Songfacts®:

• This piano ballad finds Tate McRae wanting to make some changes to her life as she reaches her late teenage years. She'd like to cut her friends off as they've got nothing in common, she but fears being lonely. McRae is also missing her ex, and the heartbreak she feels after her split makes her cautious about another relationship. However, the Canadian singer acknowledges she will love again and is blowing things out of proportion.
  
  During the pre-chorus and chorus we learn McRae is talking to somebody who'd noticed she's going through a confusing time. She vents her frustrations, telling the person that growing up is chaotic and she didn't realize "changing would be this exhausting."
• McRae wrote the song with:
  
  Her regular songwriting partner Victoria Zaro ("You Broke Me First," "Feel Like S--t").
  
  The song's producer Greg Kurstin. The American hitmaker also produced her previous single, "She's All I Wanna Be."
• McRae released "Chaotic" on March 25, 2022 as the third single off of her debut album, following "Feel Like S--t" and "She's All I Wanna Be." She said "Chaotic" was "literally such a hard song write" and that it's probably the saddest song on the album.
• McCrae first teased "Chaotic" in February 2022 when she shared a snippet of the song on her TikTok. It sparked a trend where users posted videos of themselves crying in private while maintaining an outwardly happy face publicly, to correspond with the lyrics, "You said it looks like I've been going through hell. How did you know, how could you tell?"
• McRae penned "Chaotic" at Greg Kurstin's studio. She'd been writing with plenty of people but wasn't getting any songs she connected with. McRae attributes this to all the changes going on in her life, having recently graduated high school and moved to LA from Calgary. The teenage singer had yet to settle into her own skin and work out who she was.
  
  McRae wrote the song quietly on her computer. She told Apple Music: "I feel like this was one of the first times that I sat down in a session and I was like, 'Okay, I need to really talk about where my mental state is at right now, because I don't know if it's looking too good.'"
  
  An hour later, McRae had finished the tune. She walked across the studio, gave Kurstin a high five, and left.