)

I used to hate Taylor Swift.

That’s what I told others when I was 13, anyway.

Sparkly and lively, Swift’s electric performances with her popular mean-girl voice and the many controversies surrounding her made her the perfect target for a self-avowed antsy, edgy teen like me. And so over the years I maintained the same narrative for myself and those around me: that pop music, with Swift as its herald and mascot, is for the superficial. To make matters worse, I was eager to create a persona for my “uniqueness,” which resulted in a playlist full of the so-called “old and classic” rock and roll musicians: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors and, of course, every single member of the Beatles.

It’s funny looking back, as many of these bands were once considered “pop music” too. What I did not realize at that time was that listening to Swift’s music allowed one to be lighthearted, to have crushes and to dream about them, to be proudly girly without taking the blame.

And that’s hard. To accept that I am a girl, and with the advent of adolescence I would become more and more “girly,” stepping out of the relatively comfortable neutrality of childhood into the more restricted, more defined territory of womanhood, to possibly be reduced into what so many women around me appear to be — good wives and good mothers and good cooks and good house cleaners but never self-fulfilled, never seeming to be happy under their perfect housewife facet — that’s so damn hard.

And so, to choose Pink Floyd et al. over Taylor Swift meant something simple: liberation. Independence. Depth. It is a statement saying: “I am not like other girls so when are you bailing me out of this invisible prison of expectations?”

We have to face it, teenage femininity has long been associated with superficiality. Many voices tell you, again and again, that girls only pay attention to their makeup, that girls are not interested in “deep” subjects like astrophysics or political science, that girls are so boring they just keep talking about boys. And when a girl is not like that, the same narrative will tell her that she is different, that she is “cooler,” that she deserves a reward somehow for denying her femininity.

Therefore, so many of us — unique as we may all be — developed a sense of involuntary exclusion from and mistrust toward our own gender, which propelled us into an endless, exhausting search for how to be edgier, how to be less girly, day after day.

And music is one important outlet. One powerful label that screams singularity. A pure, undefinable thing tainted and trapped by our desires to showcase our difference.

Self-identifying as unique is a beautiful, yet bitter feeling. I explored experimental alternative space rock, punk and post-punk. I tried classical music, Chopin and Bach, flowing under the mechanical fingertips of Maurizio Pollini. My Björk sits next to my Kraftwerk, next to my Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

At the same time, I hid my Swift songs at the bottom of my playlists.

I do listen to her, I do like her, but I don’t dare to declare it. I fear the loss of uniqueness. I fear people will look at me and think: just another shallow teenage girl with shallow interests.

When I dismiss Taylor Swift and all of her songs on femininity, teenage loves and struggles, am I dismissing my own right to these experiences too?

It has been hard to accept that I too can enjoy my femininity — that I don’t have to shun myself, my feelings and all the possibilities there are to come. Growing up in a conservative household where studying was the only thing I was ever permitted to do as a teenager, where putting on makeup or going on dates or even painting my nails were strict no-nos and every piece of clothing needed to cover and conceal my figure, this was a huge realization for me.

Femininity does not equate to superficiality and vice versa. It has dawned on me that I need to thoroughly inspect myself for self-defeating misogyny, and for that I need a kind of Kahlo-esque honesty.

There is nothing wrong with superficiality, as long as it does not become a tool of exclusion. When I make a dichotomy between the people who listen to Pink Floyd and the people who listen to Taylor Swift, when I started judging, I also cut myself in half trying to find who I am. And I simply do not wish to continue on that path anymore. I am done seeing myself as the “Other.” I should have a right to say: I AM WHO I AM. THAT’S IT.

At the time of writing, I still very much enjoy my Led Zeppelin CDs and David Bowie vinyls, but I no longer cringe when a Taylor Swift song comes on my shuffle. The Punk Movement during the 70s espoused the idea of rebellion just for the sake of it, and so, in the same spirit, I can’t think of anything punker than a former punk kid gradually welcoming her “guilty pleasure” Taylor Swift into her headphones — because after all, isn’t self-acceptance in a misogynistic world much more rebellious than denying myself just to look cool in conformity?

After all, is there anything punker than accepting my own constant changes, anything more beatnik than seeing my own inseparable self as a flowing river?