i’m worried all of the reasons people hate taylor swift are all of the reasons they hate me
all i do is try try try
I'm worried that all of the reasons people hate Taylor Swift so much are all of the reasons they hate me.
I'm eager. I’m ambitious. I’m so goddamn earnest it hurts.
I shed my skin every three years. I make big statements and do photo shoots and go to therapy and talk about it (but only after I’ve kept it close to my chest for so long, letting the lessons marinate, that by the time they come out of my mouth I’ve moved on).
I recently tried to give someone a brief overview of my life experience and I was met with: “Damn. You have more eras than Taylor Swift,” and I have to say, I think I might have more.
All I do is try, try, try, try.
I strive and I climb and I throw pasta at the wall and I see what sticks. I cut my hair and change my clothes and search for thesis statements and write poetry and ask questions and flail my arms just to see what it feels like to dance. I have more identities than I can integrate into my current capacity for life experience. I think I might be permanently stuck in 2011.
I wish I could be cooler. I am equal parts recluse and life of the party and that really seems to confuse people.
People don’t like change, and they really don’t like when women change. When their idea of who a woman is, or was, is incongruous with her present actions. Or appearance.
People don’t like when they don’t have control. And they really don’t like when a woman seems to live outside their narrative of how the world works. They try to squash her down, write a new story to try to make something make sense, they draw conclusions. But she (universal She, and T-Swift) rises back up. Every time. Like a cockroach or a phoenix, you decide.
She makes statements. She evolves them. She takes a stance. Then she hibernates. We can’t quite figure her out – how much is calculated and how much is capital T Truth? I don't think we’ll ever know, because I don’t think she knows. I don't think anyone knows. Especially in this day and age where our subconscious is inextricably linked to our perception by an outside third party, an insidious vestigial organ born out of the online era and hanging on as an eternally present observer: our every move is a performance, our every thought is a content opportunity, our every choice is a wider commentary on who we are and what we believe.
This is not about whether you like her music; this is not about whether you like me. This is about the unexamined self, the embarrassment of allowing yourself to exist without a through-line – who would you be if you weren’t thinking about how you would be perceived? What would happen if you let the idea of you and the reality of you be incongruous for a while?
This is about how my favorite books and movies are all of the ones people hate because they say “nothing really happened.”
I don’t know, I kind of miss when we viewed selfhood more as a semblance of loose threads, a series of actions threaded together with a splattering of interests and all mixed up with cosmic randomness. Not a self that is purely calculated, pruned, served up on a platter, perpetually on offer to consume and critique.
What if we allowed ourselves, and others, to thrash our bodies out into the world and all that it meant was that we were testing out what it means to be alive and truly feel it? To press against the edges of identity out of pure curiosity, like a child wondering what happens if you knock the tower of blocks over and start again.
I am not saying that I am (or that Taylor is) morally or artistically superior in any way — I guess I’m saying that I’ve spent a good portion of my life feeling raw and exposed and talked about behind backs and so deeply wrong for my ambition, for my willingness to fail, for being the person who raises her hand in class not because she wants to prove she’s right but because she wants to learn what happens if she’s not.
I guess what I’m saying is, I think I’ve felt a lot of shame for being so earnestly committed to getting as much out of the human experience as I possibly can. My fear of disappointing myself is larger than my resistance to change, and therefore I constantly feel like I’m not in on the joke. The joke being that most people seem to talk a big game about no regrets and living on the edge and yolo and death beds and dream big but not many seem to actually sustain that in action when it comes down to the unsexy decisions we must make everyday. And nobody ever actually follows up about that coffee they said you should get.
And I wonder, is my searching too loud? Am I leaving too many footprints, too much evidence, too many stones turned?
What is the line between trying things on and becoming them?
Am I going to be perpetually stuck in between those two poles, or will I ever actually arrive?
Thank you for reading <3 Sending everyone sunshine & clean air.
xx mm
I love this so much. More lines that inspired audible resonses from me than I can share here, including: "for being the person who raises her hand in class not because she wants to prove she’s right but because she wants to learn what happens if she’s not."
Very grateful to get to see and hear your searching that is never too loud.