How Taylor Swift Helped Me Accept My Borderline Personality Disorder
“The new Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poets Department, really hit me hard,” I told my therapist exactly one year ago. I was speaking about the end of a seemingly life-altering situationship. “She felt like she’d never find love again,” I explained. The whole thing felt so familiar.
Once again, I had met someone new and was itching to do something rash (Double text! Call her! Order a gift! Send a nude!). Spiraling, I worried this person would ghost me because I’m unworthy of love. But this time, I had therapy, a newfound understanding of my borderline personality disorder and—just as importantly—I had 31 new songs and a plethora of soon-to-be classic Taylor Swift lyrics to help me accurately describe what was going on in my brain. I took a breath and explained. “I’ve got this sinking feeling that I’ll never find anyone and this is my last chance—just like Taylor says on the song, ‘The Prophecy.’”
For years, dark moods like this one had been impossible to acknowledge and put into words, let alone escape. Just two years earlier, I’d opened my laptop, joined a Zoom call with my therapist, and lost all powers of description. This happened every week for three months.
I could narrate the basic facts and events of my life: I was in love with a man who was polyamorous and could only see me once a month—yet texted me every day. I could relay what he texted (“haha your job is so cool”) or how I responded (a string of five long texts, followed by a nude when I got worried he wouldn’t respond) or what we did together (drink wine on my rooftop because he lived with his girlfriend). But when my therapist would prod me for details, I couldn’t muster a response deeper than “sad” or “angry.” It was like trying to explain astrology memes to a Victorian child.
Now, I can see that I was hyperfixated on this person, ready to make them responsible for all of my stability and self-worth. But at the time, all I knew was that something didn’t feel right and I wasn’t happy.
Then…he ghosted me. And for weeks I didn’t leave my bed to do anything but pee, which I didn’t do often, because I refused to eat or drink. I scrolled through five months of texts, looking for an answer. Then, I spent hours in my notes app trying to write a message that would force him to reply.
But still, “I’m depressed” was the most I could say when my therapist asked how I was doing. She could see that I was spiraling and I could tell that hopelessness was creeping in. It was a familiar feeling. One that led me to attempt suicide in high school after a boy I was in love with broke up with me. I’d felt stranded and thought a near-death experience would bring him back. After five days at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, I was hopeful but nervous. I was always anxious about what would happen the next time my heart was broken. Eight years later, I was finding out.
There was one glimmer of good that fall, however. Taylor Swift released 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Allegedly about Harry Styles and known as the “Haylor” album to her most dedicated fans, it’s always been my favorite Taylor Swift record (I was also a rabid Directioner back in the day). What we know about Taylor and Harry’s “relationship” could barely fill an Instagram caption: In December 2012, they took a walk together in Central Park. There were other rumors (a possible snowmobile accident, a fight in the British Virgin Islands that broke them up). So the announcement of five new tracks on 1989 (Taylor’s Version) dangled the possibility of more context. Maybe we’d finally learn how it began…and why it ended.
The day the album was released, I waited until my 15-minute walk home from the office to put on the vault tracks. It was rare that I wanted to do anything besides wallow in bed. I figured I’d walk, listen, and then crawl back into my comfortable hole of heartbreak. But instead, I pressed play and paced around my neighborhood for three hours with the new songs on repeat.
I listened as Taylor sang about begging a partner to stay in “Say Don’t Go” and being willing to do anything to get them back in “Is It Over Now?” I heard how it felt when she was ghosted in “Now That We Don’t Talk.” I didn’t know that anyone else felt this lonely and trapped in their own head. I listened to the vault tracks so much that in four days, they became three of my most-streamed songs for the entire year.
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to describe all along, I realized when I finally pressed pause. The “months and months of back and forth” Taylor sings about on “Clean” were my own experience yearning and grieving a situationship, constantly questioning what I could do to fix it. I knew Taylor and I both moved through the world with Big Feelings. But while she turns her two-month flings into Grammy-winning albums, I get dumped and spend a year rotting in bed, self-harming, and lashing out at everyone who cares about me when they try to help.
“There’s a line in a new Taylor Swift song that I immediately clicked with,” I told my therapist in our next session. In the song “Is It Over Now?” she sings, “I think about jumping off of very tall somethings just to see you come running.” “This is how I feel. It’s like I’m just so desperate for him to talk to me again, I’d do anything—even hurt myself.”
And then, for the first time, I told her that I hurt myself when my feelings get too intense and the noise inside my head gets too loud. It was an aha moment for both of us. Since I’d been hospitalized back in high school, I’d had so many different psychiatric diagnoses—panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder. One doctor even thought I had bipolar disorder. And although my current therapist had given me what felt like a billion assessments, we never had a clear-cut answer. That is until the 1989 vault tracks helped me tell her what was actually happening in my brain and my life.
People with borderline personality disorder (it’s me, hi) have extremely strong feelings that often swing quickly between positive and negative. They—ahem, I—struggle to cope with the feelings, explain them, or even just feel them. This can make people impulsive. They might spend too much money, have angry outbursts, dangerous sex, and yup, self-harm. For people with borderline personality disorder (also known as BPD), rejection and abandonment can be especially brutal.
I’ve listened to Taylor Swift all my life, but since getting my diagnosis, I don’t just love her music for the the catchy beats or the storytelling. I love it because she makes it feel a little more normal to tragically fall for people way too quickly. When I listen to Taylor Swift, I don’t feel ashamed of my anxious attachments. If Tay is also thinking about jumping off of very tall somethings to get someone’s attention, it can’t be so deeply horrible that I am, too.
So thanks to the 1989 vault tracks and the DSM-5, I have words to describe my experiences and less shame around my emotions. As I’ve learned more about BPD, I feel the same sense of recognition as I did playing “Is It Over Now?” on repeat. Having a personality disorder felt like a lot, but it was also vindicating to realize my brain was overreacting for a reason.
Lots of people assume being part of a fandom is about showing off expensive merch, going into debt for concert tickets, or obsessively searching for Easter eggs in an artist’s songs. Sure, those parts are fun. But there’s a reason people like to joke that therapists hate Taylor Swift. Literally millions of people want to relate her raw unfiltered writing to our own lives. It can feel like we’re finally being seen for our feelings—no matter how outrageous or rooted in mental illness they happen to be.
By the time Taylor released The Tortured Poets Department and I’d once again started to obsess over an unrequited crush, my therapist was all over it. The inner turmoil was something we knew how to process. So when I got the breakup text, instead of listening to a gut-wrenching ballad that’d have me crying behind my sunglasses, I turned on “Foolish One” from Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) (what can I say? I’m a big vault tracks’ girl).
It’s Taylor’s pièce de résistance on the matter of love. The first time I listened to it, I sobbed. The lyrics (“Stop checking your mailbox for confessions of love”) felt like the universe ordering me to stop falling in love with people who were never gonna love me back. That I was embarrassing myself expecting people to reciprocate these massive and—let’s be real—self-destructive feelings. But now, when the song’s tone shifts at the very end and Taylor sings, “The day is gonna come for your confessions of love; when all is said and done, he just wasn't the one.” That message—that being alone, facing rejection, grieving a relationship isn’t going to ruin my life—is one I can finally hear.
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