Taylor’s Totalitarianism: Three Controversial Insights into Swift’s Spellbinding Sorcery
Megastar isn’t strong enough; we need a new word to describe the power of influence that is Taylor Swift circa 2024.
The 34-year-old billionaire musical mogul, in the middle of her worldwide Eras Tour, was recently named Wall Street Journal’s Person of the Year. Her celebrity is exalted amongst celebrities, as 2024 Grammy host Trevor Noah joked, “As Taylor Swift moves through the room, the local economy around those tables improves”. My hometown of Melbourne spent however many million taxpayer dollars decorating Flinders Street station to celebrate her being there, and the multi-generational hysteria amongst the public with her in the country is palpable. Not to mention it’s impossible to be on social or mainstream media without encountering a barrage of Swift sensationalism. If aliens landed here tomorrow, they’d be forgiven for assuming this is Taylor’s world and we’re just living in it. The magnitude of her present command is such that it seems imbued with an almost superhuman quality.
Now, through working with people for so many years, I’ve developed a pretty good bullshit meter. One rudimentary rule in reading between the lines is that when you feel something is being shoved down your throat, or seems too good to be true, alarm bells should start going off. Here are three of my very controversial opinions on the current celestial commander-in-chief to rattle some cages. Hold on to your panties, Swifties!
1. She is Autistic
Although not possible to diagnose anyone without a proper assessment, my impression, based on clinical experience, is that Taylor is likely on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. It might not seem this way based on the stereotype, but girls and women with this condition tend to present much differently to boys and men, which means they often go undiagnosed. We can’t assume to know someone through glimpses of their art and public persona. However, people are already so consumed with polarizing opinions about Taylor Swift that I decided my interpretation could bring some clarity and assist people in understanding this modern-day sage (and perhaps even themselves).
A hallmark of autism is having restricted interests and repetitive patterns of behavior present from a young age. Taylor has spoken about her obsession with songwriting and fame that started at a very young age, to the point she begged her parents to buy her a guitar and move to Nashville. She has relentlessly pursued her goal of making it as a country singer. Her music and media representation also suggest that boys and dating are a particular hyper-focus within Taylor’s life.
People on the autism spectrum also tend to be very disciplined and detail-oriented. This often results in them developing a special interest in something they hyperfocus on and may hone and master over time. This gives rise to the stereotype most of us are familiar with of the autistic savant. While not everyone with autism is gifted, around 30% of people on the autism spectrum have skills that are considered exceptional, such as great recall, photographic memory, or perfect pitch. While some people on the autism spectrum struggle with language and communication, others can have an acute affinity for verbal expression, devoting much attention to learning and applying language as precisely as possible, in what is known as hyperlexia. The fact that Swift’s lyricism is studied across several university courses, including one at Harvard, attests to her exceptional relationship with language.
Another defining feature of autism, which can manifest differently across the sexes, is sensory overwhelm and difficulty with emotional regulation. Due to a hypersensitive and often dysregulated nervous system, people on the autism spectrum just seem to experience more: more noise, more light, more excitement, more hurt, more everything. While autistic males often cope by appearing emotionally aloof, females can seem hyper-emotional. However, they may struggle to manage and contain their emotions. Swift has certainly spoken about using music to help her cope with overwhelming emotions and process her experiences. She has also garnered some criticism for over-dramatizing her relationships and breakups in a way that hints at the depths at which these emotions have moved her.
Difficulties with sensory and emotional regulation in autism is related to a neurological abnormality of reduced neural pruning that results in processing overlaps. In fact, the brains of people with autism have been shown to process more information per second than a neurotypical brain, and to generate much more original information. For these reasons, some people consider the autistic brain as running advanced software. Many people with autism have the capacity to see links and connections between things that others do not. Taylor certainly has an uncanny ability to extract data points from the human experience that others might miss, and craft songs around them in a way that sounds just like the emotions felt.
Due to this sensory processing overlap, a common comorbidity of autism is synaesthesia, a condition where a sensory stimulus involuntarily elicits an experience in a different sensory pathway. This results in experiences like seeing colors as feelings, letters as genders, or perceiving numbers in specific locations or events. Taylor has always spoken about her love for the number 13 and how it has been present in all significant events of her life. All her albums have been assigned a separate color. She regularly equates feelings to colors in her music, such as in the songs Maroon and Lavender Haze, and lyrics like “loving you was red”, “you showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else”, and “I once believed love would be black and white, but it’s golden”.
