Swiftmania is a very different type of high than what I experienced listening to music as a teenager: a high worth it. It’s not just the plethora of songs to discover, but the non-stop Swiftie culture itself: constant access to music, news, loot-hunting, street yelling, song swapping and lines of poetic code via text or bracelet approved – a party that is in full swing all day and all night.
As a child, she had the Indigo Girls, Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, singers for whom a troubled interior was matched by a raw, edgy exterior. But there was no one who expressed righteous anger from within a shiny suit, who suffered like me, but whose confident prowl could make me walk a little taller. My singers would sit outside the party and complain to you, but when you got up your courage, they wouldn’t go in, ready for it. Taylor doesn’t force you to choose, because she is both The fortunate you want to be, and all the anti hero you are inside
Who is swiftie? In my practice, these patients share certain characteristics. Raised on a healthy diet of kindness and fairness, she’s sensitive, ambitious, and a bit of a perfectionist. Like Taylor, she dresses to be nice and cool (and sometimes, for revenge), but inside, she’s in all kinds of pain. Her doubt perpetuates a vicious cycle in a world where she is shy and young, and others can assume she doesn’t know anything. She’s hardworking and frustrated, and she wonders if get faster if she was a man. Desperate to experience love, she has had moments of pleading with her for Romeo to take her. just say yesor tolerate being treated badly in some situation (You said you needed space, what?). And yet, Swiftie strives to be the modern Cinderella, who she doesn’t remember if she has a man. She finds in Taylor Swift a real hero who meets her where she is, but she also shows her the rough place she could go, so heady precisely because she’s within her reach.
“What would Taylor Swift do?” is a saying among certain patients in my practice. Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is to be fragile and in formation: a human construction site. Another is to be surrounded by others who are fragile and in formation. Taylor Swift articulates not just the betrayal of bullying, but the barely shy cruelty that’s even more pervasive: meanness, exclusion, on-and-off ghosting. She says: borrow my strength; embrace your pain; make something beautiful with it, and then you can get rid of it.
But what is unique about this artist, in this time, is the access she has created to a cohesive community, particularly for the pandemic generation, whose social connections became tragically elusive and for whom internet offerings assumed a central role. Regardless of what’s bothering you, this generation’s poet laureate has a song somewhere in her mega-opus that describes just that sentiment. She won’t solve whatever problem you have, but she will stay with you until time passes she does her job: Look at her now.
