OPINION: I will not be going to Adele's concerts this week. In fact, I will never, ever go to one of her shows.
It's up there with Boxing Day sales and poop jokes of things that simultaneously disgust and terrify me.
Don't get me wrong, this is not because I think her music is bad. She's incredibly talented.
And it is not because her music doesn't 'move' me. Because it really does. It moves me deeply and more dramatically than any sad panda video ever has. And sad pandas do things to me.
It's Adele's precise ability to release an emotional tsunami inside me that means I will never go to her concert. She won't even get onto my Spotify playlists. Her songs aren't even allowed in my conscious brain for longer than five seconds before I have to determinedly hum 'YMCA'.
Adele's music makes me overwhelmingly sad. It mixes regret and nostalgia in a way that tears out my guts and stamps on them.
From everything I've heard, an Adele concert is often a gargantuan therapy session where both crying and hugging strangers are mandatory. And I just can't think of anything worse than having an emotional experience in front of a stranger. The thought makes me glisten in a heaving, sweaty layer of panic.
I'd be both embarrassed and ashamed of showing Seat 54A how quickly I can melt into a sobbing mess. I suppose it's partly because I'm reflexively, very English-ly, very disapproving of public displays of emotion. I also know how embarrassed I am witnessing it, and would hate to put someone else through that.
I'd rather binge watch the world snooker championships than cast myself adrift in such emotional oceans.
Adele's songs are not happy songs. They're melancholic at best, at worst the verbal equivalent of getting blind drunk and ending up sobbing into a 4am kebab in a neon, rain-lashed takeaway joint.
Her music makes you remember and it makes you regret. It makes you remember your first boyfriend, whom you idolised, and who dumped you for vomiting all over him on a bus ride home from Rainbow's End. (Not that I can confirm or deny that I am the owner of that particular sticky and traumatic memory.)
Even writing about her music has me regressing to memories of being laughed while covered in regurgitated fairy floss and chips…
And just like that I'm wallowing. And there's nothing that I hate more than wallowing.
I wallow enough in things. I have an anxious, worrisome brain that chews over every tiny interaction from years and years ago. It rolls relentlessly in reminiscence. It's exhausting and unhealthy. And it always strikes me as something that keeps me living in the past.
This is counterproductive because often my present is much, much more fun than my past. I've already been through the pain of being rejected or ignored - the last thing I need to do is go through it again.
And the very, very last thing I need is Adele encouraging me to do that.
So if I'm shelling out hundreds for a ticket, I want it to be something that makes me feel amazing. I want a musical experience that tightens my nerves and sets them on fire. I want to throb with energy and adrenaline. I want to forget about me and be torn down by a wall of musical escapism.
I don't want to be thinking about being on a bus covered in vomit.
Verity Johnson is a Newshub writer.