Addicted to drama and unfathomably lame

I've been on a real Taylor Swift kick lately – and by "lately," I basically mean "pretty much every two or three months since Red was released in 2012."

I'm not unique to loving Taylor Swift; her fans are the most famously numerous and rabid of pretty much any fandom in the entire world, and it would be difficult to find someone who speaks English who hasn't ever enjoyed at least one of her songs. She's one of the most popular artists or businesspeople to ever exist, and like every famous woman in the world, the mere mention of her is equally likely to evoke vitriol as it is admiration.

There's been a whole lot written about her – too much, many would say! But I've been thinking about her as a reflection of me as of late, and I think that gets at the core of why she's so successful, popular, and beloved: she's a reflection of whoever listens to her, regardless of experience. Which is extremely interesting, because the specificity of Taylor Swift is what makes her Taylor Swift, but she's so good at what she does that she makes extremely niche art feel universal and shared.

I was rewatching The Eras Tour (which is still great), and I realized that one of the things that make me like her so much is how phenomenally uncool she is. Most of her stage performance and a lot of her public persona has been accused of being "cringe," and that's accurate, but her mannerisms are readily identified by the homeschooled and the theatre kids and (maybe most of all) people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies. Which is nearly all of us, at one time or another. I thought about how she's just like me: lame. And I love her.

Her public dating life is pored over and dissected in a way that is terribly unhealthy, but her obsession with drama and romance and the concept of love – what it means to love and what it means to be loved – is what keeps her creative drive going. If there's one not-personally-insulting take about Taylor Swift that isn't valid, it's "Taylor Swift is bad at writing pop music." There have been few better, in fact, and it's because her songs are so evocative of what it means to feel a thing, usually at a specific time or in a specific context ... but specific to the listener, which is important.

It's really striking how personally I relate to songs that are reportedly about very specific experiences that Taylor Swift had with Jake Gyllenhaal, or with Harry Styles, or with Tom Hiddleston, or that one English dipshit. She sends me deep into memories and tricks me into thinking I have memories that I actually don't – or might be misremembering.

I roll my eyes at a lot of Taylor's shenanigans, but it's always with affection, because I'm rolling my eyes at myself. People are sick of me, too, and I'm sick of myself. I think Taylor understands both exactly who she is and exactly what she wants the world to believe she is, and even though those may be two completely different things, she's in complete control of both of them. And that's admirable. We should all be so lucky.