Indigo De Souza is inching closer to the April 28 release of her album All Of This Will End, and on Wednesday, she processed the end of a toxic relationship in her video for “You Can Be Mean.”
“I wrote ‘You Can Be Mean’ about a brief toxic experience I had with a manipulative and abusive LA model f*ckboy. However brief, it had a life-long impact on my understanding of self,” De Souza wrote in a statement posted on Instagram. “Leading up to that experience, I had a history of putting myself in toxic situations and pining for validation from people who treated me poorly. I was stuck in some delusion that I could help abusive people through their trauma and teach them to love me in the way I deserved. I wrote this song when I finally realized that I could choose not to allow harmful behavior into my life, and that there is a deep, deep importance in protecting the body and spirit.”
She continued, “I stopped caring about validation from a**holes, stopped thinking it was my responsibility to help them, and started caring for myself in a real way. Once I made that switch in my psyche, I began to manifest truly loving, safe, kind, and communicative people into my life. Being loved in the way I deserve begins with loving myself in the way I deserve. Boundaries are so important. The body is a sacred and fragile thing and it deserves every ounce of care.”
De Souza spoke with Uproxx about her mindset while writing All Of This Will End last month.
“I was living alone and I had a lot of time on my hands because we were in lockdown,” she said. “Everything was in this standstill, and I was watching all of the systems that I’d been surrounded by my whole life fall apart, and people that said they knew what they were doing didn’t know what they were doing. It felt like this huge veil was lifted off America, and we were just seeing everything for what it has been the whole time but it’s been hiding itself. It was just so ugly.”