31 May 2025
I became a Swiftie right before the 1989 album released, so by the time reputation came out I was all in. Back then, the fandom was centralized on Tumblr and followed Taylor’s instagram and the speculations were that there would be some secret album called Eclipse that she would drop the night of the eclipse that August.
We stayed up late, just in case, freaked out as Taylor’s entire social media was wiped, and lost our collective cool when we first saw the snake. We were rewarded with the first single called Look What You Made Me Do from her upcoming album, a noted difference from the musical stylings of her five previous albums, and we ate it up like a lavish Thanksgiving dinner.
I don’t know what time I finally was able to fall asleep after the excitement, but I don’t think it was very long as I was developing some concerning symptoms that would later upend my life, one of them being extreme fatigue. When I woke up the next morning at 6:30 unexpectedly, the air felt different even inside my house. I looked out my window and the sky looked different in ways I still struggle to explain. I grabbed my phone, checked the radar, and saw that the hurricane that was slated to go south of us moved in the middle of the night and was now aiming straight for my county. We weren’t planning on leaving—we never leave—but this one was making us nervous. My sister had a 2-week-old baby and quickly she and my mom as well as her in-laws were on the road in the direction of Austin and out of harms way. Dad and I were staying behind with the dogs and to hopefully fend off looters. As we worked to secure everything on the property to avoid projectiles, we became increasingly nervous. By 10am dad and I had a discussion, loaded up the dogs, and followed our family, 2 hours from the suggested evacuation cut off time.
We passed National Guard vehicles going in the opposite direction and ended up in a hotel that also had Red Cross vehicles, lying out of harms way but poised to jump in to help in the aftermath. To say it was surreal is an understatement.
I sat on the hotel floor, watching storm chasers while also going on Target’s website to pre-order the reputation album and the magazines that were being released, pausing briefly to wonder if there would be a home to deliver to by the time it shipped and how would I change the address if not. Whose address could I use? Whose would be left?
I stayed awake riddled with anxiety, watching storm chasers as they showed places I knew well blown completely off the face of the earth, describing what couldn’t be seen in the darkness, wondering how my family that stayed behind was faring. They were told to write their social security numbers on their arms with sharpie so their bodies could be identified later. It was all surreal. (They survived, thankfully.)
The next morning, Dad received texts from our neighbor who stayed and we heard his horror story of holding their door closed for the entire duration of the storm while his wife mopped the never ending stream of water and their chickens blew away. He checked on our house which was still standing but ended up having to be stripped down in what was a nearly 4 year endeavor to get my parents back into their house. Dad heard from our neighbor and we learned of an open route we could use to reach home. We filled up any gas can we could fined, loaded up the dogs again, and headed home. Once we surveyed the damage, seeing the full extent of their house, fired up the generators and plugged in the fridges, we drove to the outskirts of the nearest town while dodging downed telephone poles and the cast offs from the cotton fields that covered the roads until we found a bar of service to call mom. As we parked on the overpass of this now ghost town, I pulled up YouTube and watched the lyric video for LWYMMD, trying to memorize the words and get the proper cadence to the chorus, not knowing the next time I’d have service to hear the song, wondering what I was missing in all the excitement everyone else was experiencing.
I don’t remember much of the next few months, and the preceding year is quite a blur. Not only did Hurricane Harvey obliterate my home town, my health was in sharp decline. By Spring 2018, I had to quite my job and stop dancing ballet because my health had gotten so bad I was nearly passing out at the simplest task. I was also losing friends to various different things in one of my biggest years of grief-by-friend-death that I’ve known, which if you know me you know is saying something.
As I found myself faced with all of these terrible things happening at once, all of this loss and change and grief and pain, there was a moment when I was walking from my parents trailer they were living in to my tiny house in the back yard that somehow faired best of any of the houses. I looked at the tree that held up the storage building next to my house which kept it from taking out my north wall. I’ve named this tree Fred, and he was in bloom. I thought back onto everything I’d lost, and considered everything in front of me. Every nerve was raw and, as someone who didn’t know how to let herself feel let alone grieve anything that was happening, I realized I had a choice:
I could stay the way I am, making the choices I’ve always made, doing what I was told and living a life that wasn’t serving me, or I could try something new.
Somehow, I knew deep down that the choice I had to make was the latter. If I wanted to survive, if I wanted to not become the ward of my parents and then my sister once they’re gone, if I wanted any hope of taking my life back and improving any smidge, I had to ask myself two questions with any thought I had:
Why do I think that? Who told me to?
Sounds simple enough, right? Oh, sweet summer child. “Simple”, yet it would go on to be the string I pulled that unraveled the sweater I had been stitching my entire life.
I started small, “Why do I think that I have to keep this job that I’m passing out at? Who told me to stay here?” Well, my parents told me this is the adult thing to do, and that life is hard so I need to just learn how to deal with it because it’ll be hard anywhere. So I quit.
”Why do I keep going to this church, even though the drive alone drains me and sets me back for the entire week, and I don’t feel like it’s adding anything to my life? Who told me I have to go?” Well, I go because I know everyone there. If I don’t go, they’ll definitely ask questions. I can hear them already in my head talking about me when I’m gone, speculating as to the real reason and assuming I’m a “heathen” or “fallen off the wagon” or whatever other things I’ve heard them say about other people. I’ve been raised in church my entire life, deeply committed, purity culture poster child, salutatorian of a bible college. I thought back to after I was in a bad car accident, and how no one from this church reached out to see if I was okay, and instead they assumed I was disgruntled and left the church. I was without a car and injured, not bitter or disgruntled, but they assumed. So I left.
