"BACK TO DECEMBER" BY TAYLOR SWIFT (2010)
or, "how to feel again"
Where I currently live is only a 30 minute drive from where I grew up, akin to the distance between Stars Hollow and Hartford. And much like Lorelai Gilmore, the handful of miles between my current and past life feels like it may as well be — in the very best way — an entire world away.
I’m sure everyone has spent the last three years deconstructing what it means to be human. By definition, none of us were born into the same world we’re living in today. As I move through life, I attribute the break-neck pace with which society and culture has shifted due to multiple recessions, the pandemic, political upheaval, and whatever the fuck else has gone on in the last twenty years. But when I stop the spiral and zoom out, there’s peace in the fact that this world has been turning long before I was alive, long before any of my problems existed, and will continue to do so, whether we choose to disconnect from the world or not.
Speak Now is not one of my favorite Taylor Swift albums, so I rarely revisit it. But every time I do, I’m struck by how each song is jam-packed with emotion, something that Swift has learned to pull back from with a tasteful nuance that manifests in a masterpiece like folklore and the deepest parts of Lover.
On a 30 minute drive home from a doctor’s appointment, I randomly got “Speak Now” stuck in my head, so I decided to put on the album as benign background noise to my short road trip. Instead, I found myself immersed by the entire album, overcome with the emotion of a 15 year-old-me, angry at every boy who either looked at me or didn’t look at me in the exact way I wanted, fuming with the desire to claw out of suburbia with my bare, matte shatter nail polished hands. There’s a sweet spot in your teen years where suburban malaise transitions into suburban rage, and Speak Now distills that feeling into a tight hour of screaming, crying, laughing, and guitar.
In my opinion, Speak Now does not stand the test of time because it was written at an age of fleeting feelings. The anger, joy, and infatuation feels like an adrenaline shot with each song — enough to get you going for awhile, but not at all sustainable. I was shocked to find myself screaming the words to “Back to December” — a song I never particularly loved — as I sped down I-80, screaming with the ire of a high school sophomore who just bombed her choir audition, smiling with the hindsight that everything, for better or for worse, eventually fades into the background.
Maybe it’s just a hallmark of hitting your late 20s, but I’ve grown tired of rage. I’m still a sucker for emotion, but I no longer have the energy to scream from rooftops or punch walls or break things. I’m much more interested in subtlety and nuance than blanket statements of praise or anger. I think this is a symptom of growing up online — a space that transitioned from being a safe haven for angsty teens to an all-out spectacle, like a money-making surveillance state in which every user is policed by a jury of the peers that hate them most.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’m working (in the very, very early stages, I must add) on a b**k about Tumblr’s impact on popular culture and vice versa, using Tumblr as turning point for when social media usage transitioned from being an anonymous yet personal safe space to an actual extension of your IRL existence. This impacts bigger creators on a much larger scale, of course; but prominent figures in our culture tend to reflect smaller changes that impact the everyman.
These days, I’m binging Rehash, a podcast by the team behind YouTube channel Broey Deschanel that covers internet trends and scandals that captured popular imagination and then were swiftly forgotten. I deeply admire the women behind the podcast and relate to their innate desire to explore popular culture with a critical eye. And as I listened to all of the episodes — but especially the one about the “cancellation” of film critic/video essayist Lindsay Ellis — I was comforted to know that my desire for nuance and critical anger vs. black and white thinking was something that other people felt, too.
This newsletter came out of a desire to break out of a haze and step back into the realm of feeling and exploration. But the way that I am feeling my emotions now is distinctly different than how I felt them back in 2010, back when I lived with my parents, or even back when I first moved into my own home just two years ago. It’s akin to the moment I’d outgrown the punk scene — objectively, the music was still good and the bands were still the same bands I loved, but I’d moved on. Moved onto what, exactly? A different mode of feeling — not new emotions completely, but just some distant and lovely neighbors, approximately 30 miles down the road.