A Piece of Girlhood Trapped in Amber

Vignettes on Growing Up with Taylor Swift, And Letting Her Go

Taylor Swift got engaged. And I felt…strange. Stranger than I should about someone I’ve never met. But parasocial emotions sneak up on you like that.

Love Story

Romeo, save me, they're tryna tell me how to feel

This love is difficult, but it's real

Don't be afraid, we'll make it out of this mess

It's a love story, baby, just say, "Yes"

We were sitting at the dining table in Delhi, my sister and I, belting out words about Romeo and Juliet like we were performing at Madison Square Garden instead of our home. School was not a place I liked being, but this, this felt right. Like a life I was about to live. The chairs creaked under our dramatic gestures, but we didn't care. This was our stage, and Taylor was our script.

I was 13 then, but something about that song always made me feel thirteen of some other girl; which is to say, hopeful in a way that required no evidence, no precedent, no logic. Just the pure mathematics of melody plus longing equals certainty that everything would work out like a story.

There's something about fairy tales that they don't tell you: they're not really about the ending. They're about the believing. About having a voice five years older than yours narrate the feelings you're on the verge of having, giving you the vocabulary for desires you can't yet name. Taylor sang about being sixteen and wanting, and I listened at twenty and learned the architecture of longing.

This situation where a celebirty functions as a mentor or guide is called a hierarchical parasocial relationship. But that clinical language misses the intimacy of it, the way her voice felt like it was meant specifically for the girl singing on a dining table in Delhi, practicing feelings like they were dance steps, learning to want things by listening to someone who seemed to want them so perfectly.

Now I know that fairy tales are just practice rounds for the messy, unheroic work of actually loving someone. But then, at that table, we were still believers. Taylor was still teaching us the words.

Looking back now, I realize Taylor was my girlhood narrator, the one who gave me permission to believe in fairy tales. But she’s also becoming the voice of womanhood, teaching lessons about endurance, regret, and complicated love. And I’m somewhere in between, thirty and hovering, still trying to decide which side of the story I belong to.

You Belong With Me

Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find

That what you're looking for has been here the whole time

If you could see that I'm the one who understands you

Been here all along, so why can't you see?

You belong with me, you belong with me

There's a specific loneliness that comes with being the girl who understands the music in avery specific way no one else seems to get. Taylor sang about it, watching from the sidelines, knowing exactly what someone needs but being invisible in the knowing. I lived it throughout college, carrying her songs like secret knowledge.

What made it harder was how often men dismissed her- “average singer,” “overrated,” “overhyped.” They said it with a sneer that wasn’t just about Taylor; it was about girls like me who took her seriously. Liking her was treated as unserious, juvenile, embarrassing. I think that’s part of why she felt like such an ally: every time I sang her songs, I was also resisting the idea that girls’ feelings were frivolous. If her voice was mocked, then so was my longing. Defending her was, in some quiet way, defending myself.

But there was another layer to this invisibility that I couldn't name then, couldn't admit even to myself. I was fat in a way that made me disappear from certain kinds of attention entirely. Not the dramatic, tragic fat of movies, just the everyday kind that meant boys looked through me to get to my thinner friends. The kind that made me excellent at being the confidante, the one who understood everyone's romantic dramas but was never the subject of them.

Taylor gave me a language for this particular species of wanting. On the surface, I could laugh about her being a pick-me, rolling my eyes with my friends about the girl-next-door versus cheerleader narrative. But inside, every word felt like a knife because she was singing about something I knew intimately: the specific ache of knowing you could love someone better if they'd just notice you existed.

She was the older sister I never had, the one who'd already walked through the emotional territories I was just discovering. When she sang about wanting someone who couldn't see you, I felt understood in a way that didn't require explanation or defense. Here was someone who got it, not just the longing, but the particular shame of longing when you've been taught your wanting is inappropriate to your body, your place in the social hierarchy.