A barrage of sensory information in the absence of a reliable pruning and ranking system also makes it hard for these individuals to learn the implicit rules for getting by in the world, so every problem or frustration can feel like it’s being encountered for the first time. This becomes especially problematic socially. The volume of information being received during social interactions can drown out more relevant social cues, meaning these individuals often struggle with the unwritten social customs, nuances, and expectations that others subconsciously know without ever having to be explicitly taught.
Perhaps the most profound difference between traditionally female and male presentations of autism is in the social adaptations made to try and get by in the world. Females on the autistic spectrum tend to be more adept at observing and mimicking human social cues than their male counterparts. While boys more often cope with sensory and emotional overwhelm by shutting down, girls can use it to hyper-attune and become codependent as a way of gaining a sense of social safety.
Whether a product of socialization, biology, or both, girls on the autism spectrum are more likely to learn at an early age that their best chance of surviving this overwhelming and confusing social world is to “fake it till you make it” — a phrase repeated in several of Swift’s lyrics. They commit themselves to consciously learning the social rules that others automatically absorb, and often this becomes a hyperfocus in itself. Thus, females on the spectrum can become expert anthropologists, exquisitely sensitive to the human experience and the nuances of interactions and felt emotion, something Taylor puts to brilliant use in her music.
The use of imitation to try and fit in with peers, even if those skills do not come naturally to someone, is called masking. When I see Taylor being interviewed, I see the masking. She does such a good job at it that it’s undetectable by most, and I think she comes across as very likable and authentic. But it’s in the slightly exaggerated prosocial physical cues, stifled microaggressions, reduced facial mirroring, and delay between stimulus and response. Some people might be subconsciously picking up on it when they claim she seems contrived.
This suppression of autistic traits and copying of others can be done consciously or unconsciously but requires a lot of energy and mental work. If the girl is highly intelligent, as Swift obviously is, they can become particularly adept at this, eventually becoming a social chameleon, able to read a room and present themselves however they feel would be most accepted. As the singer said in her song Blank Space, she can “find out what you want. Be that girl for a month”, and in Mirrorball “I’m a mirrorball. I can change everything about me to fit in”. Swift describes how these social adaptations function as an attempt to avoid abandonment in her song Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, declaring, “I changed into goddesses, villains and fools. Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules. All to outrun my desertion of you. And you just watched it”. Swift is also known for reinventing her image for each new album, from country girl, retro New York, dark and vengeful, cottage core, artsy, and everything in between.
These females can be so consumed with this social strategizing that they become masters at controlling situations and eliciting the circumstances and reactions they desire. In her song Antihero, Taylor talks about her fear that those close to her will leave her because they got “tired of my scheming (For the last time)”. This shows Swift’s awareness of her ability to manipulate situations, something she said lyrically that she “felt the need to confess” to in her song Mastermind with the lyrics “What if I told you none of it was accidental? … I laid the groundwork. And then. Just like clockwork. The dominoes cascaded in a lin. What if I told you I’m a mastermind?”
It’s not uncommon to find women on the autism spectrum who are highly successful professionally and often socially due to this skill. They can become so good at imitating they almost do a better job at being whatever they are imitating than the thing itself. Celebrities and interviewers who meet Taylor often say they were blown away by how “normal” she is. Yet, her life is so abnormal it’s not normal for her to be normal. The fact she comes across as more normal than most “normal” people you’re likely to meet shows the effort behind constructing her image. As Swift reveals in Mirrorball, “I’ve never been a natural. All I do is try, try, try”.
When Taylor won Billboard’s Women of the Decade award in 2019, her acceptance speech addressed her attempts to appease critics by dramatically altering her life choices: “They’re saying I’m dating too much in my 20s? Okay! I’ll stop and just be single — for years… Now it’s that I’m showing you too many pictures of me with my friends. Okay, I can stop doing that too. Now I’m actually a calculated manipulator rather than a smart businesswoman? Okay, I’ll disappear from public view — for years. Now I’m being cast as a villain to you? Okay”. I would add that perhaps one of the reasons she stayed with most recent ex, Joe Alwyn, as long as she did, despite being seemingly unhappy, according to her song lyrics at least, was to try and change the public image the media had put on her as someone who struggles to keep a man. Being a smart marketer is one thing, but rearranging your life to avoid criticism is self-defeating at worst, and futile at best.
