Taylor Swift, the Showgirl, and Me?

This past weekend, I must have 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 performance. I grew up in a high-control group where the most thing was convincing everyone else that you were an overcomer. I learned to ignore heartbreak and call it denying the self. To be “the pattern,” the one who was the example, even as I was beyond miserable.

I perfected the mask of spirituality and was lauded for it.

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 describes a man who promised to provide and protect, but instead betrays her. As she confronts her oppressor, she ends up finding the strength to become her own savior. How did Taylor know my whole life?

And then, immediately, Eldest Daughter, and the shift is jarring. It’s all invisible demands and being taken for granted, the burden of other’s expectations. And yet. Determined not to abandon others the way she herself was abandoned. Oh Taylor, why you gotta make me cry?

Somewhere between those two tracks I was ugly crying in my car and freaking out the guy in the car next to me. As I have thought about it I think I finally understand the heartbreak she sang to my soul.

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

This tension that we have lived with so long. Asked to be more than we are, stronger than we feel, and to do it all with a hallelujah. It is dazzling and devastating, this performance.

And yet, like my Lord and Savior Taylor Swift, we made the conscious decision, the painful and beautiful decision, to keep showing up in the life we have ourselves forged. Not in spite, not but because of it.

The happiness she’s singing about has depth, and richness and it 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 will TURN into a freaking MAMA bear to protect, that life was born on the back of my own darkest season. The toxic, controlling time that tried to destroy me. So the CRAZY love I feel for my present life is made more vivid by everything that 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.