1989 (Taylor's Version)
A reflection on 1989: then and now.
At the end of each month I want to post something a little different. So in honor of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), I thought I’d write something a bit more personal:
At 4:50 AM on 27 October 2023 my alarm goes off. Wearily I roll over to shut it off. I stumble into the kitchen and get my pre-poured iced coffee from the fridge. I make my way back to the comfort of my warm bed. It’s 4:55 AM. In just a few minutes I’ll be listening to 1989 (Taylor’s Version). As I lay there in bed in these early morning hours, I think about when 1989 first came out. I remember the first time I listened to 1989, I was driving up to the University of Florida and was meeting with the Director of the Architecture program. On my way to Gainesville from South Florida, I stopped in Orlando to spend the night with a friend. As she drove us around Orlando, she played me 1989. The windows were down and we were speeding along the highway, with the wind whipping through my hair and the streets lights acting as a strobe light, I felt electric.
There are moments in a person’s life that you remember so vividly and feel it utterly down to your core. This was one of those moments for me. I was on the precipice of my entire future and I remember feeling a sense of total freedom and hope for what my future would hold. I felt like I could do absolutely anything, the feeling only a young, naive teen has when adrenaline is mixed with complete ambition. While I think that 1989 should’ve been an anthem for me at this time—and deep down I think it was—my relationship with Taylor Swift was complicated.
The environment I grew up in was highly controlling and totally patriarchal. A girl wasn’t allowed to be a girl, she had to be a cool girl. A good girl. To smile and nod her head when the men spoke. She could sit at the table and listen and ask questions, but god forbid she wanted to contribute. She had to be feminine, but not too girly because that was vain. She definitely couldn’t be sexy, but she had to have sex appeal—but in a 1940s sort of way. If she dated more than one guy she was a slut and if she was ambitious she was trying to be too much of a man. Taylor Swift was portrayed to me as being the embodiment of everything I shouldn’t be, but deep down she was the embodiment of everything I was and wanted to be—I just didn’t know it at the time, or at least couldn’t admit it to myself. I listened to the way they talked about her and didn’t want them to talk about me the same way. So as the pendulum swings when you’re young, I swore I wanted to be nothing like her, that I didn’t like her music, and that she wasn’t cool.
But in secret moments, in the seclusion of my car or when no one was home, I’d play her songs and let myself be free, just like I was in that car when I first listened to 1989. Outwardly, I couldn’t let myself be seen liking her, because I compulsively needed the approval of everyone around me, especially the men. I lived, but for others, and was constantly torn by my strong sense of individuality and my desperation to get approval from everyone yet never pleasing myself. Looking back I feel like Taylor Swift’s music would’ve and should’ve been more a part of my life. Many of her lyrics would’ve been a guiding compass for what I was experiencing and feeling at so many different points in my life as I struggled with breaking free from the environment I had grown up in and the pressure to be perfect, while everyone around me just wanted to watch me fall.
I wish I could say that I was like many of the other fans out there who adored unabashedly through thick and thin, but I can’t. I was too self-conscious, too much of a people-pleaser, and too scared to be myself. I didn't want to be hated by everyone and I so often felt like I was, so I bent, molded, and made myself into someone I thought people would like, so they would want me, so they wouldn’t laugh at me. Much of my youth was characterized by being severely bullied, not to mention my severely complicated home life. I learned quickly to please and to be who others wanted me to be because being myself was bad. So I did what seemed like the logical thing, I stuffed the real me into a box and locked her away so no one would ever see her. I became a blank canvas reflecting back to everyone what they wanted to see and never straying outside of those lines. For each person I would transform myself into their perfect version of me tailored just for them. They wanted someone quiet, I could do that. They wanted one of the guys, I could be that. I could do anything and be anything they wanted, until I couldn’t.
While living in New York I reached a breaking point. The glass shattered and the fragments of all these versions of myself that I created scattered across floor. As I crawled over the broken shards of glass, fragments digging into my skin leaving me cut and bleeding. I frantically searched, trying to find a salvageable piece of myself that those around would love, and I saw that there was nothing left. Reluctantly, with bloody hands, I swept the old versions of myself up and threw them away. I stood up I went to that old, dusty box where the real me had sat in darkness for what felt like hundreds of years. She was still there, waiting. She was all I had left, so I had to be her and when I looked at her she wasn’t so bad. At the risk of losing everyone else I realized I had to be myself, and when people faded from my life, new people started to emerge and I discovered that they liked me for me.
As I’ve escaped the world I was once a part of and have found safety in being myself, I’ve let myself like whatever I want and that includes Taylor’s music. So the release of 1989 TV represents something much bigger to me than just a simple re-recording of her album. Over the past few years, the re-release of her music has given me the freedom to be a part of the fandom in a way that I wasn’t allowed to when I was younger. As what is probably obvious at this point, when the reputation re-record is released I will absolutely lose my mind.
It’s 5:00 AM. With shaky hands, I press play. It starts and I hear that familiar intro of Welcome to New York.