“When Taylor Swift gets married,” I thought as I turned onto the desolate highway, “I will write about it in the post calvin.” A late-night radio host—because my 1999 Ford Taurus had no CD player and couldn’t even begin to comprehend Bluetooth—gleefully shared rumors of an engagement. This was seven or so years ago, and I was a recent college grad, figuring it all out. “That’ll be the end of an era,” I thought.
There was a time when I wanted to be Taylor Swift, or at least look like her. In elementary school, I saw a perfume ad featuring a girl in a purple princess ball gown with perfect, spiral curls, a look I now know is artificially achieved.
Taylor Swift sang my adolescence. There’s a Taylor Swift song for most shades of like, love, and loathing. “Love Story” and “Our Song” are for first loves. “Style”—really much of Swift’s genre shift to pop—is more about finding and feeling yourself than somebody else. “Mean” is for bad friends. “Lover” is for the first love that feels real. She’s perennially heartbroken and perennially falling for someone new. Whether just or unjust, Taylor Swift has a reputation for romantic instability. Marriage seemed counter to her brand.
But then Taylor Swift did get married, and I didn’t care. Moreover, I took pride in not caring. The kind of pride I used to take in liking “all music except country.”
Obviously, I sang along to “Jolene” and “Before He Cheats” (remember, just a radio in my 1999 Ford Taurus), and I liked a lot of the components of country music. The energy in a fiddle or a mandolin resonates with me. (Most of my blood is Irish; some of my tendons might be cat gut.) I love a ballad and any song about burying a body with your best friend, but in my teens and early twenties I professed to despise country. (Taylor Swift, for some reason, didn’t count.) I think I was trying to broadcast an image of sophistication that I worried twangy music about faithful trucks and faithless lovers would contradict.
I would never have said I was building a brand; I might have called it an aesthetic. Now, it seems obvious how much of who I claimed to be was shorthand for archetypes I admired or others seemed to like. A lot of the identity I presented was defined in the negative, disdain being a quick-drying imitation of taste. Disliking country music or liking Taylor Swift is about as off-the-rack an opinion as you can get. It’s like enjoying a pumpkin spice latte (or exuberantly decrying them for being “basic”). Some of who I was was a costume, and like most clothes, in time, I outgrew that version of myself.
People do that. Taylor Swift had a tour about it, marking out discrete eras within her life and career.
I may be entering an “I like country music era.” At least enough of what I like is country music. Part of growing up is taking fewer things wholesale, jumping on fewer bandwagons. I like particular books, resonate with particular songs, pick through theological traditions.
Or maybe the real change is that I no longer fear what others will infer from fragments.
I grow more at home in myself despite the apparent contradictions, yet, more and more I experience a strange phenomenon, particularly among the family and friends who have known me the longest. Sometimes it becomes clear that they are relating to a version of me that no longer exists, an afterimage. This is most jarring when it seems my loved ones yearn for a part of me that I changed on purpose.
If I met some of my longtime friends today, would they like who I am now? Would I even be me now without the parts of me that are them?
As far as I know, there isn’t a Taylor Swift song for this, but there is a Dolly Parton song, a country song: “I Will Always Love You,” written for a friend and mentor she had to leave behind to grow.
I sometimes wonder if Taylor wants to be Dolly. Does she long to be universally beloved, to be a celebrated icon without being reduced to a consumable product, to have an impactful social voice without making enemies of either side? Does she seek whatever magic turns the arrows of criticism into a gentle rain of humor?
Both Taylor and Dolly are masters of the curated image, but there’s a difference between the two stars that’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s that Dolly was always honest about what was for show and what was real, while Taylor shows her fans her kaleidoscope closet of personas and carefully produced samples of authenticity. Any of it could be real. Or none at all.
It would be hypocritical to shame Taylor Swift for changing or for exposing herself too much or too little in the course of making art. I still love her music, but it is a nostalgic love that no longer describes who I am. Maybe my likes and dislikes never were the best expressions of my identity. I am, after all, a host of contradictions, like Dolly, who managed to be both fake and authentic, to be known for glamor and grit, and to bridge vastly different communities and environments.
Today, some part of me wants to be like at least some part of Dolly. I will always love every person I have ever loved. I will do my best to love every person I have been and will be, even the ones that were too loud, too weird, or too cringe. I hope love can change with me.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
