Invisible strings: Rediscovering Taylor Swift in my 30s

We were both young

When I first saw you

I close my eyes and the flashback starts

I'm sitting there

At my computer in a wicker chair...

I can't quite recall exactly how I first came upon Taylor Swift's music. I know I was in college, in Delhi, and it was either through watching Faith Hill on Oprah and finding the song Taylor named after her husband; or it was the collaboration "Breathe" with Colbie Caillat, whose songs I listened to rather a lot at the time. Either way, I was quickly enamoured by this young woman, a kindred spirit the same age as me, with the curls and dresses and boots, and the ability to tell entire stories in a single song. 

She wrote of love and youth in words I thought I'd use if I were in a world like hers. "Love Story" and "Teardrops on My Guitar" were inescapable on MTV. But it was "Tim McGraw" that spent weeks in the sidebar of my blog, which was really as big an honour as being on any music chart. I thought it was pretty neat that there was moonshine, faded jeans, eyes like Georgia stars, a cooperative truck, letters, love, and growth in one summery country twang. I decided that I liked country music, that it was "my kind of music" – perhaps a fun foreshadowing of my later days as a line dancer and instructor.

It has probably been sixteen years since then, and we have endured despite ups and downs. She is my favourite musical artist, and I never call anyone my favourite unless they have stood the test of time. I still love the songs I used to love on her early albums. I find myself sometimes rather unexpectedly bursting into tears at certain lines in her later albums that I don't even relate to. My grandfather used to cry while reciting poetry and listening to music; perhaps that's where it comes from. Or maybe she just writes with such beauty and poignance that it is hard to remain unmoved. In accordance, this is a piece about how Taylor Swift's music has held me through the years, and finding it again in my 30s.

I think what first and always called to me was her writing, and how she has consistently maintained that it is cathartic for her, which is why she writes about her life. She has often been accused of only writing about boys – when, in fact, it is her own feelings she's expressing, something for which male artists never seem to get critiqued. I've fully supported her calling out misogyny in the music industry, and taking down people who've been publicly called out by many for their predatory behaviour. In songs like "Dear John" and "Innocent", I cheered her on for not just her fearlessness but the sheer beauty of the writing and production too. 

Yet people often seem to miss that some of the best songs on her first three albums alone are about her mom, her best friend, her band, becoming redundant, holding yourself together, feeling lost, feeling disappointed, growing up, and facing criticism. All pretty universal teen and early twenties feelings, but nonetheless difficult not only to put into vulnerable words, but also plate up for intense scrutiny. She said in Miss Americana:

There is an element to my fan base where we feel like we grew up together. I'll be going through something, write the album about it, and then it'll come out and sometimes it'll just coincide with what they're going through. Kind of like they're reading my diary.

But as we grew up, we began to drift apart.

She was finding who she wanted to be, finding her voice and style and place in this world. So was I. Perhaps our falling out was because I couldn't see myself in her anymore. She found men to date, and I didn't. Maybe I bought into whatever little I consumed of the media narrative that shadowed her at the time. It wasn't mean, though. It was more like an outgrowing.

Her music just wasn't for me anymore. In London, I did listen to Red. And her Christmas songs. But it was "Safe and Sound" that sparked my interest. My tastes had led me to The Civil Wars, and though I had no idea about The Hunger Games, I loved their collaboration, the visuals (foreshadowing Folklore/Evermore?), everything. I even read a summary of the series, thinking it wouldn't possibly interest me. The joke's on me, because I ended up reading the trilogy the following year despite knowing the plot, and have been obsessed ever since.

 

The eras of 1989 and Reputation were a blur – I heard the hits, everyone did, but they didn't pique my interest. Because I wasn't paying attention to the viciousness surrounding her in the media and by others in the industry, I missed the memo that these albums were actually a reaction to all of it. They were about her owning the hate, and persisting. I took all the songs I heard at face value, and it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised all this when I began to watch commentary and reaction videos, which I'm starting to think are a vital part of being a Swiftie because of all the lore.

But she was still in my periphery. I appreciated her counter-suing her assaulter for a dollar and not backing down. Years later, I cried when I watched the Reputation tour movie and heard her introduction to "Clean". 

Looking back this exact day a year ago, I was not playing a sold-out stadium in Tampa. I was in a courtroom in Denver, Colorado. Honestly, I was there for a sexual assault case, and this day a year ago was the day that... uh [voice wavers] the day that the jury sided in my favour and said that they believed me. I guess I just think about all the people that weren't believed [...] or the people who are afraid to speak up because they think they won't be believed.

