Can you imagine a world without Taylor Swift’s music? We can’t even imagine!

The singer-songwriter sat down with Rolling Stone in a candid conversation about what her life has been like the past three years.

“You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide,” she said about public criticism. “So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.” 

Later, she told Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt that she almost decided to quit music altogether. 

“I definitely thought about that a lot,” she said, reflecting on the last few years about her rocky relationship with Kanye West and how her girl squad backfired. “I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it.”

She explained, “I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.”

Read the full Rolling Stone interview here.