SWIFTIE

Why I’m a Swiftie, you ask?

Let me take you through the Eras.

TAYLOR SWIFT: My favourite song from the album is A Place in This World. Upon the release of Taylor’s debut album, in 2006, I was 12. I was being bullied relentlessly at school, which was causing me to pull out my own eyelashes and eyebrows due to the stress. Suddenly, Taylor Swift entered my life like a whirlwind, putting into words exactly how I was feeling, and expressing other feelings I didn’t even know I had yet. I absolutely love her debut album, which I still have as the CD.
Cold as You, The Outside, and A Perfectly Good Heart helped me process my feelings about being tormented and excluded. Teardrops On My Guitar introduced me to heartbreak, Our Song introduced me to romance and butterflies, and I’m Only Me When I’m With You instantly made me think of my bestie, Miranda. She’s been my bestie for over 20 years and is coming with me to see Taylor Swift in concert. When I learned that Taylor’s long-time best friend is Abigail from high school, I warmed even more to this curly-haired blonde country singer and saw myself – and my friendship with Miranda – in her.

FEARLESS: My favourite song from the album is You Belong With Me. I fell in love with the music video instantly – it was so creative and funny, with a happy ending. “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts, she’s Cheer Captain and I’m on the bleachers” and “I’m listening to the kind of music she doesn’t like” resonated perfectly with me. I also adored Love Story; I listened to Fearless on repeat while on holiday in San Gimignano; and Change was a gamechanger for me, inducing a sense of hope that things would eventually get better.
By now, I was 14. Soon I would be leaving Danish primary school behind and “starting afresh” at a new school. Or so I hoped. I didn’t know that it was about to be the worst year of my life. This was when I started getting bullied by my classmates for listening to Taylor Swift; classmates who apparently only listened to “indie records much cooler than mine”. I ended up leaving the school early and having an emotional breakdown that saw me isolated in my room with the blinds shut for a month. Needless to say, Taylor Swift’s music got me through this.

SPEAK NOW: My favourite song from the album is Mean, although The Story of Us, Better Than Revenge, and When Emma Falls in Love (From The Vault) are close contenders! I didn’t actually get to listen much to Speak Now at the time of its release (2010), as I was slowly slipping into psychosis. I would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. However, I have caught up with all albums now, of course 😉 I have made a friendship bracelet for every Era, and Speak Now is no exception – it’s purple and fabulous …

RED: My favourite song from the album is Red. “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street, faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly” is probably my all-time favourite lyric. The emotions, speed and rush it evokes, and, of course, as someone who loves colour, Red perfectly suits my taste. At the time of this album’s release in 2012, I had just been discharged from hospital (after a seven-month-long stay) and was reeling from the chaos and confusion of my breakdown and diagnosis. I could barely string a sentence together, let alone write about my experiences or think about listening to all my favourite music. Everything was just so overwhelming, and I was feeling sadness, frustration, and a great sense of loss. People were making parodies of Taylor’s songs, and I hated it. I felt they were attacking me personally (not in a paranoid way, just feeling great sympathy for my new idol). I love All Too Well, the upbeat 22 rekindled my love for Taylor’s music, and Ronan (Taylor’s Version) recently made me have to sit down and cry like a baby. All in all, Red made me feel all the feels – happy, sad, and everything in between.

1989: My favourite song from the album is Shake It Off. (Thanks, Mum! :-)) I also absolutely adore Wonderland, but as the first one I heard of the two, Shake It Off is epic. I still struggle with shaking off what my bullies did to me, but every time I listen to “I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain” (when I know I have an official IQ that puts me in the top 0.01 percentile of the population :-P) and the rest of this irresistible song, it all just gets a little easier. 1989, from 2014, produced a lot of the pop hits we still all sing along to today.

REPUTATION: My favourite song from the album is Look What You Made Me Do. Oooooooh, how I love this album! What a comeback. Every song is a triumph. …Ready For It?, I Did Something Bad, and So It Goes… are also among my favourites. The music video for LWYMMD is fantastic. I love the snakes, diamonds, red lipstick, and power. In 2017, I was taking back my own power by blogging and also in the process of writing my first book, “Georgias Stemme(r)”. Things were finally starting to look up again, and once again, Taylor got me through it with a smile. “I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time; honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time; I got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined …”

LOVER: My favourite song from the album is Afterglow. I Forgot That You Existed made me feel good, The Man is clever, Soon You’ll Get Better is poignant, and Cruel Summer is currently on repeat. Oh, and of course, ME! has a fantastic music video. So colourful and imaginative … right up my street. In 2019, I was working on my second book, this time in English, which would later become “VOICES OFF: Talking About Schizophrenia“.

FOLKLORE: My favourite song from the album is Cardigan. This album came as such a surprise to all of us, back in 2020. And, perhaps, partly for this reason, I keep going back to it as my favourite album of Taylor’s. It’s such a wonderful album and I love every song on it. Betty, The Last Great American Dynasty, This Is Me Trying, Mad Woman and Hoax are favourites of mine. Taylor showed that she could do indie as well as country and pop, making her even more of a superstar.
But, as those of you who know me will know, I will not be wearing grey (this Era’s colour) to the concert 😉 I’m simply too much of a colour fiend for that. I do, however, have a grey cardigan from Taylor’s The Tortured Poets Department merch line … so, I guess that’s my tribute 🙂

EVERMORE: My favourite song from the album (again, 2020 – does Taylor ever sleep? :-D) is Coney Island. Another amazing album, another beautiful song. No Body, No Crime is also highly addictive, and Marjorie delivers lyrics such as “Never be so polite you forget your power / Never wield such power you forget to be polite”. Classic.

