Reflections on becoming
Saturday, August 1, 2020
I remember the first time I heard Taylor Swift. I was 15, driving on Mount Auburn Road in Cape with my best friend who was newly 16. It was dark outside. "There's this girl named Taylor Swift ..." as she put in the CD. We listened to "Teardrops on My Guitar" first. As I heard the lyrics sung by a girl around my age about the pain of being overlooked, it was the first time I felt my experiences given voice, publicly validated. I didn't have to pretend to relate to an adult world I heard on the radio; someone was singing about these things I knew, too. Maybe it mattered. Maybe, so did I.
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