Taylor is already in my ears when the dogs are sending morning light into the bed with their noses nudging the door open. Meaning a song or two is playing in my head or a hum forming in my throat as I move to let them outside. Over the bathroom sink it’s Cruel Summer and at the kitchen table it’s Cowboy Like Me and later, when I stretch out with a book and a mug of tea, it’ll be So It Goes. I didn’t always love her but I love her now; breathing her music out all around me, I’m the choir in the pulpit singing along to something that through resonance is made holy and true.
Once, I was five years old in a new country, and it comes back to this so often that all my words could end right there. Yes, they sprawl on, a recombination of the same story told again, but here might really be where something begins because I’m introducing myself to the school principal with the only English words I know, a rhyme my Iranian kindergarten taught me. It’s wonky in my mouth made of numbers and lines like ‘buckle my shoe’, and the Hafez poems I’ve memorised in Persian of course go unsaid, because there is no use in repeating them to someone who can’t understand. The Hafez fades from me somewhere between learning the word for ‘chair’ and how to write ‘happy birthday’ and I’m simultaneously made smaller in the forgetting and larger in the assimilating. At my friend Kyra’s house her mum chain smokes in the kitchen and gives us Freddo frogs for lunch. After Kyra shows me the patch of wet carpet outside the bathroom door from her leaving the tap running, we sit by the blow-up pool in the backyard. There’s an extension cord weaving out from the house, edged between the mesh door and the stucco, connecting to a stereo playing a Hilary Duff album. Kyra knows all the words and sings along while nodding her head, and she laughs when I say I didn’t know Lizzie McGuire made music. It’s just one of those moments when I’m ten but somehow still in a new country, learning I can never learn enough, and that there will always be things that just aren’t For Me. Not that I wouldn’t like them, but that I would (in almost unseeable ways) be forbidden from doing so.
It’s there when I don’t know that the bat shouldn’t hit the stumps when playing cricket at school; when I don’t know someone’s trip to Movie World wasn’t to a place where you watch movies; when I don’t know any of the Simpsons references the other kids make; when I don’t know how going ‘four-wheel driving’ is any different from driving in a normal car, etc. etc. etc., and the shame of pretending I’m not skirting the margins of others’ centres begins to lodge itself under a foot jutted out for balance, leaving me always perceptibly lopsided. So, I grow up by pulling my own arms and legs (which is to say, by some internal force), willing myself to be rid of the inadequacies sentenced upon all immigrant children. Soon, I believe myself smarter and quicker and better. I am looking back at Kyra and her coughing mother in the hallway with contempt, her wet-stained carpet, her skipping CD, and I am standing taller than the shadow I really cast, rejecting what I fear will deny me.
Like netball and bikinis and cutting class to sit at the edge of the oval, when I first hear Taylor Swift’s still country-twanged voice singing of heartbreak, by the chorus she is assigned to the category of things that exist in my exclusion. She is tall and beautiful and white. She has blue eyes and a rich dad and wears spaghetti strap tops with her hair up. She is beloved in a way I cannot perceive myself as ever being, and though she’s not that much older, I can already tell that she belongs to a version of girlhood that intersects at no point with mine. When she sings about being in the front seat of some boy’s car and burning his pictures when the love turns belly up, I am not one of those who nods along with knowingness or longing. I am serious about school and serious about growing up and serious about making the burdens of my family so far from home worthwhile. When my older cousins visit, I spend hours on LimeWire downloading the songs they played onto my blue iPod nano. The bassy beats beneath the lyrics I don’t yet understand call for hips I don’t yet have, but yearning for something that comes with time feels better than aching for that which I know will never come at all.
My teenage years are spent with no boybands, pop stars, boyfriends. Drinking, hooking up at parties, wearing low-cut shirts. I’m unlovable in the worst way and everything is wrong. Isn’t that how it goes at 16? Elsewhere Taylor releases 1989. I sneer at the childish lyrics of Shake It Off and now my iPhone is playing The Weeknd but I’m still a feminist and aren’t I just so damn smart? Taylor tours Melbourne and I’m up in my room with the blinds drawn filling my journals thinking no one knows me at all. At lunch some girls sit in the quadrangle with white tank tops laid out in front of them, cutting strips into the bottom and threading coloured beads through. They’re wearing them in the pictures they post from the concert. There’s confetti on the floor that they pick up and throw around them. I don’t know what it means that ‘13’ is written on their hands. High school finishes and I’m in none of the photos, the air passing through the coloured beads of others. Have I always been bad?
