Inner Child Era: Taylor Swift is healing millennial women everywhere (an excerpt)

Note: I have had this essay saved in my archives since about a week after I attended The Eras Tour in June 2023. It’s one of the longest essays I’ve written in a long time, and after I recently revisited and edited it, I thought “Eh, what the hell?” So in honor of The Eras Tour starting up again soon, here is an excerpt! For the full essay, subscribe to substack here.

Taylor Swift is one year younger than I am, and like Taylor, I’m also the oldest daughter in my family, which as the internet will tell you, comes with a very specific list of troubles. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania on a Christmas tree farm, while I grew up in rural West Virginia surrounded by hills and pines. While from different parts of the country and obviously very different experiences—she is a superstar and I’m an English teacher—there is still a connection in just knowing that we were born and raised during the same time period. We grew up in the same world, the same climate. We received the same messages about our bodies, our voices, and our importance.

In spite of this connection to space and time, I’m still asking myself how we have all become so consumed by Taylor’s music and her presence, and how millennial women in particular seem to be enamored by her every move. I’m wondering why so many people have felt such a deep connection to her. And most importantly, I’m curious to know why after I attended The Eras Tour, I somehow felt more connected with my own inner child. 

Perhaps it is simply the music itself. Taylor has shared through her music the ways in which she has had to grow up, whether it is singing “Fifteen” to her best friend, “The Best Day” to her mom, or “Long Live” to teenagers everywhere. Hearing someone sing about the very experiences I was having in my own life in real time is naturally going to create a connection, and I think that is where most of us began our appreciation for Taylor. But even as she sang to the world about these real-life experiences, essentially telling me that I should savor these moments—I mean, she literally said to us “I said ‘Remember this moment’”—I still spent much of my adolescence feeling like I had to be a grown up. I had to have everything planned, make the right choices, follow the right path. For years, I tried to seem cooler than I actually was. There was some little nagging voice that said I was too much. Or maybe it was a literal voice, a person now residing in some forgotten corner of my mind, telling me to sit down and be quiet. 

The world can be really hard on little girls. 

I have this vivid memory of an older high school girl with the most perfect blonde hair and winged eyeliner riding the school bus with me. I was probably 12 and she couldn’t have been more than 15 if she was riding the bus—most high schoolers in my town would immediately get their driver’s licenses when turning 16 and drive to school, or at the very least, ride with a friend would could drive—but at the time, she seemed so incredibly sophisticated. I remember her sitting sideways, legs propped up on the bench seat, talking to a boy who was flirting with her. She never moved her body. She never acted like she was too interested. She was vague and nonchalant and maybe even cold. 

I thought she was the coolest person I’d ever seen.

Of course, that was always the goal, right? To be “the cool girl”? To be taken seriously in a world that kept telling me to be smaller and quieter? To be serious? 

As I got older, I made fun of “girly girls,” tried to look edgier, denounced music that was “too peppy” and thought the way to being taken seriously was to post obscure quotes on my Facebook status. I took “the cool girl” so much to heart that by college—when I was just 17 years old—I had already let so much of my girlishness go. Gone were the days of notebooks covered in glitter and stickers. I said goodbye to my bedazzler, my gel pens, my sequined purse, and said hello to black mini dresses over jeans, a moleskin journal, and a canvas tote bag. I silenced my inner girl. I don’t think I realized what I was doing at the time; I was simply following along. And to be sure, there is literally nothing wrong with any of those things (okay, maybe the dress over jeans), it’s just that I can now see that I was subconsciously shedding a layer of myself that I now desperately want back. 

This is not to say that millennial women want to stay naive children. We are grown-ass people, following the paths set before us and paving the way for those coming after us. We are creating the lives we want. We are making the big decisions, raising the kids, and showing up for ourselves, just like the meditations and mantras have told us as we’ve tried to heal from our traumas. But what if we could have made it here by being a little more gentle with ourselves?