Some of Taylor’s lyrical reflections on her self-proclaimed scheming reveal something that many, if not all, autistic people have grappled with, and that’s shame. In a prominent line of Antihero, Taylor confesses “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me”, and asks: “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism? Like some kind of congressman?” This vulnerable line reveals something I’d imagine Swift has deeply struggled with. I suspect she may have spent many nights lying awake in bed, torturing herself over whether or not she is a terrible person for all this faking and manipulation. Spoiler — she’s not, but double spoiler — there is some value in exploring guilt around this.
In fact, I think it’s very important to unpack the concept of narcissism a little bit here as its misunderstanding can be very dehumanizing and detrimental. My PhD thesis explored the concept of covert narcissism, also known as vulnerable narcissism, and how it relates to constructs like co-dependency, people-pleasing, and altruism. Like all narcissism, the covert form tends to come from a deep feeling of not belonging or not being good enough, that a person subconsciously attempts to cope with by developing a false self. The false-self attempts to strategically gain a sense of belonging. In the covert form, this looks like an attempt to make oneself needed by being a universally liked helper-type who is often self-deprecating, self-sacrificing, and takes the moral high ground. The overt form, which most people are more familiar with, is when an individual attempts to gain admiration through control tactics and grandiose displays. But these are all simply attempts to gain power in manipulative ways because one’s innate power was undermined in childhood. Often, there is much overlap, too, depending on the situation. Both presentations are insecure, sensitive to criticism, passive-aggressive, have difficulty with long-term relationships, have a victim mentality, and have a history of emotional withdrawal. Indeed, these qualities could apply to Swift at her worst, based on themes in her songwriting and the history the public has been given about her.
However, people need to realize that narcissism, like all diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by clinicians (DSM-V), does not exist as an absolute and discrete entity. All psychiatric conditions are subjectively diagnosed on a categorical checklist of symptoms when they actually live on a continuous sliding scale within the population. There is no objective point whereby someone officially has any of these conditions. Many, if not all, of the psychiatric conditions you might have heard of, been diagnosed with, or spent too much time in an emotional TikTok spiral worrying you might suffer with, including autism, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety, depression, etc., have more in common with each other than they do differences. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for people with autism to be misdiagnosed with one of these conditions; females often get borderline personality disorder, while males are more likely to be labelled with narcissism.
At the root of these is a phenotypical neurodivergence. I’ve personally come to understand neurodivergence as related to varying combinations of genetic predisposition and environmental or psychological stress and trauma resulting in certain degrees and patterns of neuroinflammation, but that’s just the technical stuff.
What is worth knowing is that while autistic brains are not inevitably prone to developing a mood or personality disorder like narcissism, they do have a heightened response to stress, which makes them more vulnerable to the effects of trauma. And problematically, living life as an autistic person in the world today is usually inherently very traumatic.
It is estimated currently that around 66% of people with an autism spectrum diagnosis live with a comorbid mental health disorder, and most will struggle with a mental health disorder at some point in their lives. Boys and men are more likely to act out their emotional struggles, while girls are more likely to internalize them and suffer things like anxiety and depression. Indeed, Swift references her struggles with melancholy in her songs. Her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, in particular, delves into themes of depression, with several references to suicidal ideation and death.
Living with an overestimated and dysregulated nervous system is very confusing and overwhelming, especially when people do not understand why they are struggling with things their peers may not struggle with. Starting in childhood, autistic people are usually aware that there’s something weird about them. An autistic child might be constantly told by parents they’re selfish or rude for failing to pick up on and comply with social conventions. They may not understand why their peers make fun of them or don’t want to play with them. They might be scolded to pay attention or calm down when feeling overstimulated. They might be labelled useless when not allowed the extra processing time needed to learn and execute a task, and over time, learned helplessness can result. Problematically, these parents are very often neurodivergent themselves, making them more likely to miss the child’s social cues and be overstimulated by the child’s emotional needs, making attuning to the child even more difficult. Not understanding why people always seem mad or disappointed with them, these children often end up spending lots of time alone. This social exclusion then often turns into internalized self-criticism, and over time, self-esteem is eroded.
