Trigger warning: The following section contains reference to sexual assault, which may be distressing for some readers.
I didn’t just discover Taylor, I found her when I needed her.
I’m a new Swiftie and my era began on the 13 December 2023, but the road there was long and winding.
For years, I lived in loud rooms. I loved music that crashed and clawed and demanded to be felt in the body. Punk and hardcore raised me. They taught me how to belong, and how to believe that music could be a form of protest. In July 2023, that world fractured.
The singer of one of the most important bands of my life was accused of rape. This was a band built on politics, feminism, social justice. A band who talked about doing better and being better. As more women came forward, the truth sharpened and darkened. It became clear that he sought out girls, not women. The band claimed ignorance and most of us didn’t believe them.
My trust collapsed. I had known him once, even called him a friend and the betrayal was personal and seismic. The scene I had given my heart to no longer felt safe. I couldn’t untangle the art from the harm. The music that once made me feel alive suddenly felt poisonous.
Then, in October, I lost a friendship that mattered deeply to me. The loneliness was quiet but total. I moved through my days like someone who had misplaced herself. My friend’s daughter loved Taylor and through her I began listening a little (always Taylor’s Version of course). I didn’t know I was gently being led somewhere…
On 13 December 2023, I sat alone in front of the television and rented The Eras Tour on Amazon Prime. I thought I was watching a concert. I had no idea that who I was as a person, was about to be rewritten.
My moment came during Champagne Problems, ‘How evergreen our group of friends, don’t think we’ll say that word again.’ The camera turned to the crowd. Women pressed shoulder to shoulder with their friends, singing every word like testimony. Faces lit with joy, grief, release and love all at once. I saw devotion without irony, community without cruelty and softness without apology.
Something in me cracked wide open.
I didn’t just fall in love with Taylor. I fell in love with the possibility of belonging again. The idea that music could hold you instead of bruising you. That girlhood was not something you outgrew, but something you could return to when the world has been too sharp.
From that moment on, I listened to nothing but Taylor. I had sixty six days to learn a lifetime of songs before seeing her in Melbourne, night two, on 17 February 2024. Every lyric became a rope I climbed to find myself again.
And then my world expanded.
I saw Taylor in my own country. I crossed oceans with my beautiful daughter to Poland and stood in the crowd twice more, singing with strangers who felt like old friends. I collected moments instead of wounds.
Now my life is full in a way it never was before. I’m surrounded by extraordinary women. Kindness seems to orbit Taylor because she centres it, models it and insists on it. This community is generous, protective and alive with feeling.
What I found wasn’t just fandom, but a gathering. A constellation of people who understood devotion as something gentle and brave. Women who had lived whole lives before finding Taylor, women who grew up with her and people of all genders who arrived carrying their own complicated histories.
Girlhood, as I’ve come to know it, isn’t about age or nostalgia. It’a about softness reclaimed. It’s about choosing wonder in a world that so often demands armour. It’s friendship bracelets passed between strangers, voices cracking in unison, hands held in the dark. It’s being allowed to feel deeply without being asked to explain yourself.
This community knows how to hold each other. When someone is hurting, we close ranks. When someone is celebrating, we lift them higher. Kindness is not an afterthought here. It’s the foundation and it radiates outward because it has a source.
Through this girlhood, my life has filled with colour and connection. I am no longer alone in my loving, my longing or my joy. I’m surrounded by women who remind me who I am and who I can be. Together, we sing, we remember and we make room for each other to exist loudly, tenderly and without apology.
My Taylor origin story isn’t just about becoming a fan; it’s about finding my way back to joy.