Kacey Musgraves’ Cheeky Instagram Says a *Lot* About How She’s Handling Her Divorce

According to Kacey Musgraves, if you would have told her on Grammys night 2019—the night that her album Golden Hour won Album of the Year—that she would be divorced from husband Ruston Kelly, the man she credited for making Golden Hour happen, by 2020, she would have said, “Fuck off. No. No way.” In her latest interview with ELLE Magazine, Musgraves goes into detail about going through a divorce mid-pandemic, but her most recent Instagram post perfectly states her attitude moving forward.

Legs longer than my marriage, Musgraves captioned the shot from her ELLE spread.

“I could have coasted for another couple of years,” Musgraves said of her marriage, “just not paying attention to my feelings or not really dealing with some things.” She and Kelly married in 2017 and had a successful relationship until she began feeling like “I was dying inside. I was crumbling. I was sad. I felt lonely. I felt broken,” despite her career being on the upswing.

Her upcoming album is an answer to questions she began asking herself as her marriage evaporated: “Why did I make these decisions? How did I get here? How can I prevent myself from getting there again? Why do I keep choosing the same kind of people?” She says the album is “formulated like a modern Shakespearean or Greek tragedy” with her personal “catharsis” at the heart of it.

Being a human is tragic, but it’s also beautiful, she told ELLE. And you can’t really experience the beautiful parts of life without also experiencing the absolutely heart-wrenching.

“I haven’t spoken much about this chapter, and I don’t feel like I owe that to anyone, but I owe it to myself as a creator to flesh out all these emotions that I’ve felt, and I do that through song,” she said of her divorce. “It would be strange if I didn’t acknowledge what happened in my life creatively, but it is scary to be like, ‘I’m about to share my most personal thoughts about me, about this other person, about a union that I had with someone.’ I mean, I’m not a ruthless person. I care about other people’s feelings. So it’s kind of scary.”

She noted that while letting her emotions guide her creatively, Musgraves is taking time to focus on herself, telling ELLE, “I’m doing whatever the fuck I want in here, and it feels amazing.”