Had a think about this one the other day, and came to the conclusion that, keeping with the album's theme of reflecting on his time as Nine Inch Nails, it's about the differences between Trent himself and the NIN identity he's built, and is, in a sense, showing both why he had wanted to split himself "in two" by killing off the project and why he ultimately decided not to do that.
Going by the song's logic, there's this idea that the person's two identities are growing farther apart while simultaneously getting more and more tangled up in each other -- the "person" and the "artist" feel like different people but at the same time it's hard to tell which one's in control at any moment, or if that even means anything.
And there's the declaration that "this is going to hurt" -- pain can sometimes be a necessary part of the healing process, but most of the time it's an indication that you're doing something wrong. While he starts the song seemingly convinced that it's a case of the former, by the end he's questioning whether he should be listening to the pain instead of pushing through it.
And ultimately, it comes back to the theme that's also touched on in "Came Back Haunted", "Disappointed" and "Everything" -- maybe more times than that, it's just what I remember -- the decision to keep that second, "artist", version of himself alive but allow it to grow with the first one, instead of killing it and replacing it with something else.
Had a think about this one the other day, and came to the conclusion that, keeping with the album's theme of reflecting on his time as Nine Inch Nails, it's about the differences between Trent himself and the NIN identity he's built, and is, in a sense, showing both why he had wanted to split himself "in two" by killing off the project and why he ultimately decided not to do that.
Going by the song's logic, there's this idea that the person's two identities are growing farther apart while simultaneously getting more and more tangled up in each other -- the "person" and the "artist" feel like different people but at the same time it's hard to tell which one's in control at any moment, or if that even means anything. And there's the declaration that "this is going to hurt" -- pain can sometimes be a necessary part of the healing process, but most of the time it's an indication that you're doing something wrong. While he starts the song seemingly convinced that it's a case of the former, by the end he's questioning whether he should be listening to the pain instead of pushing through it.
And ultimately, it comes back to the theme that's also touched on in "Came Back Haunted", "Disappointed" and "Everything" -- maybe more times than that, it's just what I remember -- the decision to keep that second, "artist", version of himself alive but allow it to grow with the first one, instead of killing it and replacing it with something else.