No clubbing, drugs, music festivals. I’m nearly crying on the train to uni because I won’t see the guy I like for a few days but still I recoil from Taylor’s narration. In my headphones the closest plug to the wound is Dawn Golden singing ‘you’re all that I want’. I curl into the words as I daydream about him holding my hand. At uni all my classes are mostly white people. They say things like ‘I don’t see colour’ when we discuss HR policies of racism and it’s so boring, how the statement is propelled into a room that has an open seating plan but is split, the white students congregated together on one side, the international students on the other. The international students don’t really speak English and I didn’t once too. I zoom in on Google maps to show them where I’m from then they do the same. The distance still feels smaller than what I feel with the guy still talking. No, he doesn’t see colour, stretching his arms in the air from the front row.
I watch Miss Americana and see Taylor saying her success is due to her work ethic. I look at her father and look at her face and I see her trembling over a tweet in support of a leftist political party. I watch her music video for You Need To Calm Down and see a white woman where she has always been: at the centre of everyone else’s stories. I watch her stoke fires that could never burn her in the name of feminism and sidestep the flames that engulf us all and in everything she is all my exclusions in one. I don’t have the words for it yet, but it’s what underlines my dislike, a bitterness towards the space privilege allows one to take up, the doubt it allows one to evade. I wish for ignorance like that, all the way through, an innate belonging that asks for nothing and loses even less.
When COVID hits, the fear it triggers in me outstays its welcome. I can’t leave the house even when the restrictions are lifted and beyond, and now I start thinking maybe one of those things I was never made to enjoy was life itself. I have shrunk so far I am a dot; I am the speck on the dot in the mark left by a pen trailing off the paper, all my plans coming undone. I find refuge in books, in words. I leave my house through a hardback cracked open and I come out the other side having seen things I wouldn’t have otherwise. Poetry softens the landing of all my crashes, and how often they come. In the midst of withering away in lives that aren’t mine, Taylor releases Folklore. I listen to it. It seems she has been doing the same.
What is it they say about love, that it’s like falling asleep, slowly then all at once? I’m enemies to lovers with her discography and against my judgements something opens, a crevice in that unseen place I’d made warm. And maybe it’s like a light, and maybe it’s like a comfort, and maybe it’s like I don’t have to be fighting everything all the time. Red (Taylor’s Version) drops days after Max dies and all that stops me from crying is having it on repeat while I do puzzles. I’m heaving and nothing’s coming out because I’m all empty from the grief, but there’s a song, and there’s a colour, and there’s that corner piece that I’ve been looking for.
Taylor sings ‘I knew you’ and I don’t know anything. I’m forced to see how much of everything I’d denied myself. The places where I’d pulled begin to ache and it hadn’t kept me safe at all and I look at childhood pictures of me and really, feel nothing. I mourn a girlhood that was never mine. I watch Miss Americana again and the resentment is still there but it sits alongside something else now; a space carved out in me, the allowance to still enjoy what I critique. In Taylor’s most frivolous songs I find rebellion, because who is more ridiculed than the teenage girl? I imagine what it would have meant to me if I’d listened to her when I was younger. If I’d realised earlier that what was “childish” could also be worthwhile.
Now I’ve traced my way back through the years with Taylor, and I know why fans draw ‘13’ on their hands. I know all the words to my favourite songs. I know the easter eggs and the interviews and the award shows. I know the fan theories, I know the words shouted in between the lyrics, I know the sound of her heartbeat remixed in. I know in everything I love is a piece of me, and that there’s still parts waiting; a wholeness to be sought, if only I allow myself to seek.
This is so beautifully written!!! Another immigrant girl raised near Melbourne over here, thank you for putting words to so many feelings and thoughts that swirled throughout my journey with Taylor's music. Maybe because I was younger when I first heard Love story, but my story strays from yours a little at the start. I pushed away my early love for her songs for all the same reasons you delayed jumping into them. It was my final year in high school when folklore pulled me back into her world and I've never looked back. I'm still learning to embrace the "girlish" joys in life that I never allowed myself to indulge in before, and the resentment I still hold for (still) being on the outside for so long.
(I found this at 13 likes, I'm sorry to have to ruin it)
!!!!!! A masterpiece. I am so deeply moved. I will be returning to this piece again and again