Mine

Every time I listen to this song, I cry. I feel like it was written about my love story. But this post really isn't about my love story (sorry...maybe I'll share it another day :o). It's about Taylor Swift and why I love her.




My best friend from high school, Allison, invited me along to a Taylor Swift concert last summer. And there I made another one of my make-believe friendships. Taylor is as much of a space cadet as I am. She loves sparkly things and tells her fans she loves them.

But the truth of the matter is that I feel like she gets me. Like really gets me. As in, if I could write songs, this is what they would turn out like. A little cheesy, but full of the good and the bad, and the feelings that go along with it. I'm big on feelings.

She sings about her mom (yeah, that one makes me cry too) and being a geeky girl in high school. And it transports me back to being 16. I loved being 16...I'm probably the only person on the face of the planet who liked that age, but it was the year I became free by learning to drive (a land yacht of a Buick with peeling paint and bench seats that was only two years younger than me, but it was given to my family by a friend who was going off to college and there were so many good memories in that car) and went on my very first real dates and to prom and found the love of my life who is still the love of my life...and got my first real kiss. It was the year that I finally dared to hope that I might be okay (not even good - anything better than dismal) at sports after hours of hard work at swimming practices and a coach who really helped me believe in myself, and got my very first (and favorite-to-this-day) job at a paint-your-own-pottery shop where I found great friends in the other girls I worked with. They were some of the most creative and adventurous people I will ever have the privilege of knowing and they opened up my world.

I don't know if it's something about being in your early twenties that makes you nostalgic for the joys of being a teenager and even a child, but I see it in my own explorations and I hear it T.Swift's songs. And maybe it's that experiences are about feeling something and she doesn't sing only about what happened, but frames it within an image that reminds me of how my experiences made me feel too. I guess the thing is, events happen in a changing world, but emotions are timeless.

Even though not all the things she writes/sings about are happy things, this is still my happy music. Anger, sadness, loss...those subjects are still framed in a humorous or touching way that's still real. Like that song that's up at the top...it's about a love story that overcomes the only other "love story" that girl had ever really known. The fact that we all have seen "love stories" that are not really filled with love is sad, but true. I've experienced a few too many in my own life, but that's why I identify with this song. Because I've also been blessed with someone who is willing to help me rewrite how a love story ends...the right way.

Sheesh, I hope you can forgive me for getting all sentimental...but that's just what Taylor Swift does to me. The cheesiness probably gets me because I'm a big cheese ball myself. Whatevs. That's exactly why T.Swift and I should be best friends. Maybe then she'd also let me borrow from her closet???