelspin of Netflix-and-chill (“Let’s start the Narcos off at episode one”)? Maybe.

Then, of course, there’s her paean to side-chick feelings, “The Weekend”—which faces off against a dude’s other ladiez with the minimal pride such a contest warrants. When there’s not that much of anything to go around, the wins are just smaller. That’s a fact, but that doesn’t mean you don’t like it. What else is there to do?

SZA’s Twitter feed wields the same kind of daily-applied wisdom, spanning the range from “Not this song again” to “Not bad face.”

A Magic 8-Ball has 50 percent positive answers—which is way too many. Get out of here! SZA’s tweets feel just right because the odds are far more realistic. Her signs point not to yes, but to lol, ‘k, and So?

If there’s a formula for a SZA tweet, it’s one part affective spike, one part playful communication, and one part DGAF punctuation: perfect for the shrugging observations she spits out on the regular.

Not only does she get it (it being life’s effronteries), she also loves her fans without pandering to them.

And when it really matters, she’ll really get in your face about it, like someone who cares. She knows how simple the answer can be.

Is there anyone on Twitter better suited to this era of averageness? I don’t think so. That’s because, despite her many gifts, she’s going through it with us. Her Lyft is late too. Her night got panic-attacked out of existence. That dude is still ignoring her texts. She might not always be happy, but who the hell is?