As Taylor Swift's Eras tour blazes through its second summer, comment sections are littered with confused onlookers claiming they "don't get" the hype. Countless Reddit threads are devoted to this subject and I just don't get Taylor Swift is even the title of a CNN think piece.
A peek into any Eras show reveals that the people who "get it" are having a ton of fun, but I suspect the root of the draw runs deeper. Grief is a theme stitched throughout many of Taylor's albums and it is an emotion too often suffered in silence but craves a village to heal. Taylor has created that village and I find myself visiting it in my worst moments.
Three years ago, I went through a breakup of a 7-year relationship. We weren't married, engaged, or had even discussed such things. We were long-distance, which meant our time together was spent over weekends, holidays, and vacations. Both divorced and in our 40's, we existed in our own invented relationship space, one that often needed explaining because it wasn't a marriage or cohabitation.
We were as connected as any relationship I've had though. He broke up abruptly, and in that instant, he vanished from my life. My grief was intense, for months, I cried daily and could barely eat or sleep—a new normal that I hid from view because the business of life had to continue.
You might think breakups get easier with age, but they don't. The real surprise though was how people reacted. For most, it was a single conversation, a life update. I told the story and then we barely spoke of it again except for a stray question "any word from so and so?" before the conversation would turn to whether I had new dating prospects. Everyone was over it, why wasn't I?
After my breakup, one friend's reaction was, "Life is short! There's other fish in the sea!" I felt scolded for my grief. Society seems to mandate the duration of your grief based on its assessment of the severity of your loss. For a breakup, the grief should be swift so that you can revel in the joys of singlehood. If your partner dies, a lengthy grieving period is mandated and any attempt to re-partner sooner is met with great judgment. Grief has rules.
Taylor breaks those rules by giving voice to a certain kind of grief—disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is a form of grief that is dismissed or invalidated by others. It is suffered in silence because others don't believe the situation merits the gravity of your emotional response. Disenfranchised grief can occur in non-marital breakups, teen breakups, a breakup of one's parents, the loss of a family member to addiction, or any loss not fully appreciated by other people.
Grief is like a stench that lingers until you air it out. Dr. Jeffrey Gardere, clinical psychologist suggests taking a grieving friend on "vent walks," where you allow the friend to air it out without judgment.
Disenfranchised grief is accompanied by shame and loneliness and often lingers precisely because the griever isn't given the space to air it out. Taylor Swift has invited us to vent walk with her.
Many of her songs are about the end of non-marital relationships, some of which were short-lived but deeply felt. She gives voice to other pain too, including the loss of her grandmother, the trauma her grandfather experienced in World War II, the suffering of healthcare workers during the pandemic, and her anger toward bullies that unfailingly question the legitimacy of a woman who has achieved extraordinary success.
She also rages against critics who disenfranchise her grief by branding her the faulty common denominator in her breakups. A male acquaintance once bristled at me, "Something is very wrong with a girl who has that many breakups." I mentally calculated my own breakup number---at age 51, I have her beat. The message is that women are only allowed so many tries before we must conclude they are damaged. This is the disenfranchisement.
Taylor's writing exposes disenfranchised grief in ways that make those who have experienced it feel seen. Listening airs out the sadness, and perhaps more importantly, the rage, an emotion that women are traditionally discouraged from expressing. The permission to do so is transformative. Taylor titled The Tortured Poets Department version of her Eras tour, Rage: The Musical.
Photographs of Taylor on stage reveal her bent over in an inked-up white gown, mouth agape, exorcising her demons into her mic. I feel drawn to the catharsis. I see I'm not alone. At an Eras concert you are among thousands who resonate. It is a collective rebel yell. People of all ages show up. Yes, even bedazzled 13-year-old girls know grief. Please never tell them they don't, you'll only send their feelings underground and effectively remove yourself from their roster of support people.
As a society, we excoriate certain emotional experiences so much that legions of people are starving for empathy and validation. By putting pen poetically and unapologetically to her emotional world, Taylor Swift is the salve. Her fans decode every lyric not because they have too much time on their hands, but rather because they are attempting to decode their own emotional experiences, ones the rest of the world has dismissed as trivial.
If you don't get Taylor Swift, you probably haven't experienced disenfranchised grief. Consider yourself lucky. Or perhaps you haven't encountered the kind of love that can produce it. Either way, I just ask that you excuse the rest of us, we're processing some tough stuff.
Sherry Pagoto, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist working on a memoir on love and loss.
All views expressed are the author's own.
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About the writer
Sherry Pagoto, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist working on a memoir on love and loss.
