I look around in my life and often wonder what would have been different if I never saved this one song to my mp3 player or turned up the country radio on the drive home from school. What would have been different and would I have been different?
I often like to say that I was born into a family of swifties because I would not have been a swiftie if my family wasn’t one first. My mom kept me surrounded by country music when I was growing up. That was the radio station that was always playing in the car when she picked me up from school and Fearless was always the CD she had in her CD binder that she kept in the glove box. One of my first recollections of listening to Taylor Swift, however, was in 2007. At 7 years old, I walked into my Aunt’s bedroom, where she kept a bookshelf of CD’s and always had the latest MP3 player, and asked her to play the song that goes… “it’s late and your mama don’t know.” Little did I know, that song was called Our Song and my Aunt made sure to educate me. 4 years later, my mom surprised me and my best friend with tickets to my first concert… The Speak Now World Tour. I remember going to the dollar store before making my way to the ARENA (yes taylor swift used to play arenas… crazy to say) to make sure I got enough glow sticks to be noticed by mama swift. I had myself convinced I was getting invited to the T-Party with 5 glow sticks on my wrists. Unfortunately that was not in the cards for 11 year old me but I did go home that night and put my first Taylor Swift poster on my bedroom wall.
A few months later (because I can never be normal about anything), I decided to start my first fan page… a swiftie youtube channel. My 11 year old self thought she was a genius by sitting in my 6th grade bedroom while reading the Taylor Swift articles from Tiger Beat magazines in front of a camcorder and then uploading it to youtube and calling it… The Taylor Swift Show. Ahead of her time, truly. Don’t worry, I also did merch hauls (back when a necklace was $10) and “swiftie morning routines” which is quite similar to what I do now…
This led to me making twitter fan pages, instagram fan pages, and later… tumblr fan pages that taylor actually followed. Although it’s funny to picture my 11 year old self sitting in her bedroom saying “Welcome to The Taylor Swift Show” wearing a T-Shirt from Justice and blue eyeshadow stolen from her mom’s makeup bag, having this safe space of self expression where I could talk about the music I loved without hearing “when is she going to write a song called “maybe i’m the problem” from the nearest boy was a sigh of relief.
And to answer my first question. Yes. Things would be very different if none of these events would have unfolded. I wouldn’t be writing my first blog post of a blog that I worked so hard on and am so proud of. I wouldn’t have met some of my best friends that I have traveled the country with. I wouldn’t have met taylor swift…twice. I also would not have been able to make it through some of the things that life has thrown at me as gracefully as I did if I didn’t have Taylor. The most beautiful thing about this community of girlhood we have created is seeing everyone’s connection to Taylor and this music. How we got here is all connected by a little invisible string wouldn't you say?