The song made me feel seen in my invisibility. She understood that the girl on the sidelines wasn't there by choice but by circumstance, that being the understanding one wasn't a personality trait but a survival strategy. When you're fat and young, you learn to be indispensable in ways that don't require being desirable.

But parasocial relationships do something strange to time. They flatten it. While I was learning to be heartbroken through her songs about seventeen, she was already twenty, already evolving past the feelings that felt so immediate to me. I was always catching up, using her past to navigate my present.

The strange thing about having Taylor as an emotional guide is that she seemed to stay just ahead of me developmentally, always a few heartbreaks wiser, a few lessons learned. When I was ready for the sophisticated pain of "All Too Well," she had it waiting. When I needed to understand what it meant to be haunted by someone you loved, she was there with the exact words.

Psychologists call this "temporal identity integration"; using cultural figures as anchors while we navigate personal evolution. But what they don't capture is how it feels to have someone you've never met understand your heart better than most people who've held it. How it feels to have someone give voice to desires you've been taught not to have.

She belonged with me, in a way. Or I belonged with her. In that strange, one-sided intimacy that feels real because the emotions it generates are real, even if the relationship itself is an elaborate, beautiful fiction. In the specific loneliness of being the girl who knows she could love better, if only someone would let her try.

Enchanted

This is me praying that

This was the very first page

Not where the story line ends

My thoughts will echo your name, until I see you again

These are the words I held back, as I was leaving too soon

I was enchanted to meet you

The first time I heard this song, I was twenty-one and believed in the kind of love that happens in a single glance across a crowded room. Taylor sang about meeting someone and knowing, instantly, that they would either save you or ruin you, and not caring which.

This was her teaching me about enchantment. About the particular vertigo of meeting someone who makes you forget how to be the person you were five minutes before you saw them. I had never experienced this, not yet, but through her voice, I was practicing for it.

There's something about Taylor's emotional vocabulary that always arrived just before I needed it. She gave me the words for feelings I would have later, like leaving emotional breadcrumbs for my future self. When I finally did meet someone who made me forget my own name, I already had her language for it.

Parasocial relationships serve identity exploration functions in adolescence and young adulthood. But that misses the poetry of it, the way she was essentially composing the soundtrack to feelings I hadn't felt yet, creating emotional templates for experiences I was still growing into.

I think about teenage girls listening to this song now and feel a kind of tenderness for them, the way Taylor must feel tenderness for the girl she was when she wrote it. We're all just practicing feelings through someone else's voice, learning the words for desires we're not quite brave enough to have yet.

Enchantment, it turns out, is just the dress rehearsal for love. And Taylor was always the best drama teacher, making us believe we could memorize passion before we'd ever felt it, making us think we could learn the choreography of heartbreak by watching someone else dance.

I Knew You Were Trouble

And the saddest fear

Comes creepin' in

That you never loved me

Or her

Or anyone

Or anything

By the time this song came out, something had shifted. Taylor was twenty-two, and I was seventeen, and for the first time, she felt like a peer instead of an older sister. We were both learning that love could be a kind of beautiful destruction, that you could know someone was wrong for you and want them anyway.

This was her teaching me about complexity, about the gap between what you know and what you choose, about how wisdom and wanting don't always align. The fairy tale songs had been about believing in happy endings. This was about understanding that sometimes the story you most want to be in is the one most likely to hurt you.

I played it on repeat during my first real heartbreak, the kind where you participate fully in your own undoing. Taylor's voice became a companion in the specific masochism of loving someone you know will leave. She made it feel glamorous, almost, the drama of knowing better but doing it anyway.

What strikes me now is how she was evolving as I was evolving, both of us learning to complicate our own narratives. This is an egalitarian parasocial relationship, where the celebrity functions as an imagined peer. But it felt more like growing up alongside someone, both of us getting more sophisticated in our mistakes.

