Plz be so kind as to reblog my essay so that maybe it can make its way to Taylor. pls. plz. please. please. ily.
My Imaginary friend, Taylor Swift
“She wears short skirts, I wear T shirts, she’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers”, I would sing to myself outside at fifth grade recess while my socially awkward tomboyish feet walked carefully, balancing on the raised plastic divider between the grass and the woodchips. I dare not fall, because those woodchips were actually scolding hot lava.
Taylor Swift was kind of like my invisible friend. Between fourth and sixth grade, a solid three years, her CD was only music I listened to, besides the occasional pop radio in car, where her songs were often played as well. As far as I was concerned, no one else made music besides Taylor. I can still imagine the cover of the CD case, with her long waving blonde hair swimming amongst the aqua blue background, “Taylor Swift” sprawled across the front in casual cursive letters; Taylor’s eyes glowed an ocean blue and I was in love.
At this point in time Taylor was a little bit ahead of me, in terms of love affairs and tales of high school incidents. She wrote her first album as a freshman in high school, though some of the songs on the album she had written even earlier. I was just arriving in middle school. I looked up to her. Her songs weren’t necessarily about things that directly related to me, but I always found a way to connect to them, whether it was a recent heart break between me and my two day long relationship with Jonny or Josh or Jake or whoever, or if it was relating to her hints of clumsy awkwardness. I remember watching her “You Belong With Me” music video over and over and over again, as she, the dorky outsider lost a boy to your typical lip-gloss-wearing cheerleader type.
Her song Fifteen described her first day of high school and her first kiss amongst other things that I wouldn’t understand until later. The song had me almost certain what my first day of high school was gong to be like and had me determined to wait until I was fifteen to get my first kiss. Though I jumped the gun on that one, by two years, at thirteen. Whoops.
I remember so clearly, in the confines of my childhood best friend’s basement, popping in Taylor’s CD, standing in front of a large mirror and leaving our hearts on the floor as we danced to Taylor’s ballads about love and growing up. It’s safe to say I didn’t choose to pursue interpretive dance. Though I couldn’t always directly relate to Taylor’s first album, I always found a way to make it relevant to my dramatic tween years.
During my later angsty middle school years I moved away from Taylor’s music and toward pop punk, Good Charlotte and Mayday Parade, the classics. It was during this time that the media became obsessed over her every move, and every new guy she was seen with became her next boy friend, her next victim in a pattern of songs about failed relationships. Even so, during the media’s obsession with Taylor’s lovers and private affairs, I silently stuck by her. If we were all brave enough to feel things as deeply as Taylor, I think we would all live more fulfilling and vibrant lives. But alas, scandal and promiscuity are what interest the general public and so, it’s the media’s job to create some. To combat the media’s portrayal of Taylor I think she tired to be the perfect picture, an elegant, sweet country girl. And while Taylor is sweet and elegant, there’s more to her than that, which her fans would later fall in love with.
Taylor and I kept our distance through the later middle school years and early high school. During this time I battled major depression and anxiety, desperately tying to figure out who I was. After many mistakes and instances where I found out who I definitely was not, I found who I was. I found a group of friends who supported me and they became an integral part in helping me to embrace myself. I became confident and stopped apologizing for who I was. Soon after this Taylor came out with her Album, 1989, which is centered on the new friends she made, that allowed her to be true to herself and enjoy life. Around this time Taylor stopped apologizing for who she was as well, she stopped pretending be someone that hopefully, the media couldn’t abuse. She decided to unapologetically be her self. She embraced the awkward and quirky. While much of the media and public still seemed to be hung up on her love life or new hair style, many fell in love with this new side of her. This gained my interest in Her once again. It was like talking to an old friend. Hey, me too! Me too. Isn’t it amazing to live life this way? I wanted to say to her.
Around this same time Taylor was taking the Internet world by storm. She has become known for communicating with her fans on social media, especially through Tumblr, which I happen to be an avid user of. Tumblr became a huge way for Taylor to express her sense of humor, a kind of Internet humor that appealed to many of this generation. She has become known for sending fans packages and letters, and arranging to meet many. She has become very open and down to earth with her fans. I feel that Taylor is one of the most genuine celebrities out there, and this is the foundation of her enormous fan base.
It also was quite fitting that this album came out during my senior year of high school, while I was planning to move to New York City for college. A big move, that I was excited for, but also weary about. I had decided to fully commit to following my dreams of working in the fashion industry and I was hoping it was the right decision. It was ALSO fitting that, that summer before I left for college a close friend of mine invited me to go see Taylor’s 1989 tour…
As I stood there awaiting her appearance I began to realize the gravity of the situation. I felt myself falling back in time, to when I was listening to Taylor’s first album. And suddenly standing next to me was my younger self; I was simultaneously in the present and the past. We stared at each other in disbelief, and with a little bit of awkwardness since it had been a while since we had last spoken. I was stuck in a strange limbo, somewhere between who I had been and who I had become. We were about to see Taylor Swift, the voice that had and kept us company so many times was actually going to be standing in front of us, with a body attached. Our hearts began to pump at alarming rates and I remembered dancing in the basement, and crying over two week old “boyfriends”.
The lights dimmed and the crowed quieted, the calm before the storm. Taylor steps on stage, and I burst into tears. I wish now that I had let the tears come, and embraced the moment. And while a few modest tears would not have embarrassed me, these tears were intense; the kind where your face smashes up into a wrinkly contorted version of someone who looks like you, but you dare not admit is actually you. I could have sat there and sobbed for quiet some time, but I quickly pushed the tears back out of embarrassment. At first, I was thoroughly confused by my violent emotional reaction. But after my younger self and I screamed, sung, hyperventilated, and cried to Taylor’s first few songs I looked next to me to see my younger self-fading away. Eventually, I was standing only with my current self, my more confident, happier self who was about to move to New York City. The concert acted as the beginning of a new chapter in my life, or maybe the last few sentences of the chapter before. I let go of pieces of me that I had been hanging on to that had no purpose in my life anymore. I was ready to walk, run, jump, swim, into the future, whatever it took. Fittingly, Taylor began to sing Welcome to New York, “Walking through a crowd The village is aglow, Kaleidoscope of loud Heartbeats under coats, Everybody here Wanted something more, Searching for a sound we hadn’t Heard before, And it said Welcome to New York It’s been waiting for you, Welcome to New York, Welcome to New York.” I sang along and imagined what it might be like in that strange exciting city. Once again Taylor was a step ahead. So many things went through my head during that concert, but something I kept coming back to was how drastically I had changed as a person over the years and how proud I was of that. I realized how ready I was to move on to this new phase of my life. It was such a easy transition of thinking, like my past and future had been separated by one of those nicely perforated lines on a sheet of note book paper and Taylor ripped out a new blank sheet and placed it in an empty folder labeled new and exciting things.
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