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Healing My Inner Teenager with Taylor Swift
My teen years were marked by an unyielding desperation for male approval, a fruitless search for myself within the possession of someone else. I spent those years hopelessly aiming for the moving, undefinable target of ‘enough.’
When my mind keeps me up at night with replays of my worst moments, it is those years that haunt me.
Lately I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift sing of those growing pains I remember all too well. Because although I have a lot of issues with her, I can’t deny that the 32-year-old singer speaks directly to teenage me.
The problematic pop queen shot to stardom wielding grudges, heartbreak, and rumination, and ‘Midnights’ proves she has no intention of letting go. With the overarching fixation on past wounds, you could call her lyrics petty and emotionally immature. It isn’t hard to see why critics accuse her of narcissism, self-victimization, and misogyny.
Throughout her career, Taylor has played innocent ingenue, revenge-seeking femme fatale, well-intentioned White Feminist, and self-aware hot mess. But this has not been a linear evolution, for she has never abandoned any of one of those personas for the others.
Like many artists, Taylor upholds the narrative that pain is the key to creativity. She writes from a place of deep insecurity and…