She was teaching me that heartbreak could be a kind of education, that sometimes you choose the wrong person precisely because they'll teach you something you need to know about yourself. Through her voice, I learned to find meaning in messy endings, to see beauty in the kind of love that burns bright and brief.

Looking back, I think we were both just figuring out how to be complicated. How to want things that weren't good for us and admit it. How to make art from the wreckage of our own poor choices.

Back to December

So this is me swallowin' my pride

Standin' in front of you sayin' I'm sorry for that night

And I go back to December all the time

The first time I understood regret, real regret, the kind that sits in your chest like a stone, was through this song. Taylor was twenty-one, singing about wishing she could go back and love someone better, and I was sixteen, learning that time only moves in one direction.

This was my introduction to the particular sadness of recognizing your own role in something breaking. Of understanding that sometimes the person who leaves isn't the villain, sometimes it's you, and you don't realize it until it's too late to matter.

I hadn't broken anyone's heart yet, not really, but through her voice I was practicing for it. Learning the weight of "I'm sorry" when it's too late for sorry to change anything. Understanding that growing up sometimes means becoming someone you wouldn't have recognized earlier, and not always someone better.

There's something about Taylor's capacity for self-examination that always felt generous. She could have made songs where she was always the wronged party, always the innocent one. Instead, she taught me that maturity sometimes looks like admitting you were the one who didn't know how to love someone when they needed it.c

The research talks about nostalgia as "rebellion against the modern idea of time," and this song felt like my first encounter with that rebellion. The desperate wish to go back, to be different, to love better. But also the growing understanding that regret is just the price you pay for becoming someone more capable of love.

Through her voice, I learned that December always comes. That time doesn't stop for your personal revelations, your delayed emotional intelligence, your too-late realizations. That sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let someone go, even when, especially when, you've finally figured out how to want to stay.

And then there was “All Too Well.” The10-minute version arrived when I was almost thirty, and it felt like Taylor had aged alongside us. The original had been a young woman’s heartbreak anthem, sharp and raw. The expanded version was something else entirely, a memoir, an epic, the sound of someone revisiting old wounds with older eyes. It mirrored what I was learning about heartbreak myself: that some stories don’t shrink with time, they expand. Growing older didn’t dull the ache, it just gave me new language for it.

Tolerate It

While you were out building other worlds, where was I?

Where's that man who'd throw blankets over my barbed wire?

I made you my temple, my mural, my sky

Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life

COVID hit when I was twenty-five, and suddenly I was alone with my thoughts in a way I hadn't been since adolescence. The world had stopped, but my heart kept its restless rhythm, and Taylor's voice became my companion through the long, strange months of lockdown.

This song found me in that particular loneliness of being tolerated rather than celebrated, not just by romantic love, but by life itself. The feeling of performing your own existence for an audience that had stopped paying attention. Of giving everything and having it received like background noise.

I sobbed to it in my bathroom, since the room I shared with my sister not really a place I could drown in my emotions in. It felt like Taylor understood the specific quality of my loneliness; not the dramatic heartbreak kind, but the quiet erosion of feeling unseen. She was singing about sitting and watching someone read, but I heard it as a song about sitting and watching your own life happen to you.

There's something about pandemic isolation that made parasocial relationships feel more real, more necessary. When the world contracted to the size of our screens, the people singing to us through them became as present as anyone. Taylor's voice felt like company in a way that was almost physical, the audio equivalent of someone sitting beside you while you cried. The way her voice in my earbuds felt like the closest thing to being held. The way her understanding of pain made mine feel less isolating.

She kept me company through the kind of sadness that has no story, no clear beginning or end, just the low-level ache of being human in a world that had temporarily forgotten how to touch. Through her voice, I learned that loneliness could be a shared experience, that being unseen by one person didn't mean being invisible to everyone.

Even when the world was tolerating us all, barely, she made us feel celebrated. Understood. Like our small, contained sadnesses mattered enough to be turned into art.