"You don't feel a sense of any victory when you win because the process is so dehumanising," she added in Miss Americana. I heard about her fighting to take back ownership of her discography and respected her more for it. Soon enough, I danced to songs from Lover in my Mumbai living room. I watched her documentary and realised how much I'd missed, and silently apologised for being a bad spirit friend. We still had so much in common. She wrote journals when she was 13, like I did. She cared about the same things that I did. She was trying to evolve from seeking approval to being truer to herself, like I hoped to. We lived in different worlds, but we began to grow back together.

Then, pandemic. Folklore appeared in the lockdown with the suddenness of magic. I remember feeling goosebumps realising the twist in "The Last Great American Dynasty", and mourning with "My Tears Ricochet". It was just right. Evermore only strengthened this feeling. Not to mention that she collaborated with Bon Iver, another of my former favourites, but never someone I expected to hear singing with Taylor Swift. I came upon my now go-to reaction video account, Chats & Reacts, which made me feel like I'd found friends, and instilled in me a desire to have a similar chatty video or podcast (I eventually would). I was even exercising to her music.  

They were the perfect albums for the universal grief and trepidation we were feeling. Uncertainty and sprinkles of fear are a part of the human condition at the best of times – even in those moments when you're deliriously happy yet a little bit afraid to lose it all, or feel like you'll never be happy exactly like this again – but they felt so constant at the time, so exhausting. These albums were reminders of softer, deeper things. They were different, yet they felt like the Taylor of yore, like an invisible string that had always tied us together. 

The nostalgia continued with Taylor's Versions, even if it took me a while to realise that the abbreviation TV following an album did not, in fact, mean "television". I would later be inspired by her vaults to dig into the archives of my own work. Fearless and Red had comebacks, and I was dragged in, headfirst. They were portals to younger days, when everything felt like so much more. Every unrequited crush made us think we'd never love again, classmates wrote angsty poetry, and then we grew up and realised how resilient, and hopefully graceful, we can be.

I delighted in cutesy "You Belong With Me", whose video younger-me had thought was the pinnacle of filmmaking; and in the sass of "Mr. Perfectly Fine", a song that has aged tremendously well given recent events. There was a 10-minute song, and later a short film. There was "Ronan", which I'd forgotten about, because it is probably the most painful song to ever have been penned. I discovered "Starlight", and the story behind "22" being light and energetic that was hidden in "All Too Well", and "Today Was a Fairytale" transported me to a bus headed for Pilani.

But real life is seldom a fairytale.

I was right there with Bonny and Emily to welcome Midnights. It was fun, but it was only a few months later that I could actually connect with it, when I was going through some of the same things Taylor must have while writing it. Suddenly, there was so much empathy. What had felt light at first transformed into a vulnerable album – dark, doubtful, trying to assert, to reassure. News of her break-up left me saddened, even as my own relationship of roughly the same duration was cracking and crumbling around me, castles and all.

I took refuge in those midnights, the words clearer in that season of sadness and hurt and anger. I thought of the talks and fights and couples' therapy and I felt it all. There was no one song that told my story, but there were lines here and there – which, incidentally, is how this album has been described by a critic, blending the real with the fictional until they're inseparable. I caught the feelings and I held them. And when I found "You're Losing Me", albeit pirated (sorry), here, finally, was that one song in which every single line matched my rawness as though it were written for me. I cried to it all of last May, but selfishly also felt relieved that she had experienced it first and could hold my hand through it. Life is interesting, and time does heal, because when I listen to it now, I don't feel like crying. 

I guess I learned that when a relationship becomes unrecognisable, it can't do anything but end. When you find yourself becoming smaller, tolerated, begging for footnotes, when words begin to distort you, you know in your soul it's time to let go. I've lost people before, and I probably will again. But as I faced the harshest winter of my life, I combed through and devoured the entire discography, and it took up more significance in my heart than ever before.

Because I am interested in life stories, I wanted to be more attentive to her journey. This time, it was so hard to find a song not fun to listen to on 1989, and Reputation was all the fire I was feeling. I couldn't believe I'd missed it. I had newfound respect for how she'd handled the narrative against her, choosing herself, building herself up. Speak Now TV came out on the day in July when the movers packed up and sent off less than half of the shit we were dividing up – mine now, not ours – and for a little while I lay on the comfy couch that had no room in my new life, and vacuumed the traces of the day, and remembered what it was like to be 21 singing along to all those purple songs. 

