When I was about eight years old, my mother decided it was time for my sister and me to enter the world of pop music. Raised on old show tune CDs and Dido albums from the 90s, Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cFearless,\u201d which had been released the year before, was an unabashed exercise in acoustic guitar and what I understood to be the biblical truth about love. I was hooked. My sister and I would belt \u201cFifteen\u201d to each other on car rides home, certain that we, too, would fall in love at 15, praying that a cute guy would move in next door so we could re-enact the iconic \u201cYou Belong With Me\u201d music video. We were shameless in our imaginations, genuinely enamored with Taylor\u2019s heartbreak ballads and vulnerability. I wanted nothing more than to be her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A year later, \u201cSpeak Now\u201d was released. When I saw Taylor in concert during the Speak Now tour, I\u2019m pretty sure I cried watching her perform \u201cEnchanted.\u201d I hated Kanye West, I created elaborate schemes in my head in which \u201cMine\u201d was a real story, and I sang \u201cLong Live\u201d during music sharing day in 5th grade. Yes, all 5 minutes and 17 seconds of it, undoubtedly further drawn out by my complete lack of rhythm at the ripe age of 11. When \u201cRed\u201d came out two years later, it was a repeat love affair, the softer record becoming the soundtrack to many puzzles, road trips, and dinners for my family. I was a fierce Swiftie; I practiced her signature heart sign in the mirror, and I hated Joe Jonas with a passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But when 1989 released, I was 13. I had just started eighth grade, and it was starting to become apparent that Taylor Swift was for girls. I didn\u2019t know much, but I knew that being a girl meant confronting a constant battle with the world, and I knew I wanted to be as far away from that as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I didn\u2019t listen to 1989. I smirked at Taylor\u2019s music video for \u201cBad Blood,\u201d how indulgent it was, how embarrassing. I reveled in her feud with Kanye West. I memorized all of the lines to \u201cFamous,\u201d always shouting the lyric, \u201cI feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,\u201d louder than the others, as if I could skin my femininity right off my body by doing so, like it was the only way to prove that I wasn\u2019t like other girls, that I actually hated Taylor Swift, that I thought she was a crybaby, a snake, an embarrassing artist way past her prime. While I still enjoyed \u201cYou Belong With Me\u201d and \u201cLove Story\u201d in private, they felt more like relics of my childhood rather than the visceral, pulsing songs that had swept me off my feet only a few years prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When \u201cLover\u201d was released the week before I left for college, I didn\u2019t even notice. I saw mentions of her music video for \u201cME!\u201d on Twitter, and after viewing the unicorn-pastel-core album art, I felt confirmed in my belief that Taylor Swift was completely irrelevant, that she\u2019d sold out to Big Music, that her pre-cooked pop was so far removed from my refined taste of Snail Mail and Maggie Rogers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so my life went on: me, doing everything in my power to extricate myself from femininity, so fearful of not being taken seriously, a self-proclaimed feminist\u2014even though the word tasted weird, a clutter of contradictions and internalized misogyny and convictions that sexism was Over And Done With.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When \u201cFolklore\u201d came out during the summer of 2020, I was living in Harpswell, Maine with five other Bowdoin students. I was one of two women. COVID summer seemed to sag in this vacuum of time, so unhurried in its dreamlike repetition of the same day, every day. Between working at the Topsham Target 40 hours a week and squinting at crosswords on our oversaturated, sunlit porch, I became deeply sad, sometimes even angry, with the heaviness of carrying myself. I had never been so profoundly aware of my gender as I was in that house\u2014not to the fault of the men I was living with, but rather because womanhood is a state of existence that best thrives in the public eye. Who was I if I wasn\u2019t being perceived? Who was I when I saw the same five people every day, when I wasn\u2019t interesting anymore, when I was nothing new? Who was I when my femininity, something I\u2019d been trying so hard to run away from, became a simple fact against the inherent masculinity of the house? I couldn\u2019t put my thumb on it then, and I still don\u2019t think I can now, but the understanding that I would have to negotiate with my womanhood forever, that it would be a slippery, permanently liminal relationship, threatened to suffocate me that summer. It threatens to suffocate me even now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When \u201cFolklore\u201d came out, I was, to put it simply, down bad. There I was, wheeling and dealing with my gender, mired in a deep rage, and Taylor Swift had the audacity to release her eighth studio album amidst it all. I was hesitant. I was skeptical. I was desperate. But I was also a woman with a 30-minute commute to her retail job, a commute I always ended by playing Phoebe Bridgers\u2019 \u201cI Know The End\u201d as I rolled into the parking lot, if that paints a clear enough picture. As I tentatively listened to \u201cexile\u201d for the first time, selected solely because it featured Bon Iver, it became clear to me that Taylor, too, was in a crisis of identity. An album characterized by gorgeously simple acoustic guitar riffs, \u201cFolklore\u201d was a marked departure from Taylor\u2019s previous three albums, the albums that had filled me so deeply with repugnance, that had made me feel such strong second-hand embarrassment for her. As I listened to \u201cFolklore,\u201d I felt the way I had when my mother played \u201cFearless\u201d for me for the first time all those years before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a slow return to Taylor Swift. At first, \u201cFolklore\u201d was strictly commute music, not something to be brought inside of the house, not something to reveal that I was listening to. Then it became the soundtrack to my ear-soaking as I battled a piercing infection so gnarly it still threatens to re-haunt me to this day. And then it became crossword music, then apple pie baking music, until suddenly, \u201cFolklore\u201d had entered my music\u2019s vernacular completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just as Taylor built worlds and imagined stories for the characters she constructed in \u201cFolklore,\u201d I, too, was re-learning how to get lost in her music, to weld her dynamic storylines with my own. \u201cBetty\u201d and \u201cAugust\u201d became my summer soundtrack, and I saw my experiences with womanhood so strikingly reflected in the characters Taylor sang about on these tracks. Just like Betty and Augusta, I, too, was trying to navigate womanhood\u2019s creeping tendency to mold itself against men, to define my existence in something else besides the male gaze. Since that summer, Taylor has embarked on a project of re-releasing her old music, the records from my childhood haunting me anew. As I continue to re-examine my own relationship with being a woman, it\u2019s comforting to be surrounded by those tracks I loved so dearly, that felt so close to the truth of femininity when I first listened to them a decade ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m still not comfortable with mainstream femininity, and I\u2019m not sure I ever will be. Internalized misogyny hides in weird places. I often think of my friends who are women, of how badly I want to do right by them, of how scared I am of pushing them away. I think of my sister, of how our love for Taylor is and was complicated, of how I want to be the best version of myself possible for her. I think of my younger self\u2014delighted in the love stories, the angst, the promise of growing up to be a woman. I want to make her proud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet despite all this, I still didn\u2019t post my Spotify Wrapped, because I\u2019m still a little embarrassed that Taylor Swift was my top artist. This is an unlearning that will follow me for years to come. But by God, will I be listening to the 10-minute re-recording of \u201cAll Too Well\u201d while I\u2019m doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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