On and on I used this metric to peel apart the layers of my life, identifying the different things that actually caused me stress which was triggering my health issues. Over time I learned I have Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, an inflammation of the brain stem that causes issues similar to that we’ve since seen in Long Covid patients. I had to get a handicap parking placard because I didn’t have the energy to walk a grocery store, let alone stand up long enough to make the food. I was pricing wheel chairs, but my chiropractor, the one medical professional who believed me, told me to avoid getting the wheelchair as long as I could because, “once you’re in the chair, you’ll never get out of it.” I couldn’t afford one, anyway, uninsured and now unemployed, except for teaching ballet classes at my studio which consisted of me sitting on a stool and pointing with a stick while my assistants essentially did everything. I owe my studio owners so much for allowing me to adapt the way I needed to in spite of it all.
Now, it’ll be 8 years this August since the hurricane. I’ve managed to slowly but surely push my baseline in ways I didn’t even expect. While I was considered relatively mild back then, I’m definitely considered mild now. I learned my ME was caused by stress (shocker, I know) and triggered by my inability to eat monounsaturated fats after my gallbladder was removed. Turns out it didn’t need to be removed, and my issues were caused by a genetic condition doctors said I didn’t have called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which affects connective tissue, and a co morbidity called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, which is where (TL;DR) your body is sensitive to histamines. Once I learned this, I was able to know how to treat, fuel, help my body and slowly work my way back to a baseline that allows me to not only work, but also as of this week begin college classes.
My therapist asked me on Thursday how it felt to be in school. I told her it feels fake. This degree is something I’ve wanted for 20 years but wasn’t allowed back then because my family couldn’t afford it. Then when my health tanked, I never thought I’d be able to handle the course load to do it. So much so, that I never even considered it until a friend of mine heard me mention it casually and she said, “Well, why can’t you?” and when I tried to list all the things, she debunked them, gently, one by one. Finally I said, “I can’t do math, Rose” and she said, “Emilee, there’s AI now you’ll be fine.” Listen, I’m not a fan of AI and avoid it as much as any human can, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t that I would use AI for any math class I have to take, but moreso that I felt supported. I realized in that moment that I had friends now who knew math and would be more than willing to help me. I’ve built a life filled with people who add to my life, not just suck it out of me because I’m helpful and convenient.
It used to be difficult for me to listen to reputation because it brought back really painful memories from the hurricane and the life I used to live before. I got to go to the reputation studio tour, though I couldn’t drive to Houston because that one limitation I still have even to this day, I had a friend graciously offer to go with me, even though she didn’t care for Taylor’s music and stayed somewhere else while I was at the concert. I took my cane with me. My phone fell outside the stadium, only breaking my back camera leaving me only with unzoomable selfie camera and my polaroid. I remember so little of it from my own memories given my physical limitations at the time affecting my cognitive function, but I was there.
As the Eras Tour came around, I was too afraid to be disappointed (at no fault of Taylor’s, mind you) and thus ruining things that I almost didn’t even try for tickets. When I decided to at least try, I panicked when I didn’t get them first day, being thrown to the back of the line instead of the front with our reputation tour boosts. Thankfully they corrected the second day and I scored tickets to Kansas City night one.
My fear was rooted in experience, but what I forgot in that fear was all the things that were happening last time that weren’t happening this time. I was a completely different person then, living a life I was told to live, grieving the loss of friends who had died and ones you’d decided not to be in my life anymore, figuring out the limitations of my illness, filled with so much uncertainty.
But now?
Now, I’m living a life I’ve chosen, filled with people who love me and actually care about me as a person. I’m working a job I enjoy, going to school for my dream degree. I’m setting myself up for a life that is sustainable, where I won’t have to rely on people who don’t understand me and who bring me down simply because they’re the people I know. I’m building a life where I am enough. I’m doing the work to unlearn everything that doesn’t serve me and relearn the things that make my nervous system stay calm. I’m learning to trust myself, my voice, my inner knowing even if it offends someone else. I’m learning not to disappoint myself even if it disappoints others. I’m working with an incredible therapist who, ironically, lives in the town we evacuated to and who has done more for me in our 16 months together than I could have ever hoped for in a lifetime.
As I stood in my kitchen making eggs this morning, I was thinking about Taylor’s letter she wrote about being able to buy all of her previous work, and how reputation was so perfect she couldn’t imagine how to improve it in a re-record. And now she doesn’t have to. And at first, I felt that pang of hurt I’ve felt from the pain I experienced during the release. But then, I played the album, safe now to stream without lining the pockets of assholes.
And what filled my head was memories of Eras Tour, memories of redemption, memories of recounting seeing Karyn in Houston in 2018 and how much this album still does truly hold up. I could listen to these songs and not feel pain, but feel freedom.
And I stood there, and I thought, “goodness, this feels like it would have been such a perfect representation for when I took my life back” and as I started to think, “I wish it would have been around then”, I realized, it was.
This album was what I was listening to as I stood next to Fred, considering my next options, every nerve exposed and emotion raw. This album is what I played as I was taught by my dear friend Nargiza how to learn to grieve. This album is what was playing as I made hard decision after hard decision, playing as I built myself back, playing as I made new, true friends, playing as I reclaimed myself.
This album was introduced to the public the exact day of my life that I point to when people ask if I can remember the day everything changed for me, and it’s been with me ever since, and now it’s with me as I stand here, a new person, living boldly the life I was always meant to and building a life I’m so proud of. And I can stream it, knowing full well that Taylor gets all of the credit for her work after her long, hard fight to do so.
What an incredible ride.
1988- 