A Eulogy to my Inner Tortured Poet
The End of an Era:
A Eulogy to my Inner Tortured Poet
I thought I was going to Taylor Swift for my daughter.
Chloe’s grown up with Taylor Swift providing the background music for her life. Speak Now came out the year she was born. At age four, she spent an entire year in sequined pink Hello Kitty boots rocking out to 1989 on the powder blue Anna & Elsa guitar she got for Christmas. Reputation coincided with her sleepover era, resulting in countless pajama-clad dances being made up and performed to “Look What You Made Me Do.”
Fast forward almost a decade, and her first breakup launched a week of “I Forgot That You Existed,” the lyrics holding much-needed space until her heart could catch up.
So, when a friend asked if we were interested in the extra seats she’d scored during The Great Ticket Apocalypse that was The Eras Tour, I jumped at the chance.
For her.
After the tears and excitement cleared, Chloe started making bracelets, planning outfits, collecting face glitter, and trying on white cowboy boots. I started to worry that no one single evening could ever live up the hype.
Finally, the day arrived. We loaded the car, cranked our Taylor-or-Bust Playlist, and drove 5 hours to New Orleans. Somewhere along The I-10, I started to feel an energy I couldn’t explain. We passed cars painted with “Swifites on Board” and “In Our Swiftie Era.” A friend send a pic of the giant friendship bracelet swagged across the Superdome. The air was electric.
We loaded up on merch, swapped some friendship bracelets, and made it to our seats.
Then it happened.
Taylor Swift hit the stage.
I expected Chloe’s response. Here was the singer-songwriter who’d literally created the soundtrack for her life. Her emotions were raw and real, and they poured out from the first note to the last.
What I did not anticipate was my own reaction.
It’s hard to explain phenomena. By definition, phenomena defies logic and reasoning. It’s meant to be experienced, like 65,000 of your new best friends singing every single word to every single song for a solid three-and-a-half hours. Somewhere around the amazing staging and choreography of “The Man,” I could feel something shifting in my DNA.
Words. Have. Power.
I’ve always thought that. Hell, I’ve made a living writing in some for or other for my entire adult life. But it took standing in a crowd, surrounded by a sparking sea of Swifites, for that idea to sink into a place where I could trust it. My own writing has never been that—my own. I wrote for other people for so long that, even when I have the chance to write for myself, the idea of what people want from me is always there. Public Opinion is the omni-present critic that keeps me in my head, unable to truly express myself.
Last spring, Taylor Swift was the topic of Chloe’s social studies project. She’d made a hot pink trifold presentation and researched the economic and social impact of Swift’s career. I’d listened to her paper, offering notes on the structure and grammar. But I hadn’t truly heard it. Watching Tay-Tay kiss her bicep, it hit me. I’d been harboring a tinge of dismissiveness. Part of me had bought into the damaging idea of bubblegum pop, that music with mass appeal was by default trite and disposable. It was fine for my daughter to be a Swiftie. But me? No.
For the past decade, I have been trying (to varying degrees of success) to express myself through art and writing. Specifically, I have been teasing meaning from a neurological condition that developed when my kids were little. It was a game changer in every possible way for me. More than the physiological effects, the experience opened an awareness of how women are perceived in the medical community. With one line, Taylor Swift zeroed in on what I’d been trying to articulate.
When everyone believes ya, what's that like?
I joined in scream-singing the rest of that song, the rest of the show, all the facts and figures my daughter had presented sinking into my bones. Here was a female artist who’d refused to let a man steal her work and call it his. She’d given her heart away and had it delivered back on a silver platter more than once. She was a writer who pulled from her most vulnerable, true moments to make sense of her life. Her authenticity was revolutionary; she was changing the game.
And she was doing it in knee-high, crystal-covered Christian Louboutin boots.
I’d scoured the internet for something to wear to the concert that felt fun but wouldn’t make me stand out too much. Something “appropriate.” Something that said, “mother of the Swiftie.” I’d landed on a black, white and red 22-style shirt that had brandished a lyric that resonated deeply with me: I cry a lot, but I am so productive. I threw it on with red pants and a pair of rhinestone tennis shoes.
“What era am I?” I asked Chloe.
She surveyed the pieces. “We’ll call you a mash-up.”
In all of my own writing and research, I’d developed a fascination with Victorian asylums. During the countless neurological exams I’d undergone during a stay in the hospital, nurses and residents and students had all talked about me as if I wasn’t in the room. And in a way I hadn’t been. I had disappeared to a place deep within myself, a place where I could forget what was happening. Where I could not just cope, but thrive inside my own imagination. For thirty solid days, I couldn’t talk (at least not in any way that made sense), but I could still write.
I scribbled on paper and typed on typewriters (I could not be in or under lights, much less staring at a screen). I arranged Mardi Gras beads into neurons. I trimmed and glued photos of the women who’d had my same disorder, the ones treated with water hoses and electric shocks. Then I lied to myself, saying no one would understand, and I tucked them all away in drawers and trash bins.
I had been told for so long that my words – MY words, not the ones I’d been trained and paid to write – had no value, that I had bought into the lie and even perpetuated it onto other wonderfully creative women.
Alchemy is the only word I have for the moment Taylor Swift stepped onto the stage at the Superdome in her The Tortured Poets Department era. It defies logic and reason and words, but there with 65,000 witnesses, I saw with every cell in my body that every single impulse and idea I have as an artist and a writer and a filmmaker is not meant to be swept into a closet, hidden beneath a bushel.
My art is not a source of shame, a dirty little secret.
It is meant to be shared.
Walking out of that concert, I knew I would come home and create this website with no other goal than stepping into my own, authentic expression. The fact that TTPD was, is, and will always be my era was as black-and-white as Taylor’s dress.
However, it’s time to give my own Inner Tortured Poet—and her deep-seated belief that no one will care what I have to say—the (bespoke Louboutin) boot.
Comments