I'm the Swiftie It's Me

Taylor Swift is a loser and the most popular woman alive, too. Realizing this may have just changed my life.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

My biggest breakthrough in healing my trauma was not supposed to be midwifed by Taylor Swift. I’m an Arianator and Barb — more of an edge. The first thing that bothered me about Swift was that face she always makes. The open mouthed look of both surprise and intent — now I realize that the inherent contradiction in that gaped red-lipped mouth reverberates through Swift’s music again and again and again. First as country then as pop then as folky and next probably hardcore metal. My sister did just text me that she found Swift’s saying “metal as hell” in her recent Time “Person of the Year” interview contrived and awkward. Maybe that was an Easter Egg.

The Easter Eggs all sounded exhausting, and I never had the time or energy to follow those. A few years ago, I lived with a Swiftie, one of the OGs from the Tumblr era. She had an actual poster of Taylor Swift hanging on her wall. We were in our late 20s, and I thought I couldn’t imagine doing that because it was immature, but really I just couldn’t imagine caring about something that much. It’s not like my walls had anything cool on them.

I was on Kanye’s side of the whole thing. I loved his music at the time when I mocked Swift’s. I had no idea that “Mean” was about me. But it’s also about them. There’s that contradiction. “I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey.” I’ll get back to “Mean” later. As much as I mocked Swift in the early days of her career, I never took real issue with her until Reputation. I’ll get to that later too.

In 2010 I went on an epic Outward Bound excursion.

I was 17, approaching my senior year of high school, and needed to get away from my hometown and do some soul searching. I needed to get away from myself, really. I found the most intense trip that the pricey program had to offer: a three week odyssey in Utah. It started with one week of canyoneering in a completely remote canyon where we had to carry our own water in our backpacks, followed by a week of regular mountain backpacking, and finally a week rafting on the Colorado River. My godfather paid for me as a generous, incredible gift, granting me a life-changing experience. Well, to be honest, it didn’t change my life. Though I did fall in love, and that’s where Swift comes in.

Outward Bound is an extremely expensive endeavor, but it fortunately has a program that allows less fortunate teens from urban areas to go on trips at no cost. It was the poorest with the richest, and then me. I was totally out of my place and honestly didn’t connect with anyone in my group, except for one: Greg*. I bonded with Greg over music. Greg proudly represented his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina by sharing the local rap group Troop 41’s song “Do the John Wall,” which included a dance where you flex your arm and rhythmically sway your hand from right to left – it’s in the music video.

Greg was so cool. Raleigh was a real city and I was from a small town in Southern Oregon called Ashland. It’s a liberal enclave that became progressively gentrified by Californians throughout my formative years, changing from a hippie-filled counter-culture hub to a mcmansion-filled, but still liberal, extension of NorCal. My mom went there in the 80s as a wandering lost soul seeking a refuge from her harsh, abusive upbringing in Hoboken NJ. My great-grandfather was the boss of the dockworkers’ union in the 40s and 50s. The movie On the Waterfront is based on the corruption that was being enforced and perpetrated by my mobbed up great-grandfather. In the classic film, he’s portrayed as the villain, of course. My lineage is no stranger to bullies.'

In 2010, in the middle of nowhere in Utah, I was doing the John Wall and cheering along with Greg to the line in “Wagon Wheel” (a mainstay trail song), that goes, “And if I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free.” Otherwise, it was “Our Song,” “Love Story,” “Hey Stephen,” “You Belong with Me,” Fifteen,” and in difficult moments on our trek: “Fearless.” After a long hike during the day, at our temporary camp, Greg would write letters to his girlfriend. Did I mention he had a girlfriend? A gorgeous, perfectly blonde North Carolinian girl who he loved with a devotion that made me love him. Swift’s songs were not just our shared language but perfect narrations of the unrequited love story unfolding with each step we trudged along on our windy journey. I didn’t care that Greg had a girlfriend, I just loved talking to him and learning about his life. He was actually the nicest person in the world. He was perfect in every way… And I mean objectively. He literally was the class president at his school or something, but he also partied (as did I), which I feel is the perfect combo for a high schooler, especially an attractive, tall, smart, kind one.

