It's Delicate: Growing Up and Searching for Daylight
November 11, 2022
Writer: Emily Mitchell
Editor: Lynn Sabieddine
Midnight is seconds away. I grab my friends, squealing with excitement and anticipation, adrenaline pumping from a night of dancing. We count down, pull out our phones to film our reactions, and hear the first synth-heavy beats:
“Meet me at Midnight…”
Earlier that day, I was walking home from class. It was my mission to listen to as many Taylor Swift songs as possible before hearing her brand-new studio album. I opened my phone, hit shuffle, and let the music take me away.
I am in elementary school, running around the playground singing “Love Story.”
I am making up dances with my friends to “22.”
I am screaming the words to “Long Live” with my pom team the night before a big competition.
I am crying over the painful and poignant words of “All Too Well”.
I am watching the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video for the first time, my jaw on the ground.
I am growing up.
As I watched the leaves fall, I was suddenly hyper aware of how fast time is moving. I felt a wave of sadness as I realized my childhood was all but gone, and I would never get that time back. Where did the years go? How did I get here? Walking back to my dorm, my mind spinning with assignments and plans and the gray, undefined mass that is the unknowable future. Why did things have to change so rapidly? And where do I go from here?
I looked down at my phone, scrolled through the playlist of Taylor songs I was listening to, and found comfort.
She had started as a wide-eyed, guitar-strumming country princess, singing of high school trials and tribulations. She blossomed into a full-fledged, record-breaking artist, before becoming a pop phenomenon, shattering and regularly selling out stadiums. When the world turned its back on her, she emerged stronger than before with a sharp tongue and a story to tell. She found daylight among the black night, and wrote stories. Songs of love and loss and happiness and misery and growing up.
She continued to curate albums, constantly evolving and rebranding and introducing new sounds to a fiercely loyal fanbase. But throughout it all, she retained the charm and the genuine warmth that captivated huge audiences. She changed, she grew up, she fought battles and suffered wounds, and always found the daylight.
Maybe that’s what growing up is about.
Learning lessons and making mistakes, constantly changing and evolving, discovering more about the world and who you are — in order to become the best version of yourself for the season you’re in. Sharing your stories and the love in your heart, in hopes someone will see your light and shine right back at you. Finding the people and things who are important to you, and the person you are meant to be. Remaining strong in the face of adversity and never giving up the fight for happiness, for comfort, for sunshine in the darkness, knowing it’s the pain you feel and the knowledge you gain during the bad times that make the good ones that much sweeter.
But even as your world changes at a breakneck pace, maybe you get to keep parts of your former self with you, as you evolve and as you grow into exciting new chapters. Maybe the little kids running and jumping and dancing around in a limitless world never go away, maybe the memories they make and the wonder they see can stay with us forever. Because even as Taylor Swift releases album after album, embraces look after exciting new look, and introduces new sound after new sound, she dances around stages in sold out venues still singing Love Story, straps on her guitar to entertain her fans, and shows the world her authentic personality that captivates so many.
And if that’s what growing up is, that’s not so scary at all. In fact, the comfort of that knowledge makes me Fearless.
