Listening to Taylor Swift is my guilty pleasure.
I’ve spent the last hour squeezing drug store pink #200 dye into my recently bleached hair, jamming out to TS’s entire discography. I mean all of it, from the antebellum teenager I grew up hearing on the radio to the red-lipped multi-millionaire who seems to have killed the former.
Why does this matter? Well, I’m always bashing Taylor Swift for selling out to the industry and becoming like every other serial-dating pop-star on earth. And at the same time, I could sing you 92% of her songs with all the lyrics and no need for music.
i do this when I’m driving a lot, because where i’m from it takes at least fifteen minutes to get anywhere and half an hour to get anywhere good and over an hour to get anywhere that’s somewhere. Just to prove my point, four days ago I drove an hour on the interstate six different times in the span of 24 hours. This is what I have always known. Long drives and music have always filled the space between where I was and where I’m headed.
When I drive south on I-25 from my hometown, I am driving directly towards the city. Slowly, the fields and distant strip malls become concrete overpasses, two lanes become four (I know, crazy right), and the gentle hills of the front range roll into a greater metropolitan area. At night, going north, the lights fade into the distance and eventually I can only see as far as my headlights go. I love that. I love the way it feels like returning to a simple place, backed by the mountains and untouched by the bustle of life. Now that I no longer live here, there’s something special about the things that used to be routine.
See, I was raised on a decade of romcoms, love songs, 97.3 KBCO, and Taylor Swift. Every Taylor Swift album is distinctly paired with a different era of my life, and in a lot of ways I feel like I have grown up with Taylor. I’m realizing now it’s unfair to call her a sellout and to say she transitioned to pop music simply because that was the way to make more money, when maybe she has simply evolved as an artist. Everyone changes as time goes on (returning from college has made that abundantly clear), and I can’t love Miley Cyrus for growing the way she did and shame TS for doing the same.
We’re all growing up, in some way or another. Some day I’ll make peace with the way we walk through life alone, and how it’s okay if other people can’t completely understand me or the things I’ve been through. It’s like Lauren said, they’ll find a way to be there in their own way. There’s a good chance I often feel the way I do because there is a chemical imbalance in my head, because I am not standardly hormonally, but I’m past the point of caring. I have made it this far with who I am, and maybe it makes me hard to be around sometimes and maybe it makes me difficult to love but I don’t care. I’ll do the trauma therapy and I’ll try to get in the habit of shutting out negative thoughts, not to make myself better or normal but because I should be allowed to bury my sad stories without worrying.
The reality is, what I’ve always wanted more than anything else is the kind of love that’s manufactured by popular culture. The kind that supposedly makes your life better and whole and fills the empty spaces between things with meaning and feeling. I don’t know if this kind of love is real. I want to believe in it, because I grew up believing in it. The problem is I’m always anticipating the future instead of letting it find me. I suppose we all sort of anticipate the future too much. We’re all always putting forward this idea of achieving happiness as being “that easy,” and I have never felt that. It’s because we’re socialized to glorify the idea of being okay, of being content and happy and to want that all the time. But that doesn’t work, at least not for everyone. I need discomfort to push me forward, I need friction to understand where things can improve.
This is living as I have always known it; passing the time between where I’ve been and where I’m going with music. With the right playlist, I could drive forever without getting where I thought I was going, and I’d be happy. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I love listening to Taylor Swift in the car, as much as I’ll pretend I am above that, just like I love falling in love with different people on different days of the week even when I know things won’t work out. Because these are the things that make me smile, because maybe happiness isn’t “that easy,” but some days it feels that way and some days are enough. I have a suspicion I’m not actually trying to go anywhere, but rather waiting for the right music, the playlist I could listen to indefinitely, that makes the destination and the horizon all part of the same meaningless backdrop. See, the most important things exist in the space between what we feel like matters.