About seven years later I was in New York City, where I live now, at an improv center called Magnet Theater. I judged a girl for having a Taylor Swift poster yet had paid money to pretend I was a disgruntled cab driver who has bunions, in a musty, windowless Midtown classroom. Anyway, one of the girls from my class and I had become Facebook friends recently and I was excited to see that we shared Greg as a mutual friend. I hadn’t talked to Greg since the weeks following our OB trip. Which was fine. I liked having him perfectly preserved as that perfect specimen who never was given the opportunity to reject me. But in that wonderful Midtown hellhole, I asked the girl how she knew Greg, and she said they went to college together. “I did this backpacking trip with him in high school and I had the biggest crush on him,” I told her. She responded, “It’s so sad, isn’t it? All the best ones are gay!”

I told a friend this story and they pointed out the likelihood of a cis male knowing every Taylor Swift lyric preceding a future homosexual awakening. I’m happy to hear that he eventually discovered new aspects of himself and I really hope he’s happy now. I will always associate Fearless with him, and therefore, I have a fondness for Swift’s music from that era.

In the following years, though, I changed my opinion of her. Kanye was totally right – Beyonce did deserve the award, and then Red came out when I was a sophomore in college. The year prior to that, I was in my dorm building, watching some awards show with a bunch of members from my dorm. Swift was wearing some dress resembling a nightgown, and I remember that one of the girls watching with us was loudly criticizing her for playing a ‘young girl’ and trying to seem too innocent. I thought that the image of vulnerability was actually refreshing, and I showed a hint of Swiftie-ness budding... But that quickly dissolved with Red, which I thought I hated. I now realize I really was miserably depressed and couldn’t find much joy in anything. “I Knew You Were Trouble” was forever tainted by the viral video of the goats screaming to it. I would sing along to “22” and half love it and half think to myself, “Yeah she is saying she’s confused and lonely, but she’s tall, blonde, skinny, gorgeous, rich, famous, and gets tons of boyfriends all the time.” I was 20 when that song came out, and I hated my life. We clearly had nothing in common and this ‘vulnerability’ did not seem authentic.

That red-lipped “gasp” face she always does in photos said it all: she’s looking surprised but she’s posing for the camera. It doesn’t connect. If you’re gonna pose, pose. I love that Ariana Grande only lets one side of her face get photographed – it suggests there is actual insecurity present. That’s me. Not some tall white girl named Taylor Alison. I’m Angelica Sage Florio Roberts. No hyphen because my parents probably knew a split was inevitable. Roberts was originally Reubenitz, too, so I just use Florio now. So what does tall blonde rich Taylor have in common with short Italian, Jewish me?

That dorm I mentioned before was at The George Washington University’s satellite campus, which cost a fraction of the price of the regular dorm rooms. It was away from the main campus and immediately my deepest insecurities were triggered. I felt poor. I felt inferior. This was the period during which GW was ranked as the most expensive school in the country to attend. That meant they had generous financial aid, hence why I went there. I got into better schools, just so you know. The fact that I need to tell you that is proof that I’m still deeply insecure about a lot of the same things as I was from back then. I have spent the past six to eight years doing therapy for serious depression and anxiety, and I still am far from healed, but Taylor Swift may just be a key to me turning that around.

Skipping ahead, the Taylor’s Versions plan was announced, my immediate reaction was, ugh. It felt like such a cash-grab, and what’s worse, I believed she was trying to play the victim card. And the victim card was something I felt I knew “All Too Well.” When I was struggling with depression, I was told to never play the victim, and I can confirm that shifting my mindset away from that did actually help to some degree. Even before this Reputation turned me off from Swift (not that I was on Team Kim; I was Team Nobody) due to the fact that anything related to Kim Kardashian seemed like a publicity stunt to me. It didn’t help that “Look What You Made Me Do” provoked a deep jealousy in me, over Swift’s pettiness. Why can she not take accountability for her actions and I have to? Did I do any research into the celebrity drama happening at the time? No. I was living my own drama and because I had the chip on my shoulder about Swift seeming disingenuous, I didn’t care. To me, she was becoming further pander-y, and her music was just getting worse. So did I listen to a lot of it? No.

