Loving Taylor, Fearlessly
I love Taylor Swift. I’m not ashamed to write that sentence down, nor am I afraid to say it out loud. But I used to be.
I spent the earlier half of my teen years engrossed in Taylor’s first three albums — her self-titled debut, Fearless, and Speak Now. Despite never having been remotely close to being in love, Taylor’s music struck a chord deep within my heart. I had never encountered another young woman who seemed to feel things as deeply as I did, nor one that could turn those feelings into prose so beautifully. In a way I couldn’t name at the time, she felt like the big sister I never had. I was enthralled, enamored, and enchanted by her.
But then I spent ages 15 to 20 convincing myself and the people around me that I hated Taylor. Caught up in the John Green-inspired “I’m not like other girls” narrative that dominated my late teenage years, I told myself that I was simply too intellectual and sophisticated to find her music at all interesting. That stuff is for little girls, I thought to myself, overcome with the internalized misogyny that so many young women blindly buy into for social capital among their male peers.
Once, a friend asked me for my opinion of Taylor’s latest album while a Cool and Quirky Hipster Boy that I had a crush on was standing nearby. I scoffed at my friend and told her I only listened to Taylor when I was a kid. My tastes have matured, I had convinced myself. Now I listen to music written and performed almost exclusively by men that I cannot at all relate to and barely enjoy, and listening to this type of music makes me seem Hot and Interesting™ to men my age to whom I cannot at all relate to and barely enjoy.
Despite what I told myself and those around me, my tastes had not matured. I loved Taylor and her painstakingly honest music almost more than ever. I found more comfort and understanding in her lyrics than I could anywhere else in my life. But I listened to her music in shame and in secret, depriving myself of something that made me happy simply because I wanted to avoid being called “basic.” Basic — a term exclusively reserved for degrading anything that women dare to enjoy — was, in my young mind, the worst thing that I could ever possibly be.
Flash forward through college and into a global pandemic-induced quarantine that canceled my college graduation and sent me back to my childhood home, every single external system of validation I had ever known was suddenly stripped away from me. For the first time in what felt like forever, I had no one to impress. There wasn’t anyone who could peer over at my Spotify account open on my laptop and see me listening to “All Too Well” on repeat. There weren’t any indie boys who could make fun of me for thinking that 1989 was better than anything Mac DeMarco has ever put out. All of a sudden, it was just me, sitting alone with the shame and sexism I had swallowed for so long, waiting for it to unravel.
Then, on July 24th, 2020 — with barely 24 hours notice — Taylor turned my world upside down. She released her eighth studio album Folklore, and I came undone.
All of the grief, pain, and feelings of isolation that I had bottled up throughout the pandemic were immediately brought to the surface by this masterpiece that Taylor had produced in her own quarantine-induced solitude. In the same ways that I related deeply to the themes of heartbreak and young love on her earlier albums, listening to Folklore was the first time that I heard someone else describe the yearning and loneliness that had come to define what was supposed to be one of the happiest years of my life.
Folklore is all I listened to for the rest of that summer and into the fall (this isn’t hyperbole, ask literally anyone who knows me at all) and, in more ways than one, this album brought me immense healing. Folklore opened a Taylor Swift-shaped Pandora’s Box for me, and I finally felt released from all of the self-imposed shame that prevented me from reveling in this music that I had loved so deeply for so long. So, naturally, I spent the next several months of my life repeatedly listening to every single one of her albums, allowing the poetry that I had denied myself for years back into my heart.
There is almost nothing I resent more than the internalized misogyny that, even as an extremely ardent and vocal feminist, prevented me from unapologetically loving Taylor Swift for so many years. Listening to her music overwhelms me with the indescribable feeling of being seen, known, heard, and loved all at once, and I cannot believe that I ever thought it acceptable to deny myself from feeling those things. I never will again.
Last Friday night, as I sat in my childhood bedroom listening to Taylor’s re-recording of “Love Story” for the first time, I was sent hurtling backward in time to when I was sitting in the same bedroom at age 12, iPod Nano in hand, listening to the original Love Story over and over again while yearning over some boy whose name I can’t even remember. But, instead of looking back on that young version of myself embarrassingly, Taylor has allowed me to see that 12-year-old girl in all of her glory and to embrace her fully.
In this flashback, I tell my younger self that she deserves to enjoy the things she likes without shame nor justification. I tell her to resist the socialized urge to deem anything youthful and feminine — including herself — as frivolous or vapid or inherently unworthy. I tell her that it is so fucking cool to like things, to love them, and to obsess over them. I tell her that, despite what she’ll be led to believe, apathy and cynicism are not the markers of interesting people. I tell her that leaning into the things that make her heart flutter will bring her meaning and purpose, especially in life’s darker moments. And, most importantly, I tell her that she deserves to feel seen and known and heard and loved and that she should run towards those feelings at every single possible moment, in whatever way they manifest.
In writing this piece, I realized that I have a lot in common with Taylor. We’re both Sagittarius’s who openly admit to being bad drivers, we are deeply nostalgic and sentimental people who have never gotten over anything that’s ever happened to us, and we both have the capacity to write an entire album about Harry Styles (she actually did it, though, but I’m convinced I could do the same if I really tried).
Most of all, though, both Taylor and I find solace in writing about the beautiful messiness of our lives — the heartbreak, the loss, the healing, the joy, the grace, the everything-in-between. She inspires me to keep writing, to keep feeling, to keep loving, despite it all. I am indescribably grateful for the impact she’s had on my life, and am so proud to finally love her openly, completely, and fearlessly.
