How Do You Come Back From THAT?
A few thoughts as I disappear down a Taylor Swift and fear of success rabbit hole.
You know how I wrote about rabbit holes a short while ago? Well, I’ve been going down a Taylor Swift one since we saw her concert in Lisbon. She is currently in the UK for her European leg of the tour and my TikTok feed is full of her Edinburgh performances and the newspapers regularly have articles about her. Plus my daughter has made me a massive playlist of her songs that I’m steadily working through. She’s therefore been at the forefront of my mind, somewhat.
So, last night I started to watch Miss Americana on Netflix, a documentary about Taylor Swift. I loved seeing her songwriting process. I could watch an entire documentary on just that. All was well and good until that moment at the 2009 MTV VMAs when Taylor was receiving an award and making her acceptance speech and an uninvited Kayne West appeared on stage and interrupted by saying Beyonce’s video was better. Taylor was nineteen years old and the crowd were booing Kanye but, confused and embarrassed standing there on her own, she thought they were booing her.
I won’t go through the entire drama (which included the Kardashians) but will reference how Kanye then released a song with the line ‘I made that bitch famous’ and in his concerts the crowd would chant ‘f**k Taylor Swift’. Twitter was then flooded with the hashtag #taylorswiftisoverparty. The vile misogyny of it all made me feel sick and my heart wrench, and seeing her bewildered face on the stage, completely and utterly humiliated, haunted me.
How do you deal with that? How do you come back from that?
This is one of my deepest fears. And it has stopped me from progressing as quickly as I would like with my writing.
What if someone dislikes me or my writing so much they deliberately go out of their way to do me harm causing psychological distress?
I’d like to think I’d have the mental strength to deal with it - but it would be hard.
This, I believe, is part of fear of success. Fear of the negative side to success. And maybe this is my anxiety speaking but I do feel - sometimes - that everyone will hate me. Or, rather, will hate what I write. I mean, that’s quite arrogant of me, barely anyone knows about my work. But what if, someone as influential as Kanye West comes across my work, decides it isn’t worthy enough and proceeds to attempt to demolish my career?
What if.
Unlikely as it is, it’s always there at the back of my mind because it stops me from pushing forward with my writing ambitions. Or at least, it has in the past. What I write is sooo vulnerable. If it’s criticised it’s like people are critiquing me, personally. You cannot differentiate one from the other.
Just yesterday I read that if you have a worst case scenario you also, as a matter of balance, need a best-case scenario too. Plus the most-likely scenario. So that’s definitely something for me to think about. I always like to think about how I can control or regain control of the situation as well. To work through these worse-case scenarios and plan out how I could deal with them.
I think what has helped me the most, however, is just acknowledging I have this fear and not being embarrassed by it. Even though, rationally, I know it sounds ridiculous and would never happen, I’ve still written about it and spoken about it. And you know when you speak of something bad then it loses some of it’s power? Well, that’s obviously working because I am now making progress.
As for Taylor. Well, what Taylor did was to go underground for a year. And she processed it all with her storytelling lyrics, coming up with what I feel is her best album, Reputation (don’t come for me!) From what I understand, she took the snake motif that had been used against her and claimed it as her own in all the album’s imagery.
She’s then gone on to create and perform in a tour that has beaten all records to become the highest grossing tour ever. Not a bad comeback, eh? She’s also sold a few albums too.
There’s a lesson for all of us who have (what can be a debilitating) fear of success. If Taylor can come back from being humiliated on stage, in song lyrics, chants and hashtags, then I’m sure I can cope with whatever will be thrown at me in my much smaller creative career.
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Thank you for sharing this, Helen. I really appreciate you're vulnerability and transparency. I'm completely new to Substack. I have imposter syndrome and I'm so scared of the unknown. Thank you for giving me the boost I needed to, just start!
“if you have a worst case scenario you also, as a matter of balance, need a best-case scenario too.” - gosh we’re such pros at worst case scenarios, this is a great reminder to be a pro at best case scenarios too!