“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.’

One of my first vinyls was Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” I loved dancing to “Material Girl” and “Into the Groove.” Her multiple bracelets and lace gloves helped me find my way into the fashion world. I followed her for a few more albums but eventually lost interest in her music. I knew she was smart and great at marketing herself, but I couldn’t identify with her lyrics. This trend continued with artists like Mariah Carey, Whitney Huston, and Celine Dion. I could appreciate their talent but found their diva behavior or love for couture fashion difficult to identify with. Besides, I thought I had arrived at a stage in my life where I no longer needed to fangirl a musical artist.

I am going to admit something that some of you may be appalled by for various reasons, maybe because her music is not Christian, or you think she is a poor role model. Others of you may think she is not that talented and find her over-hyped. And for all those reasons, I have been hesitant to admit this on social media, but I am going to anyway. And like she says, “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” but I am gonna “Shake it Off.” I became a Swiftie in my fifties!

This didn’t start because I heard a song and obsessed over it. It is true, I knew some Taylor Swift songs prior to December 2023. You would have to live under a rock not to have heard about Juliet’s anguish right before Romeo proposed in “Love Story” or “Blank Space”. Instead, my interest was sparked by listening to Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times staff writer, explain her love for Taylor by dissecting her music in a podcast, “The Daily.” In the podcast and an article, Taffy breaks down her lyrics and explains why they speak to women. She talked about songs I had never heard and shared how the lyrics express different eras of life Taylor has lived through. Not eras in the literal sense, but in the fact that we are constantly evolving as women. We are the young girls who experience the joys and crushes of first love, betrayal in love, friendship, our careers, and how we are often misunderstood. Taffy states, “Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood, to understand that their womanhood is made of those microchapters of change, that we’re not different people than we were then, that we shouldn’t disavow the earlier versions of ourselves, our earlier eras.”

This struck me hard. How often have I looked back on my life with disgust at the different eras of my life? I held disdain for the young girl who wore the Madonna glove, without showing kindness to the bigger-bodied teen who just wanted to be trendy. I mocked the naive college student that believed if Christians cared enough, we could make a difference for individuals and families experiencing homelessness. I curbed my professional ambitions, believing that I had made a choice that resulted in doors being closed forever. I let others define me without speaking up, knowing at the time I didn’t have any agency. This constant self-loathing didn’t show kindness, grace, or curiosity to my younger self. And only as I have learned to integrate myself with all those past Sherrys, have I moved toward wholeness.

But I still wasn’t a self-declared Swiftie. For the next three years, I read more articles about her and dabbled a bit more in her music. In one interview, she told Gayle King that she struggled finding her identity because she wasn’t “cool, sexy, or edgy.” Instead, she was “imaginative, smart, and hardworking.” She loved writing music and worked hard at developing her craft. When she didn’t get a Grammy nomination, her response wasn’t that she deserved it and was robbed, nor did she get caught up in self-loathing. Instead, her response was she needed to work harder and make a better album. How many women have wanted to do good work, but have embraced being trendy, or edgy, or sexy to move ahead in their respective fields? We embrace the nerdy men in Silicon Valley and hard-working actors who continue to do work into their late 70’s without evaluating their sex appeal, and also the imaginative geniuses in art and film who create great work without being edgy. But for years, women had to fall in one of those three categories to make it ahead. Taylor Swift is helping us redefine that.

Then I decided to stream the ERAS tour on Disney. It took me 4 nights but watching her perform and the response from her fans was contagious. By this point, I had listened to plenty of her music to realize not all of it has happy endings. She takes you through a range of emotions with her music, yet you leave the concert feeling a complete emotional release from all the anger, sadness, and betrayal you have felt. You also see that everyone in the audience has the same experience. The concert is fun, an actual theatrical show with themes and interactions between the audience and Taylor.

Not only did I watch the tour, but I watched the tour documentary as well. The time and effort she put into every detail is mind boggling. She cared about the costumes, the dances, the physicality of it, and wanted her fans to have the best possible experience. All this attention to detail allowed her to buy back her masters, along with giving life-changing bonuses to the entire crew, from the dancers on stage to the truck drivers moving her equipment.

Her generosity is legendary. Not only does she invite younger talent on stage with her, but she also spends quality time helping mentor younger women interested in song writing and the music industry. Some think she is too controlling by owning all the rights to the production of her albums and videos, but this allows her to be creative and explore artistry. Finally, she is the richest woman in the music industry ever. Yet, on the eve of her wedding, she and her fiancé, Travis Kelce, gave $26 million in donations to small nonprofits they were connected to across the country. With my short-lived experience in the non-profit world, her $1 million donation to the Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank in Reading, PA is a life-changing donation for an organization like that.

Taylor Swift is almost 20 years younger than me, but it doesn’t mean her life has no meaning. And it doesn’t mean that she can’t teach older women a few things along the way.