That brings me to this moment right now.

I’m 30. I’m almost exactly halfway through 30. I say that turning 30 was both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me. Contradictions collide with expectations – or hopes – again. It’s like how change is the only constant, the very essence of life is contradiction, and now here on December 14th, the day after Taylor Swift’s 34th birthday, I am a newly minted Swiftie because I discovered a humanness in her that changed everything. I realize now that she is contradictory herself, being self-aware yet unmalleable in her own way. It’s like how you can hold a mirror up to see yourself, but you can only see from the angle you’ve manipulated your body to view it from.

At this point I knew a ton of awesome fans by this time, and some of my best friends were Swifties. But like, I was not trying to claim that as an identity in the way that people usually are when they say things like “I have three Swift friends!”

A week before I turned 30, I saw Taylor Swift live at the Era’s Tour Saturday night Philadelphia show. If you thought the biggest surprise of this story was that Greg is gay, you thought wrong. How did I, a non-Swiftie get to go see the tour to which some of her most devout fans couldn’t get tickets? It’s just as simple as: my cousin invited me and obviously I wasn’t going to turn it down. We sat in the nosebleeds and it was really awesome. That’s kind of it.

Taylor Swift re-entered my psyche recently when I lashed out at two people. One was a guy who I was in a situationship with, ending said ‘ship. The other was my sister, who unfortunately, and regretfully, received the ugliest verbal blows I’ve delivered.

Since this breakup of the situationship had been precipitating around the end of the year, I’d felt extremely anxious about ending this ‘era’ on a bad note. The situationship itself was incredibly confusing to me for the few months it lasted. Did I love him? Did I like him? Did I want him because he never wanted a relationship, from the very beginning? Did I deserve him? Could I win him over? Would that be a fun challenge? Would I want him if I did win him over? Fuck.

Those familiar questions led to a few other questions: Why am I here again? How am I still here? Why can’t I get unstuck? Will I ever change? Answer to all: “I’m the problem it’s me.”

At this time, Taylor Swift was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, so she was being featured all over social media, and I was liking what I was seeing. Some quotes that my friends were sharing genuinely captured my interest. I was liking the narrative that 2023’s economy was shaped by feminism. I just finished a second, completely new version of a screenplay about women proposing (marriage) to their partners. Bring on a female-centric economy, and buy my screenplay please.

I may have felt great about finishing my screenplay, but the end to the ‘ship was dimming my light, as had the backsliding behavior with my sister. Throughout these weeks, every time I peered on Instagram, I saw another photo of Swift holding hands with her current boyfriend. The ‘endgame’ one: Travis Kelce. A football player all-American jock? No, that’s too full-circle. Perfect and so wrong, contradictorily. I kept thinking, how does this woman keep choosing the guys that are going to break her heart? People who clearly cannot actually understand her emotional needs? Yeah, I stereotype football players, but that’s not as bad as what the sport does to their brains.

Anyway, I thought, if Taylor has backslid to a new-old mistake, does that mean that I have something in common with Taylor Alison Swift? When she started seeing this football player, I realized that this isn’t a game for her like I had previously thought these relationships were. She actually is making bad decisions because she, like me, backslides. Believing this was my way in to starting to believe that Taylor Swift and I could be remotely similar. My opinion changed later but we’ll get to that.

December 13th, was her birthday.