Exile

I think I've seen this film before

And I didn't like the ending

You're not my homeland anymore

So, what am I defending now?

You were my town

Now I'm in exile, seeing you out

I think I've seen this film before

Somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty, I stopped keeping up. Not consciously, it happened the way all growing apart happens, gradually and then all at once. I'd still hear her new songs occasionally, but they lived in a different emotional register than the one I was operating in. The voice that had guided me through my twenties started to sound like it belonged to someone else's life.

This is the strange grief nobody talks about, losing touch with the artists who shaped you. It's not dramatic like a breakup or definitive like a death. It's just the quiet recognition that you've grown in different directions, that the voice that once felt essential now feels adjacent to your experience.

I found myself in emotional exile from Taylor Swift just as she was reaching new heights of fame and artistic achievement. While the world was falling more in love with her, I was learning to live without her voice as my emotional translator. It felt like a small betrayal of my younger self, the girl who had needed her so desperately.

Parasocial relationships naturally evolve as we age, and the figures who serve identity formation functions in adolescence often become less central as we develop independent emotional vocabularies. But knowing the psychology of it doesn't make it less lonely when it happens.

I missed her in the same way you miss a friend who's moved away. Not constantly, but in specific moments when you need the particular comfort they used to provide. I missed having someone who could put words to feelings I couldn't name, missed the safety of loving someone who couldn't disappoint you in person.

But there was also relief in the distance. Freedom from the emotional intensity of always processing my life through someone else's artistic evolution. Space to develop my own relationship with feeling, my own vocabulary for wanting and losing and growing.

Sometimes growing up means learning to be your own emotional guide. Sometimes it means saying goodbye to the voices that taught you how to listen to your own heart.

Champagne Problems

You had a speech, you're speechless

Love slipped beyond your reaches

And I couldn't give a reason

Champagne problems

When the news broke, I realized I hadn't listened to her latest album. Not really. I knew the names of the songs, could recognize a few melodies, but I didn't know the words the way I used to know them: instantly, intimately, like they'd been written specifically for me.

This is what it means to age out of someone's artistic universe. Not rejection, just irrelevance. The songs that would have been life-changing at twenty-two felt adjacent to my experience at thirty. She was still brilliant, still evolving, still creating art that mattered, but not to me, not in the same immediate way.

I thought about the girl who had memorized every word of "All Too Well," who had believed that understanding Taylor's emotional landscape was crucial to understanding my own. What would she think of this version of me, who could let entire albums pass by without absorbing them into my identity?

The engagement announcement made me confront this distance. Here was someone whose romantic life I had once followed with the investment usually reserved for close friends, and I was learning about her happiness through social media notifications. The intimacy had evaporated so gradually I hadn't noticed it happening.

But there was something beautiful about this, too. About having loved someone's art so completely that it taught you how to love art itself. About carrying the emotional education she'd provided into new relationships with new voices, new ways of understanding feeling.

She had been my training ground for aesthetic devotion, my introduction to the idea that someone's creative expression could matter to your personal development. Even if I'd outgrown needing her specifically, I'd never outgrow what she'd taught me about the possibility of art as companionship.

The champagne problems were no longer mine to solve through her songs. But the capacity for feeling them, for turning them into something meaningful. That was a gift that outlasted the parasocial relationship that had delivered it.

Sometimes I wonder if Taylor was ever really mine. Because she was everyone’s. She was the scream-sung lyrics at 2 a.m. sleepovers, the undercurrent of every heartbreak playlist, the soundtrack of countless adolescent bedrooms. Loving her was a private intimacy carried out in public chorus. The parasocial felt personal, but the truth was millions of us were feeling it together. Maybe that’s why it worked, because even in our solitude, we were part of a choir.

Haunted

Come on, come on, don't leave me like this

I thought I had you figured out

Can't breathe whenever you're gone

Can't turn back now, I'm haunted

The weird thing about her engagement is that I'm happy for her. Genuinely. The way you're happy when you hear that someone you used to love has found what they were looking for, even if it's not you. Even if you were never really in the running.

