Heartbreak and Heteronormativity
Growing up with “Fearless”
Written by Shelby Evans, Lifestyle Editor
When the lyrics “should have said no” were sung, the rain that Taylor Swift stood under matched her in time. N-O was imprinted into the wall of rain coming down. The sheet of water was broken by the letters.
It’s how she ended her Fearless tour set when I attended in 2010. I remember it like if I put enough energy forth I could be 11-years-old again, so excitedly naive in the crowd of my first concert.
I never left the stadium, and she continued to play my favorite songs. Every time I was blown away. Because of that, I never had to be lonely, confused or angry. I could stay wonderstruck by her presence on stage.
When I try to concentrate on my adolescence, being at that Taylor Swift concert with my father was the last time I felt invincible.
Shortly after, the realities of my father’s hard drinking came crashing down, but it wasn’t like the rain that crashed down on Taylor Swift. Instead it was financial fears by my parents and my 12-year-old self understanding too much of the situation for my age.
I never told my father I hated him at that age, instead I stopped saying “I love you.” I stopped accepting his pleas to do things together.
“No, I don’t want to go to the movies.”
“No, I don’t want to go get lunch with you.”
We weren’t the same father and daughter who snuck into the men’s bathroom at the Taylor Swift concert so I didn’t have to wait in the never ending line for the women’s.
He drank alone in his bedroom, while my mom slept in my brother’s old bedroom, and I laid awake at night listening to the creek of the steps he took up and down to steal another drink from the kitchen.
So, I changed. I stopped dancing to Taylor Swift in the living room. I began spending as much time as possible at my middle school theatre. I rejected everything “the cool kids” liked. I embraced the outward appearance of someone who did not feel like they were ever fully understood.
And I lived by a rule, never let the friends around me know how unhappy I felt. Sometimes if I was feeling far too nostalgic for a 13-year-old to have a claim to, I put on my “Fearless” CD.
I could dream of high school, and my first love. I waited to “jump head-first, fearless.” I anticipated my first boyfriend at 15, just like Taylor. I always skipped “Dest Day,” because I couldn’t bring myself to remember any happy memories I shared with my father.
High school came… and I waited. I looked for the perfect boy to crush on, to wait to tell “can’t you see: you belong with me.”
My friend’s first kisses came and went, and they fell in and out of love. I waited.
I blinked–I was no longer 15. I hadn’t done anything Taylor had. I got myself a 2002 Mitsubishi Lancer with a CD player. Always In the player was my original copy of “Fearless.”
On nights when I wanted to avoid the cold walls of my house and the uncomfortable attempt of my father talking to me, I would drive around town with the windows down screaming, “Romeo save me, I’ve been feeling so alone.” I waited for him.
People I gave rides to groaned whenever the car turned on and her voice came through the speakers. Some kids from the theatre department never got in my car again.
One night when I was 17, a friend and I broke off from a larger group and talked at a park late into the evening. A police officer came to get us out of the closed park. And I said goodnight to him.
I got home and texted him “I wish I had kissed you goodnight.” That’s what happens in the movies. That’s what Taylor would have done.
When nothing happened between us, I thought about disappointment, but I didn’t have any. I wasn’t upset that we hadn’t kissed, I just thought it’s what I should have done.
Eventually “I got tired of waiting.” I felt more and more like an outcast. I began focusing on my heartbreak that occurred without a boy ever loving me. The heartbreak of a daughter with a flawed family, and a father fallen from grace. There was “no one here to save me.”
While Taylor struggled with young love and wanting it to be as perfect as a “Love Story,” she also knew that sometimes the end doesn’t mean two people are together “Forever and Always.”
She could channel her disappointment directly at the men, she’d sing to them, “You’re not sorry.” She learned what being in a toxic relationship was like and admitted “you know you’ve got a mean streak that makes me run for cover when you’re around.”
Instead of identifying with the failed trials of first loves, I thought of my father. Who continued to waste away. He continued to be more of a burden financially and emotionally than was worth sticking around for.
I held bitter thoughts about him, and while our broken hearts were different, I could still find solace in the angry lyrics.
On my optimistic day’s I’d remind myself that “these things will change.”
I waited for the day I could leave it all behind, I waited until I could say “This is a big world, that was a small town. There in my rearview mirror disappearing now,” and mean it.
I never felt comfortable in my house, I had friendship fallouts, no one wanted to kiss me, and for some reason I felt like no one ever saw the full truth of who I was. The only way to heal was to leave.
And then I left, I kissed my first boy (and a few more) and I never stopped and thought, “it’s the first kiss, it’s flawless, really something.”
When I found myself sitting under the Washington Monument with a hand to hold and slow danced to Jack Johnson at a plaza in downtown DC, I didn’t feel like he was dragging me headfirst into something fearless. I just felt like I was someone watching the interactions, not actually enjoying them.
If I had just stayed at the Fearless concert I would have never known what being let down by a parent felt like, I wouldn’t have had to lie to friends about my happiness for years, and I would have never learned that I was unlovable.
I could have stayed at the edge of my seat waiting for Taylor to perform “You Belong With Me” live. I would still have the dance moves I had created for the song in my living room memorized, and I’d act them out in the middle of the arena.
But I would never have confronted my father’s alcoholism, he wouldn’t have gotten sober, and we wouldn’t have a make-do relationship. I spent all of that time thinking one day I’d fall head over heels, and I’d tell a boy named Stephen I “Can’t help it if I want to kiss you in the rain.” I wouldn’t have been able to see through my own facade of compulsive heterosexuality.
“Fearless” was my parameter for love. I spent ages 10-20 intoxicated by Taylor Swift’s heteronormative lyrics, that I never stopped to consider how I could love differently from them. I wanted what Taylor sang about. I wanted to feel as strongly as her words conveyed; I just defaulted to wanting to do that with boys.
When I was finally able to see through the masquerade I didn’t know I had, I could admit that kissing girls made me want to “dance in the rain in my best dress.” I no longer felt unlovable.
So, maybe when I hear “Taylors Version” of “You Belong With Me” I won’t think about the boy-next-door I desperately want to fall for me. I’ll think about the shadow of myself that haunted it’s way through middle and high school waxing on about being misunderstood and unseen, when the real me “has been here the whole time,” just ignored for a little too long.
I’ve learned that the lyrics to songs like “Love Story,” “Fifteen” and “The Way I Loved You” aren’t exact translations of my experiences. I never fell for the first boy I kissed at 15. But, I did learn that high school is “life before you know who you’re gonna be.” At the age of ten, I didn’t know what that insight would mean at 22.
That’s the poeticism of the re-release, I’m not who I was 2008, I have my foresight, and so does Taylor. Together we will examine the naivety we held when we all heard “Fifteen” for the first time. Because no matter what, I wouldn’t be who I am today–daddy-issues, lesbianism and all–without having had the album “Fearless” guiding me through it all.
And maybe, just maybe, because of the re-release I can find myself at a Fearless concert again. Not frozen in time at the age of ten, but as a confident, happy young adult.