Taylor Swift, the Showgirl, and Me?

This past weekend, I think I played Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, a hundred times over. I had preordered the vinyls, painted my nails a blazing orange, and even hosted a little listening party. I went into this album an unapologetic Swiftie (and really, why should anyone ever need to apologize for loving an artist?)

I was ready to leave the tortured poet behind and be swept up in the melodies and the storytelling that have become her signature. And per usual, she delivered. She promised a show and we got burlesque and Broadway and theater and showgirls from every time period. We all found a new musical era to enjoy.

But what I found was something more. It may be at touch presumptuous to say, but I found my own story there.

On the surface, the album glitters with sequins and lighter tunes. And from a distance all we can see is the dazzle, the wealth, fame, applause—it all looks enviable. Yet as I listened, I heard what was really being said. About how often showgirls have been put on display, only to be devoured by the very industry that claimed to celebrate them. They wore their smiles like armor while quietly withering underneath, dependent on men who controlled their livelihoods, captives to the whim of public opinion.

And that part, I felt.

I have never been on a stage, but I know the ache of performance. I grew up in a high-control group where the most important role you played was convincing everyone else that you were always overcoming. I learned to shine while quietly breaking, to be “the example,” the one who seemed above struggle, even as loneliness hollowed me out. I perfected the mask of certainty, though I lived with anxiety I didn’t yet have the language to name.

Marriage, in that world, became another kind of performance. We had no tools for real communication, and therapy was taboo. So we stumbled through, unequipped, while our children shouldered the weight of parents who were trying and failing. From the outside, we had it all—a bright, enviable family. Inside, misery filled the corners like smoke that never cleared.

And so, as I listened, I kept finding myself in tears, even through an album that is lighter and happier than tortured albums past. The music carried me somewhere uncomfortably familiar. I cried the hardest at the juxtaposition between track four, Father Figure, and track five, Eldest Daughter. Reading the lyrics I felt like they were pages torn from my own life.

In Father Figure, she confronts betrayal: the man who promised to provide and protect becomes instead the one who oppresses, forcing her into the bitter strength of becoming her own savior. That strength is necessary—but it is also costly.

And then, immediately, Eldest Daughter, and the shift is jarring. Suddenly, she admits she is not a savage, not a bad bitch, not the iron-fisted heroine that was required of her in order to protect herself. In this track we see the invisible demands—someone who is sometimes taken for granted, burdened by expectations, yet determined not to abandon others the way she herself was abandoned.

The heartbreak lies in the tension between those two truths: the need to be unbreakable, and the reality of being deeply breakable.

This tension is the marrow of so many women’s lives. We are asked to be more than we are, stronger than we feel, and to do it all with a smile that convinces the world we are fine. It is dazzling and devastating, this performance.

And yet, like Taylor, we keep showing up in the life we have ourselves forged. Not because we are unscarred, not because we relish the fight, but because to walk away would mean becoming the very wound that marked us.

What I realized, listening again and again, is that the joy in Taylor’s voice isn’t in spite of the darkness she’s endured but because of it. The happiness she’s singing about has depth, a richness that only exists because it’s framed by everything she’s survived.

And maybe that’s why this album hit me so hard. The life I’m building now, the one I adore and protect, was born on the back of my own darkest season—a toxic, controlling time that almost swallowed me whole. The sheer love I feel for my present is sharpened and made more vivid by the shadow of what came before.

Yes, the album sparkles. But for me, the real power is in the choice it mirrors back: though the darkness of the past has tried to undo me, I too will not be Ophelia. I choose to build, to sing, and to shine.