I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department on repeat. I listen to it in the car as I wait to pick up kids from school or while I run errands. I listen to it as I clean house or fold laundry through my earbuds connected to my phone resting in the back pocket of my jeans. Or I play the vinyl throughout day, flipping the records to hear each side, while a vanilla amber candle burns. It’s the third candle I’ve bought in a month, searching for the perfect scent of cozy and not quite finding it. Still the candle burns. And the music plays.
Tortured Poets hasn’t been on this heavy a rotation since 2024 when it first came out and I couldn’t get enough of it. I played the album in the car so much that my kids began to ask me to play something/anything else. Eventually, I complied. My husband and oldest child even woke up on the wee hours of Black Friday in the same year for me to get the vinyl. After hours of waiting in the cold, we missed the album by being a couple people too far back in the line. Shivering (all of us) and disappointed (me), we left the store. I did order the vinyl when it became available online by setting my phone’s alarm for midnight Pacific and waking up to get it. After it arrived, I played it day after day until I stopped. Even now, I prefer the vinyl to my phone’s audio or my car stereo. I like the physical act of getting the record from the sleeve and putting it on the player. I like flipping the record to its other side. Maybe I just like my music material.
Tortured Poets has fascinated me since it first came out. It’s a break-up album with a some love songs. Not surprising from Swift, who is known for her songs about her relationships and breakups. But something about this album’s heartache spoke to me, which did surprise me. I’ve been happily married for over 20 years (actually, it will be 25 in December). It’s been an awful long time (decades!) since a boy has broken my heart. Honestly, I just remember the contours of the last time that happened. It was a boy who decided he would rather play the field than date me, and to add insult to injury, the next girl he dated was also a Kelly. I can remember being broken up about it. But when I prod what’s left of the memory, there’s no sharp pain. There’s no wound. There’s no scar. There’s just fuzziness and the sense that maybe there’s a funny story here.
So, why, then, am I belting out the bridge to “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” like my life depends on it? Why am I practically yelling “Old habits die SCREAMING” from “The Black Dog”? Why am I crying as I sing along to “loml”? Why do I have a t-shirt that reads, “I cry a lot, but I’m so productive, it’s an art”? Why does “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” feel like an anthem I didn’t know I needed? Why does “But as she was leaving, it felt like breathing” from “The Bolter” stop me in my tracks? Why am I compelled by “Down Bad” and it’s tragic relationship’s end since I never cried at the gym, much less over a guy? What is it about Tortured Poets that resonates?
It’s because I know heartache, even if it’s not romantic heartache. Everyone knows heartache. Tortured Poets gets what heartache does to a person from the small griefs to the larger life-changing ones. I might not have cried at the gym over a loss, but I sure as hell have cried in public over one. I might not have lost the love of my life, but I lost my stepdad five years ago and still haven’t recovered. I know what it is like to be depressed and to put on a smiling mask to get shit done, even when you would rather die. I know what it is like to be betrayed by a man, who you thought you could trust, and how it almost destroys you. I know what it is like to leave something and finally feel free.
So, why Tortured Poets now? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as I listen to the record that goes from “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” to “The Black Dog” on repeat. And I know the answer. But knowing the answer and wanting to reckon with the answer are two different things. The answer is that I am at a point where my old life no longer fits, and I don’t know what my new life is going to be. I find myself in a weird liminal space where the path in front of me is hazy and unclear, but I want to step forward onto it anyway. I hate liminal spaces. I hate not knowing what comes next. I hate the jump from old to new. Something, however, has got to give because the old life no longer fits. It frustrates and chafes and holds backs. It makes my heart ache because I have to mourn the old to get ready for the new. And Tortured Poets gives voice to how my heart feels now as I start to move forward, one cautious step at a time.