“I have always been a really big Taylor Swift fan. I connected with her because I’m 26 and she’s 33, so growing up she was always a slight life stage ahead of me. Whenever she would come out with albums, they would apply to my life because she would be singing about her most recent era and I would be living that era.
I really just always connected to her music, I think the best thing about her is her writing: she’s really lyrically smart and I really admire that about her.
I have two Taylor Swift related tattoos. I have a snake for ‘Reputation’. I also have a ‘mirrorball’ tattoo. I love Mirrorball. I really relate to it. That’s another thing I think she does really well is put words to these experiences that people don’t know how to describe.
At the Eras Tour, I went twice and I wore an outfit inspired by the song ‘Maroon’. I had this oversized white button down shirt dress that I painted with a wine colored food coloring and the tights combo that Taylor Swift wears with my Doc Martens. People knew I was going for ‘the burgundy on my T-shirt when you splashed your wine into me’. The outfit also had a connection to the song ‘Clean’: ‘a wine stained dress I can’t wear anymore’.
I have a lot of freshman boys who want to become my enemy when they walk into my classroom because they think ‘this girl is obsessed’. I always say to them, ‘you’re allowed to not like her nut let’s have a conversation about it. What don’t you like?’ And they’ll always say, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Well, then you don’t know what you’re talking about. I could say I don’t like any artist, but if I say I don’t like Kendrick Lamar, I probably haven’t listened to him.
Growing up, I was really active on Tumblr, which is a social media app, but it was photo video blogging and writing, essentially. I used it for writing and for photography. But Taylor Swift was also very active on Tumblr. She would connect with her fans on Tumblr all the time and Taylor Nation would reach out to people via Tumblr. I never got reached out to. She used to do those listening parties for her albums when they would come out. The invite would come in multiple ways, but they would connect with people, and Tumblr was a way that she did that but she was always liking things on Tumblr, people would call it like it was crazy. It felt like a very intimate connection to her, which is another reason why I love her because she loves her fans.
So many of those songs are like coming of age for me. Reputation came out when I was a junior in college and it’s just these pivotal timestamps of my life where I can just vividly go back to who I was, which was completely different from who I am now.”
