Saturn Return, Fearless, and Coming Out With Taylor Swift

My Saturn Return began in April 2021. A Saturn Return, for those of you who aren’t very online or queer, occurs every 27-31 years when Saturn returns to the same position it was when you were born. It represents a cycle of your life, a time for self reflection and taking stock. It also coincides with what my friends and I call a “quarter life crisis,” this “what the fuck am I doing with my life?” realization that pretty much all of us hit at some point between the ages of 25 and 30. (I hit mine right at 25. I’m precocious.)

But the soundtrack for my Saturn Return is its own blast from the past: Taylor Swift’s re-release of Fearless, which just dropped.

When Fearless was first released in 2008, I had just turned 16. A couple months later, I got my driver’s licence and my sister’s car, complete with a black flip folder of CDs. In my first year of relative freedom, driving to and from softball practices, to “town” twenty minutes away for ice cream, and riding around with friends, Fearless was on rotation. 

Fearless, most succinctly, is an album of love songs mostly to boys, but also to Swift’s best friend, family, and herself. She’s obsessed with her crushes in ways distinctly teenage; I remember how being near boys your own age, whether at the pool or Walmart or an away basketball game, felt all-consuming, terrifying, like everything you could end in total mortification. 

I thought, one day, I would feel about a boy how Taylor Swift said it felt: take my hand and drag me headfirst, fearless! I never did. When I mentioned online that I wanted to write this article, someone commented, “The last time I listened to that album, I was straight,” to which I replied, “Me too.” This album was a blueprint we never actually followed.

Swift provided the soundtrack for my teens and twenties, and I still can’t listen to her songs without feelings transported to the year they debuted. The highlights, for me: her debut self titled Taylor Swift in 8th grade, when I desperately wanted to be pretty, and her ball gowns and perfect hair; Fearless, when I was 16 and not dating, wondering when my romantic urge would kick in; 1989, my senior year of college, playing on the electronic jukebox at every bar as I applied to graduate schools to move and finally come out; and Folklore, the whimsical nostalgia-tinged soft pop playing while I moved back to Appalachia, got married, and settled down, in every sense, into what I hope will be the rest of my life last summer. Now, back to Fearless, the album that first made me wonder, fleetingly, whether or not I was straight, because I didn’t feel this way about boys, not even a little bit.

Not being “a teenage girl” about boys was taken as feminist individualism, I think, by my friends and family. I didn’t want a husband, so I must be a future girlboss, independent, alone, aloof. It never occurred to anyone, not even me, that maybe I wanted not-a-husband. I thought that I was broken because I didn’t feel attraction to the boys around me, and I still dated them, confused that people were having a good time, that people wanted to be touched, that people got butterflies. When I did date, I used cultural touchstones, like Swift, to tell me how I should be feeling.

Now, I’m 28 and married. I’m not straight. I never wanted to be alone, actually. I just couldn’t see the way forward.

Today, I drove to my job as a university instructor in Appalachia, a completely normal moment in this great life that I have created, somehow, very suddenly over the past few years. Windows down, I screamed along to “Hey Steven,” realizing that I couldn’t conjure up a single boy who I was thinking of so many years ago when I sang along with my friends. I remember these songs were catchy, and so little else.

And it was all catchy, nice to fit in and feel like I understood these lyrics. Denim mini skirts, v-neck lace-lined Hollister spaghetti strap tanks, thick eyeliner, slick-straight razor-edged hair, wrecked flare acid wash jeans -- does it matter what I did and liked to fit in versus what I actually enjoyed? 

Taylor Swift taught me how to talk about differing-gender relationships long enough to get out of my hometown, and later, my college town, a script that allowed me to appear authentic even as I was struggling to articulate, internally, what I wanted out of my life. And for that, I love her.