TAYLOR SWIFT’S VOICE AND HOW YOU (I) MATTER

Last night in the car, my daughter gave me an overview of Taylor Swift’s breakup songs. It was the quickest drive from Maine to Massachusetts ever.

I listened to the songs from the place of someone writing her second book about things that are so deeply personal the only thing that can carry them is my real voice. This is not a place I enter or exist in lightly or easily, the place of real.

Imagine being a little kid and going up to a person you love with your whole self, you mom or your dad or your best friend, and imagine sharing with them something that intrinsically feels part of who you are: look at this!! Your trust in them is so deep that you hand over the delicate bubble of your place in the world so they can see what you see and mirror back to you understanding and therefore connection, but imagine what happens when the other person, not understanding, pops the bubble through disregard or lack of attention. Who are you now? How can you survive this shocking break?

You become not-you. You work with the understanding that you and what you love is not as important or good as you thought it was, and you work to learn the rules of the game so you don’t lose the people around you.

The thing about Taylor Swift’s break-up songs is that, as a listener, you have the sense that Taylor wrote the songs from the place of looking at the broken bubble and how it feels to be that person. You have the sense that she is singing from the place of you breaking my bubble will not break me, and I am going to tell the world what happened. Others will see me, and I will have taken care of myself by speaking my truth.

She did get small, and she sings about this in her break-up song (goodbye Jake Gyllenhaal, you asshole) All Too Well, “I’m a soldier returning half her weight”. When a woman’s identity is her appearance as it is in our culture, and thousandfold for a female celebrity, how could a person not be tempted to physically disappear when she can’t control who and how people see her? Being yourself and speaking and acting out your truth in this world can feel like too much when you are used to hiding or muting your beingness—real is that powerful and that dangerous. To run that much energy through your body when you have taught yourself to downshift into second gear can feel like being electrocuted. Can you survive yourself?

What made me feel so good last night listening to Taylor sing (aside from the humungous thrill that I was sitting next to my daughter) was that the answer was yes. Over and over again, each song was a declaration of I am here and I will not be broken. The very thing that some people criticize Taylor for: her highly personalized accounts of her relationships, are empowering for me as a listener because they say, the details of your life matter. You, as a women, as yourself, matter. What happens to you matters.

In the late 80s when I first read Fierce Attachments by Nadine Gornick, my sense of what was possible as a human and as a writer changed. I didn’t know the deep attention I paid to my mother and my homelife was something that had merit out in the world. I hadn’t read books like that in school. I hadn’t been taught that a woman’s daily life was worthy of deep attention. It took over three decades for that idea to really sink in, and during that time I wrote mostly about my relationships with men instead because that, men and my relationship to them and to their view of me, I knew had value in the world. I could present myself to the world through the male gaze and earn my place that way.

That’s what I see Taylor doing now. I wonder what she’ll sing about when she’s my age. I hope I’m still around to hear. I’m deeply invested in what she’s doing now and what she’ll do next, and in all the people who love her music and openly sob at her concerts. I listened to my daughter teach my Taylor last night, and every pore of my body was singing, You matter. You matter. You matter. Keep talking. Keep talking. Keep talking.

I’m listening.