Thank you....Taylor Swift?
On obsessions and missing them.
As my dear friends and family know, I was loitering, trespassing (press-passing) this past weekend outside Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan, where Taylor Swift performed two back-to-back sold-out concerts that at which 60,000 people — divided by age and era; united by rhinestones, cowboy boots and this one Amazon shirt— died and went to country-pop heaven. While some well-meaning friends thought I —EYE, an intern who started last week—might get to go into the actual stadium and write my silly little thoughts about Taylor Swift, all I was tasked with doing was to get footage of the fans and atmosphere outside the stadium, filmed vertically.
This, of course, is no small feat. I don’t mean to make light of it. Somewhere in the last four years, I transitioned from being a person who knew how to use Instagram to being a person who doesn’t know how to use TikTok (to prospective employers of the future: this will be a thing of the past by the time you read it. I’m an agile learner and the youth love me.) What with the pandemic shaving a few years off my life and my newfound attention to #gainz and not the gram, I feared I’d lost what newsrooms might define as street-cred: the ability to not just keep pace with all the new frippery on apps designed to ahem, zap the brains of future generations into oblivion, bring people together with the charm of targeted advertising, but master all the frippery in the hopes that distinct regional audience segments will willingly say “Yes, here Divya, take my eyeballs, farm them for your award-winning vertical videos.”
It is one thing to know how to use the text-to-speech function; quite another to know how to use the text-to-speech function for a video that will be seen by likely hundreds of thousands of people, several hundreds of whom routinely wait to lob some version of “loser” or “this isn’t news” or “I don’t care about this and thus, neither should other people” or <vague gestures of violence and malice> into the first comments section they stumble into. But that’s the gig! In my world, I call it character-building stuff. It’s a gym, but for my nerves. It’s a pull-up bar, but for my emotions. It’s a 10k, but for Internet tolerance. (If you weren’t familiar with my coping mechanisms, you are now.)
In any case, this weekend was all about Taylor Swift: I spoke to fans and followers who’d spent sleepless nights trying to get tickets, driving over from Canada, setting up camp at the crack of dawn to buy her crewnecks and plotting outfits for each Era that Taylor’s celebrity life has given rise to. (For what it’s worth: I definitely know most of the words to “Love Story,” “You Belong with Me” and “Wildest Dreams” and can murmur along to at least two others. I listened to these songs when my memory retention was far more formidable.) I watched little girls show up with their parents, Gen-Z girlies show up with each other, mom-and-daughter duos for whom some of the last ten years of childhood and parenthood was marked by Taylor’s ballads. I felt some panic about using social video — what if the apps released a new feature while I edited, what if my phone shut down, what if I simply died etc — to capture all this, but mostly wistfulness.
And the reason I felt this pointedly, that this was the thing I noticed, was because I myself have been far too burnt out to hold any such high-stakes, ride-or-die convictions in the recent past. As many of these things go, I don’t know when it started but I sure know I’m here now! Here, as in: a place where I struggle to finish my thoughts on account of exhaustion wrought by classes and work and personal and professional goals, but bubbling below the surface, the fears and high standards underpinning all these material things. For a while now, I’ve cared little for things that bring me joy and delight, choosing instead things that bring me comfort and rest. (Not mutually exclusive always, but the Venn diagram really hasn’t worked out on this one.)
I really haven’t obsessed over anything recently that I can remember! Where I’ve been obsessed, it was short-lived and forgettable. I haven’t looked feverishly for new music or devoured books or done anything that consumes me creatively since, who knows, grad school, Amuma’s passing, whenever this fun little burnout era began.
But I realized I missed this and wished for its return when I witnessed Swifties go nuts in Detroit. An amazing sentence, one I didn’t think I would write, but the most devilish things in life turn out that way. People had put thought and care into their outfits, their bracelets, the answers to my questions about their favorite songs and albums, they lit up when they talked — there was that conviction and bonhomie in the air that comes, I would guess, at many a packed concert: of your obsession being other people’s obsession, too; of knowing so much about something you’ve loved for so long; of knowing that the other people around you Get It. It was…nice! I wanted to be nuts too!
I was filming all these girls and their parents, smiles, sequins, excitement and all, and you know, fandoms and standoms come with their own pesky set of problems. But on a sunny summer afternoon and in the company of something so simple, bewitching and unadulterated, I found something I’d kind of sorely missed and lacked currently.
Not in an “I don’t have this” way, though — in an “I could and should have this (again)” way. I once, prolifically in my opinion, wrote new verses to a Phineas and Ferb soundtrack and memorized all the brands of jeans that Her Royal Highness Mia Thermopolis would wear in the Princess Diaries novels. The Swifties, formidable as their obsession is, and I share some commonalities, and for that reminder, and for this past weekend, I am grateful. I can, after all, be obsessive about things that don’t further the bottom line of my midlife crisis!
All is not lost. And I should be kinder to myself, etc! An uphill climb awaits, to be sure — I’m under no illusions how much work it takes for a tired mind to crawl out of its Gilmore Girls-ridden hole — but lucky for me, I’ve recently done some character-building stuff. (And climbed out of actual obstacles - that one deserves to be bragged about for time immemorial)
Other quick notes:
I’m in Detroit for the summer, interning! I will be back in NY in August.
My short-lived nonforgettable obsessions of late (just noting for my own memory and in case it makes you shriek in recognition): Paul Mescal of Normal People Irish angsty-boy fame; also Ireland; babygirl king Kendall Roy; Strings + 808 + Beat (Once again I say, Nicholas Britell Coachella stage when); and this essay about writing and waitressing (not short-lived)
I’m reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng with a book club filled with “younger” readers (said readers are 22 to my 26. In any case, they are closer to 20 and I am closer to 30, so I usually sit with that thought when I want to be deeply horrified)