Happy 34th birthday, Taylor. And it was the day that the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie came out. I wrote a stream of consciousness note in Create Mode on my Instagram — yes I’m that kind of mentally ill - for my Close Friends only. “I feel incredibly raw right now – like a scab that’s been picked at. I did a lot of healing, then a lot of that work has gone undone, largely due to my own emotional chaos which I think subconsciously is some self-sabotaging resistance to growth and change.”

I could come up with a few reasons to pinpoint exactly why I paid the $19.89 to rent Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour the movie that night, but intention was only a part of it. I may have been led to it, mystically (Amazon controls our brains). I plopped down on my couch to re-live the concert that I had seen IRL. My greatest takeaway after the Philly show was that it was inspiring to see what a woman could do when granted that much creative liberty — carte blanche. As a creative myself, I appreciated that she could create such an elaborate experience, it was a whole world within the stadium.

Watching the movie of the concert, I finally appreciated Swift’s lyricism to the level she deserves. I was texting with one of my best friends, Andrew, a Swiftie, about how incredible some lines are. “Please don’t be in love with someone else.” In my state of sadness, I teared up. And then I felt the shame of feeling such a specific sadness at 30, again. And amidst my crying shame-spiral, there she was, singing her lyrics with as much heart and soul at her age – 33 – proudly. Wearing a sort of demented princess dress, she stood there and owned the feeling of fearing rejection. Wait… Is she like me?

I texted Andrew, “Please don’t be in love with someone else.” He agreed that those lyrics are simple and profound. He also listed some of his other favorites, and he inspired me with his genuine ability to connect with her words regardless of any artifice. His favorite was “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter.” I loved that he loves the poetry that I had been missing all these years.

I stayed up until 2:40am watching Swift.

I went back to “Cruel Summer” a few times. That bridge kills me every time, and there’s a moment in the live show where she gives a preamble introducing it. She goes, “do you know the words to this bridge?” Then yells “Prove it!” Before bursting into the vulnerable vomitosis of verbal confessions. That song is about not being chosen, and she sings it with pride. How?

The thing is, that pride over one’s negative feelings is so foreign to me that in the past, I couldn’t imagine that Swift actually knew what it felt like to not be chosen. If she had, she wouldn’t be up there in a sparkly leotard spilling her guts about it. I genuinely thought it was all an act that was put on to sell some idea of feminine trauma, and all she did was profit while fans celebrated… Something. Twenty-four hours later, I find it comical that I literally did not think it was possible that Swift ever felt the way she describes in her lyrics.

The next day I had the day off from work. I watched “Cruel Summer” while getting ready to take my dog out, and then out in the cold, I listened to more T-Swift. I played one of my favorite songs, “Mean.” I played “Mean” again. And again. It is like how Swift and I grapple with ourselves again and again, and my ADHD fixation-tendency led me to another ADHD-tendency: over-sharing.

“Someday, I'll be livin' in a big ole city. And all you're ever gonna be is mean.”

That song brought me back to the summer of 2010 again, but not when I was trekking in the La Sal Mountains. This time, I was back in my hometown, Ashland. “Same old tired lonely place.” The memory this time was of the meanness of a memory I had previously avoided as much as possible. I was sleeping over at a friend’s and woke up to frantic calls and texts urging me to get home immediately. I arrived as soon as I could (I didn’t have my car!), and when I did, I found that my car had been egged to oblivion. My car was a 1987 (or maybe 1989 heh) Volvo and total hunk of junk, but we affectionately called her “Merdey,” and appreciated that she got us (my sister, then me) around our tiny town.

On that hot July day, over four dozen eggs had splattered over the exterior and then baked into it, destroying the paint. This wasn’t a prank, it was a pulverizing. The heat did one thing to help, by melting the cheese that had been smeared inside all four door handles so that it oozed out and alerted us of its presence. That part haunts even my sister, who witnessed the aftermath of this juvenile violation. Mean.

At 30, heartbroken for a different reason and raw for every reason, I remembered the feelings that pulsed through my veins at the time. It was like an injection of some drug that both kills me and keeps me alive, because it was familiar. Even if that familiarity is unpleasant, it’s necessary in a life of uncertainty. “He wanted it comfortable, I wanted that pain,” Swift sings. Pain can be comfortable.

