How To Be Lana Del Rey

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Change your name. Wear a mask. Dress like gorgeous trash. Dress up as your childhood idols. Get to know your own fantasies. Become them.

Talk like a nervous doll. Sing like a ghost. Write melodies that sound like melted velvet. Write songs that sound like falling into the sea. Fall deep inside your own crawly watery melodies. Get lost inside your own drug-strewn dreams.

Shroud yourself fully in artistry. Aestheticize all your feelings. Realize that artifice has its own way of being authentic. Understand that the truest piece of yourself is the fantasy of who you are trying to be.  Film yourself in a montage of all your dreams until you become them. Remember that transformation does not equal fraudulence. Truth has no set chronology. Killing off your old self isn’t murder if she never really existed at all.

Turn your entire mystique into your motif. Create your own false tragedies. Confide in the internet about those years you imagined you lived in a trailer park. Tell them that you once had a bandanna-ed biker boyfriend named Cheese. Tell them you and Cheese used to kiss each other against the balcony railing of the local motel. Tell them that you used to threaten to push Cheese over the railing and then be like “LOL JK.”

Realize that you only feel safe staring out from the shady reflection of your own dreams. Be scared that one day someone will reach out and take these dreams away.