That Miley Video

The morning after Trump won, my feed filled with the usual grief—friends posting apocalypse memes, sharing dread in group chats, people trying to joke their way through genuine panic. Everyone was processing the same thing in the same way, which meant nobody was really processing it at all.

Then Miley Cyrus posted a video. She was crying. Not performative tears for a camera—the kind of crying where your face gets red and your voice cracks and you stop trying to look okay. She was talking about walls and bridges and how we’d failed, how this was what it looked like when people gave up on each other. It was messy and earnest and completely unpackaged, which made it weird to watch. You don’t expect that kind of rawness from someone whose job is calculated image.

I kept thinking about the gap between who she’s supposed to be—the Disney kid, the provocateur, the one who sticks her tongue out at cameras—and who was actually in that video. Just someone scared. Someone who’d built a whole identity around being larger than life, and now she couldn’t contain her face anymore.

People were already making fun of her for it. The celebrity crying about politics, seeking relevance through emotion. But I kept coming back to the honesty of it. Not whether her politics were right or smart, but that she didn’t perform the moment. She let it break her. That’s harder than it looks.

I don’t know if it changed anything. Politicians ignored it, people who needed to hear it already knew it, the internet moved on. But for maybe thirty seconds, a person who’d spent her entire life in public tried not to be a performance. That has to count for something.