Some difficult experiences happened in my life to shape me into who I am today. I can’t get into all of it, but I can point to the car-egging and say: I was bullied. This didn’t shape me into who I am but reflecting upon it is guiding me someplace important. I was a victim of bullying that one time. Suddenly, that car egging is a gift… Because a lot of past occurrences are nearly impossible for me to trust or believe, but the splotches covering that car were undeniable. By the way, if I can doubt that my own real life lived experiences actually happened, now does it make more sense that I could doubt that Swift was being honest about hers?

I (over) shared about the (over easy) egg memory on my Instagram Stories in Create Mode, and then when I looked at who saw it, I suddenly regretted making the story public to all my followers. I realized that I was worried about how some people might judge me for having been bullied… Wondering what was wrong with me. It’s cute that I imagined that I ever possibly gave ‘popular in high school’ vibes, huh? A girl can dream, but also, Taylor Swift never claimed to be popular in high school — in fact she did the opposite — and now she’s the most popular woman in the country.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour just broke the world record for being the highest-grossing tour ever.

Her number-one dance move is to mime a head being chopped off – she does it every time she sings about a breakup. That’s her move for “it ends” or “over” or anything like that… which occur in every song. Nobody is going to the shows for the choreo, Everyone knew what I could never believe to be possible: that Taylor Swift is a loser and the most popular woman alive too.

I could have cried after my car was egged. And I could have told someone that it made me feel hated, which made me feel like there was something inherently wrong with me, which made me feel unlovable, which made me feel lonely. And sad.

I didn’t have to go to the carwash, put on a brave face for my sister to try to suggest to her “Oh no there’s nothing wrong with me. They did this to try to make me upset and doing that would be letting them win.”

If only I had come around sooner. I had never experienced Taylor Swift the way I did while watching the tour movie, though. Seeing her smile proudly while revisiting her past sagas finally taught me an important life lesson: those feelings that you’ve shared are actually being freed. You can let go if you acknowledge victimhood, sadness, shame. Brene Brown has been saying this for years… I know… But I never quite got it until now.

So before when I “realized” that Taylor is stuck in making the same mistakes over and over again, she probably has actually been cycling through feelings over and over and over again because… That’s what life is? That’s what living is? Feeling something, acknowledging it (for her that is writing a song about it), then moving on? Because now that I’ve listened — really listened, I realize that her songs aren’t about her being stuck and never changing, it’s just that life is messy and complicated and the same feelings will be cycled through. Change is constant.

Backslides to previous versions of ourselves offer opportunities to deal with similar challenges differently. Taylor Swift actually just modeled that very concept with her Eras Tour by revisiting her past iterations and honoring them for what they were, without any shame. In fact, she sings her old songs with fervor. During “Look What You Made Me Do,” she sings, “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama. But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma.” But we know that she did move on. She went onto entirely new genres, and she is thriving. She went from being unpopular in school to hanging out with endless A-listers. She may choose the wrong boyfriends but at least they’re all different kinds of wrong. I had it all wrong when I’d thought she was stuck, and I was wrong when I thought I was stuck, too. Now that I’ve come to realize how much unnecessary judgment I’ve piled on myself for, well, everything, I’m proving in real time that new lessons can be learned from old mistakes.

In her 73 Questions interview with Vogue, Taylor said that her favorite song lyric is “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee,” from “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. Really good choice. I think it perfectly summarizes the ambiguity of life. But I think it’s that whole entire song that kind of sums up Taylor Swift, because it is so clever. Carly sings, “You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you,” and the song is about them. But it’s not. It’s about you and your pain. You can know what it’s like to feel pain, and still be a global sensation. You can decide that all they are is mean.

I’m going to put what I’ve learned into Oprah language:

Admitting defeat doesn’t mean you’re defeated.

*Name changed

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