The Eras Aren’t Just (Taylor’s Version)
"I've had the time of my life with you": Why The Eras Tour feels so monumental for Millennial Swifties like me
It’s been a big year to be a Taylor Swift fan.
And with the recent announcement of her international tour dates, some of us have even bigger weeks to come. The flush of initial excitement quickly gave way and now only the dread of the upcoming Ticketmaster bloodbath looms. The battlefield is set - and à la the Hunger Games, we’re preparing to fight to the death.
So far, my daily symptoms include: waves of nausea, extreme anxiety, sweaty palms, heavy breathing, racing heart, spiralling mind and intermittent tears. There’s been obsessive stalking of US tour content, some desperate bargaining with the Gods, streams of all-caps WhatsApps, and incessant use of the hysterical cry face emoji (most regularly followed up by the melty puddle one).
Yet, judging by a chorus of Instagram DMs, 80% of my group chats, colleagues in the kitchens at the office, my social media algorithm, and the random girl in the street who approached me after spotting my 1989 t-shirt, it’s clear I’m not alone.
The Eras fever has hit. And as a collective, we are not ok.
I’m well aware of the glaring red flag that is the prevalence of parasocial relationships within celebrity culture. Even this attempt to articulate it all now feels trite, embarrassing and borderline cult-y. And yet, I’m compelled to continue to try.
Because I feel so strongly that in amongst the frenzy is a generation of women who are finally having their moment. A generation of women who grew up with big feelings that were made to feel small, finally given the chance to feel it all again. To feel our way back through it alongside the person who first gave us permission to feel it at all.
Without hyperbole, my love affair with Taylor Swift - or rather, with her music - has been the most enduring, most constant I have ever known. So many of my greatest love stories, my darkest secrets and my smallest revelations have been written in the margins of her songs.
Years before a boy would break my heart, my Parents would get there first over a plate of Spaghetti and the word divorce ringing through my ears. Though I was 9 and Taylor was yet to make her first mark on the world at large, let alone on the smallness of mine, I would spend the many years that followed chasing down the long shadows of this particular, life-shattering heartbreak.
And like every time since, it was amongst a teenage Taylor’s early breakup lyrics that I found a mirror for my grief. Behind locked bedroom doors and salty tears, I was held by songs about feeling lost and lonely, let down and passed over. The root of our pain was different, but in those guitar-strummed eulogies I could name my hurt, give shape to my sadness and feel a little less alone.
It was also in those early songs, in my early years, that I found a place to privately hope and dream and wonder. Blighted by low self-esteem, mean girls and a deep, restless yearn to be grown, I found a window into a life that I dared believe might one day blaze beyond the lukewarm bounds of the one I knew. One of rain-soaked kisses and big cities, sleepless nights and near misses. It sounded magic and messy and golden and Treacherous. And I couldn’t wait to feel it all, and feel it deeply.
A boy did – inevitably – break my heart. And years later, in the poetry of an old Taylor song that had always made me feel unsettled but I’d never asked why, I began to trace the outline of a relationship she admonished onto the shame-riddled embers of my own.
It was the first place – and for many years, it remained the only - where I’d seen articulated what I could not. I held on to that stanza like a dark secret - in solidarity, in silence - for the best part of my twenties, clinging to her words until I was able to find my own.
I spent one of my last nights in my University town entangled in a pile of limbs, four of us crammed lovingly onto an unmade bed. We were high on the triumph of our graduation and the glitter of our friendship, sat on the edge of forever yet heavy with the ache of change to come. Entwining fingers into clammy palms, we sang along, out loud, until our eyes glistened and our throats burned.
I remember thinking, right there, that this would become our mythology. And sure enough, nearly a decade later, I still can’t hear that song and not be back in that room. That one lyric now a coded shorthand, summoning at once the cartography of an entire friendship and the soft afterglow of a single memory. Signing off our birthday messages and wedding day wishes and tipsy late-night farewells: “I had the time of my life, fighting dragons with you”.
The same palms I had squeezed that night, found mine again - albums later - in a twinkling stadium, as we watched a bejewelled Taylor scorn a boy that Should’ve Said No. And we both cried, because attached to the hand in mine was a girl whose humiliated heart had not long whispered the same.
All this to say, that the eponymous Eras of the tour may be Taylor’s, but they’re Mine too. They’re Ours.
Its 44 tracks don’t simply traverse the breadth of a star-studded career; Etched into that set list is the constellation of our lives. Lives that we’ve grown up, and grown through, together. And around every chord, every lyric, every metaphor, is a memory woven so tightly, so inextricably, that for us to hear it, is to be hurtled right back there.
To singing in our Mum’s car on the way to school, clutching at the promise we’d ‘do things greater than date a boy on the football team’.
To turning 22 on a sticky dance floor, feeling ‘happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time’, emboldened by the knowledge that we’re are not the only ones.
To later feeling adrift, in big cities, big decisions and even bigger worlds. Holding out, not for the ‘burning red’ but for the ‘golden daylight’.
We navigate our own mazes with the compass she leaves behind. We soundtrack our eras to the confessions of her own. Her albums are her chapters, but they read like ours too.
This is why, hearts in mouths, we now scramble for a ticket. Each of us bound by our collective magnetism to feeling too much, for too long. Strangers, except for the Invisible String that has touched us all. A life-line, a guide rope, tethering us not only to each other, or to her, but to all the people that we have each once been.
Amongst the sequins and flashing lights and ecstasy of a scream-sung bridge, we want - we need - to bare testament: To the Great Wars we’ve fought, the ‘mountains we’ve moved’, the rainstorms we’ve danced through and the ‘tears of mascara’ we’ve cried. To honour the girls that we were, and the women that we’re still trying to become.
To hold up our bruised, beautiful hearts in gratitude to she who saw us through. She who ‘drew stars around our scars’ and built for us a home in the words that she has spent a lifetime seeking. Words she found in her darkness, so that we could feel the light.
So yes, it would be an understatement to say that emotions are running high. And let me tell you, the stakes feel even higher. You’re either in the trenches with us, or you haven’t got a clue.
If you love a Swiftie, love this moment for them. And love all the Eras that got them here, too.
And to the OG girlies, feverish with a lifetime of feelings - May The Odds Be Every In Your Favour. Here’s hoping we’re all so lucky as to crash through those Stadium walls.
Whether from within the arenas or in the car parks outside, here’s to celebrating our Best Days, our broken promises, our Cruel Summers, our darkest Midnights. Our shotgun seats, our Getaway Cars, our Champagne Problems and our Georgia stars.
Here’s to The Eras - Taylor’s and our own.
Some Cute Related Reccs…
Miss Americana documentary – Netflix
Sentimental Garbage – Midnights by Taylor Swift pt1 & pt2
The New York Times: Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice by Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell [behind the NYT paywall, but helpfully serialised in part on Instagram here]
This is wonderful. Yes yes yes to all of it.
I’m 61 and I can still relate to Taylor’s songs . Great article