One work call ends and I have about 30 minutes before the next one. I take Felix out for a small walk. The air is balmy. The sun too bright. I stand squinting in the light and heat while Felix just plops on the grass and does this weird squiggle as if he needs to touch grass with every inch of his body. I give it about five minutes and haul him back inside. I realize I am falling behind on my step count for the day and decide to walk around the house before I go back into the study and back to work. Taylor Swift croons into my ear and I find myself smiling. The joy I am feeling is pure in a way that feels light and clean. It is not tied to anything I do or hope for.
I find myself going back to the two hour long podcast from Wednesday night when she sat with the Kelce brothers on their podcast. It was two hours of parsing body language, fixating on if she was really happy. I teared up when she talked about getting her Masters back. I leaned in when she talked about her dad’s surgery or her mom’s bum knee. I smiled when she talked about Jason and his kids. There was something relaxed, laid back, domestic and happy about the show where the biggest pop star I know was candid on camera.
With my falling down the rabbit-hole that is K-pop, parasocial relationships are my life. Taylor Swift though feels different. It is not the kind of adulation I have for K-pop stars. This feels personal, relatable. Her lyrics appeal to me the way a well written essay does. I listen to her songs. I feel them with every fiber of my being. I love how she wears her heart on her sleeve. I love how she is a brilliant business woman. I am in awe of her marketing. I am a goofy kid when I am decoding easter eggs with my fellow #swifties.
The day after the podcast, my husband said something that made me stop what I was doing. He was mad that I had opted to eat my dinner alone with my podcast for company instead of with the family. My first instinct was to be defensive, to explain why it was important to me, why listening to Taylor Swift yap about her life in a way that felt intimate and cozy with the rest of my fandom was important. But, I stopped. I took more than a day to let the comment sit with me. He was not wrong. It was a podcast. I could have finished my dinner and caught up on it after.
I wondered if he would have felt this way had it been a writers zoom I was on. Would it have been different if it were a grassroots political organization meeting instead? How do we assign relative value to things? I let the comment stew and simmer.
This morning, I had that moment of clarity. All my life I have been accommodating. I have prioritized relationships, cooking large meals, showing up for friends, not burning bridges, keeping the peace over anything that could be viewed as selfish or a centering of my self. Sure, there have been occasions where I put myself first but those were accompanied by an extra large serving of guilt on the side.
That guilt sat heavy in my core, making me question why I would do something that brought me joy at a cost to the people around me. So, I over compensated. If I went out with friends, I ensured people around me were taken care of. I brought trinkets for my kids to assuage myself that they were active and present in my mind. I texted, called and surrendered my mental space to others while being away. And, the worst part, it was self inflicted.
This time though, I felt no guilt whatsoever. I tuned into the podcast because this was something I wanted to do. For two hours, I lost myself being happy for two strangers. There was no tangible takeaways. No wisdom (arguable though) to take away. No call to action I was responding to.
I am finally in my IDGAF era and I am loving it.
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