To me, this song illustrates the grieving process you go through (often more than once) when you realize that your conviction and passion for something has emptied and left you feeling disillusioned and disaffected. This theme is recurrent in the song, starting when Emily says, "thought I made a stand. Only made a scene." At first the writer felt powerful and loud, but that feeling has morphed into a sense of weakness, impotence, and shame. She never believed the fight would go out of her, and now that it has she questions how forceful that fight was in the first place. She worries that she overestimated herself from the beginning. She wonders if she should have been feeling this sense of defeat all along ("seems like nothing I said ever meant anything"). The apathy and exhaustion she's settled into feels like the natural state of things ("anyone not dying is dead, and baby, it won't be long"). Even when she was young and full of vitality, that vitality was being drawn away from her, and losing it undercut whatever blessings it gave her in the moment. Take "though the point we're making is strong, play it stripped down to my thong" (not the lyrics listed here, but that's how I always heard it). Even when she believed in her message, she was often forced to compromise in a way that took away some of its impact. She believes that years of these compromises have taken away from her impact as well. She wants back her passions and her illusions, and she's jealous of the people in her life who still have theirs, even though she knows they can't hold onto them any more than she did.
To me, this song illustrates the grieving process you go through (often more than once) when you realize that your conviction and passion for something has emptied and left you feeling disillusioned and disaffected. This theme is recurrent in the song, starting when Emily says, "thought I made a stand. Only made a scene." At first the writer felt powerful and loud, but that feeling has morphed into a sense of weakness, impotence, and shame. She never believed the fight would go out of her, and now that it has she questions how forceful that fight was in the first place. She worries that she overestimated herself from the beginning. She wonders if she should have been feeling this sense of defeat all along ("seems like nothing I said ever meant anything"). The apathy and exhaustion she's settled into feels like the natural state of things ("anyone not dying is dead, and baby, it won't be long"). Even when she was young and full of vitality, that vitality was being drawn away from her, and losing it undercut whatever blessings it gave her in the moment. Take "though the point we're making is strong, play it stripped down to my thong" (not the lyrics listed here, but that's how I always heard it). Even when she believed in her message, she was often forced to compromise in a way that took away some of its impact. She believes that years of these compromises have taken away from her impact as well. She wants back her passions and her illusions, and she's jealous of the people in her life who still have theirs, even though she knows they can't hold onto them any more than she did.