“right where you left me” by taylor swift hurts me more than many of taylor swift’s other songs because, even though i’ve never felt the pain of a breakup, i’ve felt the pain of seeing myself as someone stuck in the past. i didn’t get frozen at 23 - i’m not even 23 yet -, but i think my mind froze when i was 17, when all my fantasies of growing up happy with caring friends and a caring boyfriend were shattered as i got thrown out of the closet. and it was the most excruciating pain i’ve ever felt in my life, and i never recovered from it, and sometimes i still think about the fantasies of a good life that i had when i was 17 and i think: won’t this bitch ever grow up? and then i realize the bitch is me and i had to do two things at the same time: i had to mature very quickly in order to not let my feelings be shown to the world, at the same time i had to stop every dream of mine from maturing. so i’m mature, but i’m not mature. this confusion hits me every single day, and i know i’d give everything to go back to when i was 17 and do something different just so i would feel better now - but this might never happen, right? i might never move on from the day when i realized the world is not what it looks like, and i don’t think anybody ever moves on when they feel the same realization, and everybody tries and finds other ways to pretend they’ve moved on, to pretend they don’t care about everything they lost when they were younger and felt frozen by the unexpected turnarounds of life. i hate that i can’t move on like everybody pretends they do, but i also hate that i had to move on so fast from what i should’ve lived more and never had the chance to live in a full form.