But underneath the happiness is something more complicated. A grief that doesn't have clean edges. She is thirty-five when she got engaged, and I am thirty, and something about those numbers made me feel like I was watching an older sister cross a threshold I wasn't ready to approach. The five-year gap that had always made her seem ahead of me now felt like a lifetime.

This is the strange temporality of parasocial relationships: they exist outside normal social development while somehow being intimately connected to it. She was never really my peer, but she felt like one. She was never really my guide, but she functioned as one. And now she was moving into a phase of life that highlighted how imaginary our connection had always been.

I am haunted by the version of myself that needed her voice to understand my own heart. Haunted by the intensity of that need, by how real it felt, by how much it mattered to someone who no longer entirely exists. She embodied the anxieties of being a girl when I'm supposed to be a woman, and now she's transcended those anxieties in a way that makes me feel left behind.

There’s much written about identity continuity and how disruption to long-held patterns of identity formation can create genuine distress. But it doesn't capture the specific melancholy of watching someone who felt like a piece of your girlhood get married. Of having that amber crack, finally, irreversibly.

She's not haunted by me, of course. I was never real to her in the way she was real to me. But I'm haunted by her, by what she represented, by what she gave me, by what it means to love someone you've never met across the strange architecture of time.

Maybe being haunted is just another word for being grateful. For carrying someone's influence even after you no longer need their presence. For being shaped by a voice that never knew it was shaping you.

Lover

Can I go where you go?

Can we always be this close forever and ever?

In the end, this is a love story, just not the kind either of us expected when I was sixteen and she was twenty-one, when her voice felt like the most important sound in the world.

I love her differently now. Not with the desperate intensity of someone who needs saving, but with the quiet recognition of someone who received what they needed exactly when they needed it. She was my emotional education, my introduction to the possibility that feelings could be art, that art could be companionship, that companionship could exist across time and space and the fundamental impossibility of ever really knowing each other.

The girl who sang "Love Story" on a dining table in Delhi was practicing feelings through someone else's voice because she didn't trust her own yet. The woman writing this has learned to be her own narrator, her own emotional translator. But the bridge between those two people is paved with Taylor Swift songs, each one a stepping stone toward independent feeling.

She taught me that love could be many things: desperate, complicated, regretful, temporary, haunting, celebratory. But most importantly, she taught me that love was always worth the risk of feeling it fully. Even when it ended badly. Even when it was one-sided. Even when it was imaginary.

This is what I want to tell the teenage girls who are falling in love with her now: she will teach you how to feel, and then she will teach you how to feel without her. Both lessons are gifts. Both are necessary. Both are love.

The engagement doesn't feel like an ending anymore. It feels like a graduation, hers from the role I needed her to play, mine from needing anyone to play it. We're both free now to be ourselves without the weight of each other's expectations, even the ones that only existed in one direction.

I loved her the way you love someone who saves your life without knowing it. The way you love someone who gives you exactly what you need and then trusts you enough to let you outgrow needing it. The way you love someone who teaches you that love itself is always worth learning, always worth practicing, always worth the beautiful risk of feeling it fully.

That piece of girlhood trapped in amber is not trapped anymore. It's free, and grateful, and ready to love the world with everything it learned from loving her.

When someone asks me now what Taylor Swift meant to me, I struggle for words that aren't too big or too small. How do you explain that a voice on the radio taught you how to have a heart? How do you describe the particular intimacy of growing up alongside someone's art, of learning to feel through someone else's vulnerability?

Maybe you write about it. Maybe you call it what it was: love. Complicated, one-sided, transformative love that shaped you into someone capable of loving more freely, more fully, more fearlessly.

What she gave me remains: the vocabulary of desire, the practice of heartbreak, the permission to feel. She doesn’t need to keep singing me through my life anymore. I know the words now.

Maybe that's enough.