someone: are you okay?
me: i’m fine
my mind: I want to first thank Billboard from the bottom of my heart, for this honor, and for naming me as their woman of the decade. So, what does it mean to be the woman of this decade? Well, it means I’ve seen a lot. When this decade began, I was 20 years old, and I’d just put out my self-titled debut album when I was 16, and then the album that would become my breakthrough album, which was called Fearless. And I saw that there was a world of music, and experience beyond country music, that I was really curious about. I saw pop stations send my songs Love Story and You Belong With Me to #1 for the first time. And I saw that as a female in this industry, some people will always have slight reservations about you: whether you deserve to be there, whether your ma-
