Swiftmania is a very different kind of high from what I experienced listening to music as a teenager — a high that is worth the pain. It’s not just the plethora of songs to discover, but the nonstop Swiftie culture itself — the constant access to the music, the news, the scrolling for swag, the shout-outs on the street, the sharing of songs and lines of poetic code via text or passed bracelet — a party that is raging all day and all night.
When I was growing up, I had the Indigo Girls, Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, singers for whom a troubled inside matched a raw, edgy outside. But there was nobody who held forth on righteous anger from the inside of a sparkly bodysuit — who suffered as I did, but whose confident prowl could make me walk a bit taller. My singers would sit outside the party and complain with you, but when you got your courage up, they weren’t going to go inside, ready for it. Taylor doesn’t force you to choose, because she is both The Lucky One you want to be, and every bit the Anti-Hero you are inside.
Who is the Swiftie? In my practice, these patients share certain characteristics. Raised on a healthy diet of kindness and fairness, she is sensitive, ambitious and a bit of a perfectionist. Like Taylor, she dresses to be pretty and cool (and sometimes, for revenge), but inside, she is in all kinds of pain. Her self-doubt perpetuates a vicious cycle in a world where she is timid, young and others may assume she knows nothing. She’s hard-working and frustrated, and wonders if she’d get there quicker if she was a man. Desperate to experience love, she has had her moments of begging for Romeo to just say yes, or tolerating being treated badly in some situationship (you said you needed space — what??). And yet, the Swiftie strives to be the modern day Cinderella, who doesn’t remember if she has a man. She finds in Taylor Swift an actual hero who meets her where she is but also shows her the badass place she could get to — so intoxicating precisely because it is within reach.
“What would Taylor Swift do?” is a refrain among certain patients in my practice. Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site. Another is being surrounded by others who are fragile and in formation. Taylor Swift articulates not only the treachery of bullying but also the cruelty just shy of it that is even more pervasive: meanness, exclusion, intermittent ghosting. She says: Borrow my strength; embrace your pain; make something beautiful with it — and then, you can shake it off.
But what is singular about this artist, in this time, is the access she has created to a cohesive community, particularly for the pandemic generation, whose social connections grew tragically elusive and for whom the internet’s offerings assumed a central role. Whatever you are upset about, the poet laureate of this generation has got a song somewhere in her mega-oeuvre describing that precise feeling. She is not going to solve whatever problem you are having, but she is going to sit with you in it until the passage of time does its work: Look at her now.