What Taylor Swift Means to Me as a Writer

January 31, 2020. Miss Americana premieres on Netflix. And I’m feeling a whole load of emotions about it.

Think what you want about Taylor Swift. I know she can be a polarizing public figure, and most people have very strong opinions, love her or hate her. Despite a very brief period in time where I was tired of the drama that surrounded her (I know, it was brief like I said, and I am SORRY), I have been firmly a lover. She’s been an inspiration for me in a lot of ways, and I think to take what people have said about her and to continue to create art in the way she does is admirable.

I started writing songs when I was six. I loved to sing and I loved to pretend like I knew how to play guitar and piano (spoiler: I never learned either). I wanted to be a singer so badly, and I wanted to sing the songs I wrote. I wanted my story to be told through the lyrics I came up with and the melodies I made up in my bedroom. When I got a little older and heard “Tim McGraw” and “Teardrops on my Guitar,” when I learned about Taylor Swift writing her own music, my life changed. I knew other musicians wrote their own songs, but this was different. She was open about writing, and she left easter eggs in her album booklets and for whatever cosmic reason, her work spoke to me the most. I read and reread her secret messages, dissected her lyrics, and analyzed her writing. I wanted to see what she was doing so that I could one day be doing it too.

I wrote 100 songs in eighth grade. I got so in my head about crushes I had and love I didn’t really know, and I wrote everything into rhymes and hooks. I read them back often now, and I realize just how crazy I seemed to people. I didn’t really feel that strongly about that boy I liked and wrote twenty songs about, I just took the feeling and I ran with it. I embellished and imagined things I could only dream about. He was just the jumping off point. Which I think is something very misunderstood about Taylor and her songs.

We often analyze which of her songs are about which boy, and some of them are very specific. However, many of them–like the entire album essentially about Harry Styles–are just inspired by the feelings of love and loss and anger and bliss that she felt while dating those people. At least, that’s my take, and it’s something I realized pretty early on. It gave my writing so much more life. Nothing exciting had happened in my love life, so I really had nothing concrete to write about, but I did have a lot of thoughts and questions and ideas of what love might be like. So in what I thought was very Taylor-fashion, I took off with it.

At the same time that I was trying to figure out what romantic “love” was, I was starting my spiral with depression and anxiety, things I barely understood. I first realized that I might have depression when I was ten. I also had very bad anxiety at that time, but I didn’t know what all that meant until I was about sixteen. Because I didn’t know what I was feeling and didn’t understand what the hell my brain was going through, I did what I’d been doing with my ideas of love, I channeled them into music. I spent long hours writing songs that I dreamed about sharing with the world, and I just wanted to share the dark side of the story. I would sing love songs and songs about depression. What a combo, am I right? But I was only inspired to write those things down, to release them on paper, because of Taylor Swift. If she could be so vulnerable with her words and be bold in naming her exes and show the world that she could be strong, I thought maybe I could do those things too. Granted, I also thought I’d have a lot more exes to expose by now, but that’s beside the point.

I more or less stopped writing songs in high school. I wrote few here and there, but things were different. It’s about when I stopped wanting to be a singer and realized that what I loved about writing songs was the writing part. I started writing stories and personal essays instead of songs. To be honest, it was the rhyming thing that got me down. Every time I tried to not rhyme my lyrics, it just didn’t work. The melodies were a bit too simple for more complex songwriting. Or maybe I’d just run myself dry on it. It wasn’t that I didn’t love it anymore, it was that my writing evolved, but hey, so did Taylor’s. I still held her words close to me when I wrote because they didn’t stop inspiring me. If anything, I wanted to write more. I wanted to take the stories I imagined in her songs and flesh them out further. I took the emotions her music evoked in me and make up characters to feel them. She’s one of the only people who has ever influenced me this way and to this extent. The only other that comes to mind is Ally Carter.

Taylor Swift completely changed my life and showed me that it’s okay to fall in love–because I do it basically every day–and to be vulnerable in my words. To be strong and to stand up for myself. To allow myself to hide when I need to hide. That it’s okay to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. I am a better person and a better writer because of her, hands down.

The last few chapters of my third novel were written with Lover on repeat, and yeah, I think I’m a good writer, but I was only inspired and encouraged to finish it all in that very long Sunday afternoon because I had her words and her voice in my head. When I’m stuck, I go back and I listen from the beginning to remember why I love writing. I love it as much as I do because of Taylor. Even in the brief and dark time I was tired of the drama around Taylor, I couldn’t give her up. I just went back to the Taylor before then, which is awful because this was right when Red Era was beginning and the Red Era is lyrically incredible and stands as one of her best albums, in my opinion. I came just a tad late to the party on that album. I hope to write something as beautiful and gut-wrenching and wildly fantastic as “All Too Well.”

And as I sit here and try to put into words how much this woman means to me, I’m on my second viewing of the day. I couldn’t stop thinking about this film, from the moment the credits started rolling the first time. Every moment hit me. Putting chips in her burritos, talking about feeling fifty-seven but not ready for real adulthood, revealing her struggles with an eating disorder, being so focused for so long on pleasing everybody…

I know it’s kind of stupid to idolize a celebrity or whatever, but she’s been all I’ve had for a long time. Her music is what I came home to when I had nothing else. And I wrote and wrote and wrote to cope because that’s how she coped. I’m a good writer for a lot of reasons, but I fell in love with it when I was ten and needed it most because of Taylor Swift. And I’m forever grateful for her.