MIDNIGHTS: My favourite song from the album is Anti-Hero (but I could go on: Maroon, Snow On The Beach, Karma, Mastermind, The Great War …).
2022; just before the publication of my first English book. Life was going much better for me at this point, and I was soaring in my recovery. Now, I loved seeing Taylor excel and succeed, instead of “just” hanging on to her songs as a lifeline. I smiled knowing she was winning … and so was I.

THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: My favourite song from the recently-released album is Clara Bow. Along with the beautiful music video for Fortnight, with Post Malone, and other amazing tracks such as I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can), The Manuscript, and So Long, London, this is yet another bull’s-eye from Swift, who deserves every bit of hard-earned, billionaire, pop icon success she gets.
The most famous person in the world.
What a star.

And that’s why I’m a Swiftie.

See you at the concert.

TAYLOR SWIFT

This post is somewhat delayed – I wrote it in March and didn’t publish immediately. But I’ve decided to post it now!

ARTIST: Adrian Serghie (RedBubble)

13th March 2023

I’m watching Taylor Swift’s “Reputation Stadium Tour” movie on Netflix as I type.

(Yeah, I’m slow at getting around to things – it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to life, I think.)

Anyway, I was just reminded of every single reason I call myself a Swiftie.

Right from the very first minute of the movie.

I love all Taylor’s albums, but Reputation now has an even more special place in my heart.

As soon as I started watching, I was brought all the way back to one of my darkest times.

A time when I was deeply unhappy, struggling, and Taylor’s music was my lifeline.

A time when I felt like nobody would ever want to be friends with me again.

A time when I felt like I’d lost everything.

A time when I was 15.

No teenager should EVER have to go through what I did.

But they do. Every single day, all over the world, in endless ways.

Especially when it’s just allowed to happen.

I felt an overwhelming and terrifying loss of control. I had an emotional breakdown and didn’t leave my room for a month … I was unable to face the outside world. Thanks to a handful of young people who thought it was fun to break me down, I felt like my reputation was ruined.

My reputation.

I was 15.

The way I saw it, an ever-growing number of my peers had rallied together with the sole intent to completely ruin me. (Again, I was 15 – maybe not the most rational and mature of thinkers.) I could see the things they wrote on social media and the way they interacted with me – how different it was from the way they interacted with each other, and how my name popped up in various unflattering ways. “I think Georgia looks really hot in that picture! Ha-ha, just kidding, Georgia….”

As time passed, more and more of my peers seemed to join in. I heard that some of them were talking about how weird I was – sharing this with new people, people I hadn’t even met yet.

People I hadn’t even met yet.

Ultimately, I felt like I would never be able to win. How could I? How could I possibly reclaim my reputation? There were dozens, if not hundreds, of them and only one of me – and I seemed to be doing a pretty bad job at simply existing. (I was 15!)

My confidence was at an all-time low. I was mortified to my core. Eventually, I deleted all of them from my Facebook “friends” list and blocked a lot of them, too. Slowly, I managed to get myself outside again. It was hell. I was furious. So overwhelmingly, utterly infuriated by the fact that I had done NOTHING to provoke this, yet here I was, crushed and humiliated, crying my eyes out and feeling like the villain in my own story.

This is where Taylor Swift comes in.

While watching this movie, many years after my dark times, I found myself witness to a young woman with her own host of “reputation struggles”, yet here she was, standing tall, smiling, and absolutely SLAYING on stage. Few have achieved what Taylor has achieved, and that stadium was full – over ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND people in attendance (out of 3 MILLION for the whole tour). I could say something trite like “there will always be haters”, but I’d rather say this: Taylor Swift had her struggles. She was hurt by the haters. And yet she was still up there, out there, singing her heart out and showing up. That takes courage. Poise. And she did it with such humour, charm and grace.

I have been a loyal Swiftie ever since I first heard her song “Love Story”. I have never been afraid to hide this – on the contrary. I immediately got tickets to her 2020 concert at Roskilde Festival (before COVID blew that out the water). I have drawn her. I have written about her. I have watched her journey from her earliest, more innocent, country days – to her hard-hitting pop era – to the magical indie “lockdown” years and beyond. I have enjoyed “All Too Well: The Short Film” – and the fact that I’m not the only one who loves wearing snake rings.

Source: RollingStone.com

(Above: From Taylor’s music video for “Look What You Made Me Do”)

(Below: Georgia’s own jewellery)

All in all, if I was to mention one thing I’ve learned from watching the “Reputation Stadium Tour”, it’s that it takes enormous strength of character and courage to get up, dress up, and show up, even when it feels like your reputation is ruined beyond repair. Taylor’s concert is a demonstration of power in this respect … she hasn’t let those who tried to bring her down succeed, instead channelling her experiences into a full-blown amazing album and tour with millions of ecstatic fans screaming her lyrics and crying at her every word.

Taylor hits the right notes. She’s massively successful for a reason, and it’s not plastic surgery or sleeping with exes on TV. To me, she is a true inspiration, ever since I could relate to her first music and now, with her superstar status.

And guess what?

She’s won.

Proven them all wrong.

Made her “haters” look silly.

I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement of her international tour dates, as I’m sure many others are, too.

This brings me to this chapter of my story …

I felt like I’d lost, back then. That I’d been defeated.

It’s hard to type that.

But I see things differently now. I’m happy to see that school was a temporary nightmare, and grateful that I never became friends with any of them, even though it felt awful to be excluded at the time.

Because you know what?

I’m winning, too.

I’ve reclaimed my reputation.

I’ve put things into words from MY perspective, not allowing any jerk to dictate how my story reads.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me. I’m off to underline your name in red.