By the time of 1989 TV, I was in my new apartment, obsessively solving the Google puzzles. The New York Times had previously called the re-recordings "an act of business retribution" that was simultaneously "so joyful and so participatory for her fans". We did grow up together, NYT. We've been through all the eras. Her tour over the last year has been for the fans too, strengthening the memories, heightening the nostalgia, celebrating the community. I took myself on a solo date to The Eras Tour movie last December, and it was a party. Singing and dancing with strangers, running down the theatre stairs to make the "Willow" circle, receiving friendship bracelets, having conversations after the movie was over. So much beyond my wildest dreams.

Sometimes we don't give our idols room to err. We all have red flags. We're all problematic. Most of us never have any of these displayed for public dissection; doing this is an act of bravery in itself. But the fact that she's willing to reflect, accept feedback, and change is why I have always respected her. In Miss Americana, she spoke of expectations, of being asked to "live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable." But growth is uncomfortable. For me, it has been acknowledging her genius and still being objective about her shortcomings. Both of these can be true. It's so much easier to be a critic than to create, and that includes creating our own stories and the way we move through the world.

This year, for the first time in a long time, I waited desperately for her new album. I found friends who wanted to do a The Tortured Poets Department listening party, and we did. Of the first album, anyway; it took us three hours to get through it and by then we were too tired for The Anthology. I'd been terrified of "So Long London", that it would remind me of the city to which I'd struggled to bid farewell, that I still think of as the best year of my life, compounded by the fact that this song was written for her partner of six-ish years, coming out just days before my final court hearing. Sure enough, it cut deep; yet I didn't find TTPD seeping into me the way I thought it would, perhaps because our break-ups had already been written.

I did notice that the songs sparkle with literary references, which is not new. I sometimes wonder what she reads. I know she's read classics and poetry and The Hunger Games. "Fortnight" I couldn't fathom, but it gives me The Great Gatsby vibes. "Peter" and "Cassandra" thrill my literary soul. "The Black Dog" screams. "The Prophecy", with its Sleeping Beauty reference, echoes my insecurities. "How Did It End?" haunted me for a long time as I relived it with each new conversation. What is a concise summation of the slow demise of a long relationship? I can't pretend that I understand. All the questions from well-meaning, curious people. What happened? What changed? Why did it change? At what point did it change? Everyone fights. Couldn't you tell? Didn't you see the signs? Why did you get married? Why didn't you break up? Do you still talk? Is there hope? Was it that bad? 

There is judgment there. The secret wondering how things could go so far if there had been flags. Why there are entangled feelings if there is unhappiness. And mostly, how to prevent it from happening by using my experience as a roadmap. It's exactly what the song describes – sometimes a little smugness, but mostly empathetic hunger, so hard to satisfy because it's so hard to understand it myself. 

Even though I felt my feelings and then got on with things, I guess I did it with a broken heart so well that I almost forgot it was broken. That I may re-read the manuscript, but remembering walks alongside healing, and will take its own time. That there is happiness in our history, across our great divide, and maybe I don't need a villain. Maybe the reflection and honouring of past work is the only way to move forward; maybe this is why so many songs on TTPD literally sample music from previous albums and tie them all together like an epilogue.

And maybe this is why, even though I've had a draft of this post written since 2020, I couldn't truly do it justice until now. As we're both perched at the ends of different eras, and the beginnings of new ones, it has been so hopeful and inspiring seeing her become the best, most powerful version of herself. It has reminded me of the people and support that is important, and to keep doing what I love no matter what. That it isn't the first time that I've turned my life around, and it won't be the last; that we can keep reinventing ourselves while also staying true to our core; that everything we lose is a step we take, and sometimes we need a new genre, a new soundtrack.

From the college student who listened to these songs in her room in Delhi, and the grad student safe and sound at her desk in London, and the editor dancing in her living room in Bombay, and the slightly lost wife, and the woman returning half her weight, and the Swiftie singing with strangers in a movie theatre, and the story seeker sharing TTPD with her friends, and the divorcee cradling her brand new Evermore vinyl in an Oslo cemetery – thank you. Thank you for the music, and the poetry, and the vulnerability. Thank you for teaching me that we all have a right to our voice, and work, and narrative. And that we will be okay no matter what.

"I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart."

Long live the magic.