Thus, these children typically come to believe there’s something wrong or bad about them. They feel misunderstood and underestimated by the world and decide that interdependence in relationships is to be avoided. Instead, they often withdraw to the comfort of their special interest and develop many patterns of self-protective control in interpersonal interactions. The child decides, albeit subconsciously, that if no one will accept them for who they are then they need to come up with some type of manipulation to secure them a place in the tribe. They make behavioral adaptations, such as “I’ll get respect by being the best/ fastest/smartest”, or “I’ll become super helpful and flattering of others then they will have to like me”, or “I don’t need them anyway, I’m better than them, they’re just jealous”.
Swift has this explicit insight in her song Mastermind: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid. So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since. To make you love me and make it seem effortless”. In The Bolter Swift states “I can confirm she made. A curious child. Ever reviled. By everyone except her own father. Splendidly selfish, charmingly helpless. Excellent fun ’til you get to know her. Then she runs like it’s a race”. However, the scheming and bolting she’s referring to would more accurately be called adaptive coping. It’s not an inherent flaw in a person, or a sign of evil or selfishness, but instead an inevitable human response to feeling outcast.
The volume of work Swift puts out, and the magnitude of her professional feats, suggest that in addition to talent, she is driven to work by a strong desire to prove herself. Swift’s song ThanK you aIMe details the experience of not being able to let go of being mistreated by someone, and using that anger to fuel her creative endeavors over many years: “And it was always the same searing pain. But I prayed that one day, I could say. All that time you were throwing punches. I was building something. And I couldn’t wait to show you it was real”.
Problematically, these maladaptive belief systems and the behaviors they invite, such as perfectionism or people-pleasing, are often encouraged and reinforced by misguided parents who don’t see them for what they are. As Alice Miller pointed out in her classic The Drama of The Gifted Child, if the parent (usually the mother) is anxious and dysregulated, these sensitive children are particularly at risk of hyper-attuning and behaving in ways to try and please at the expense of their own authenticity. This creates codependent adults with a fragile sense of identity who can remain in a childlike ego state of idealizing the parent whilst remaining terrified to face themselves. Swift sums up the stifling experience of being a child who acts like a grown-up in But Daddy I Love Him, stating, “Growing up precocious sometimes means. Not growing up at all”. Swift also often refers to her mother as her favorite person and has revealed she was her only friend for a lot of years. In her thanK you aIMe lyric “Everyone knows that my mother is a saintly woman”, Swift casts a silhouette of idealization.
Although coming at the expense of true self-expression, these behavioral adaptations do work to secure a sense of belonging… until they don’t. Masking is exhausting and eventually leads to small or big episodes of burnout. The cracks show at some point. When the mask is exposed people with this fragile personality structure come undone. This is where we see things like eating disorders, drug or alcohol use, dissociation, or impulsive behavior such as conflict seeking, as an emergency attempt to block out the shame and unworthiness that sits beneath. Swift has talked openly about her history of eating disorders, and describes herself as a “functioning alcoholic” in one lyric from Fortnight. Her song I Hate It Here seems to me a depiction of dissociative coping with lyrics like “I’ll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I’ll get lost on purpose. This place made me feel worthless. I hate it here so I will go to. Secret gardens in my mind. People need a key to get to. The only one is mine”.
As an example of this shame flooding that occurs when one’s mask is threatened, Swift has discussed how being publicly accused of being a “snake” by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West following a feud they were in over an alleged phone conversation sent her into a deep depression where she did not want to be seen and did not leave her house for a full year.
Another major side effect of masking is seething resentment and repressed rage. If kids are made to feel weird or wrong when they express themselves, they rightfully accept that they must perform a certain way to gain acceptance. They can even begin to lose touch with their own needs and feelings. But they never lose the deep longing to be accepted for who they really are, to have their needs met for a change, or the anger towards the world for not allowing them to realize this innate human desire.
In romantic relationships, people with this pattern will likely oscillate between idealization and devaluation of a partner. They may initially be whomever they have to so as to be accepted by their object of desire. Because the promise of getting it right is so appealing: all sins of the past are forgiven in the warmth of the perfect union. This drives what is known as co-dependency, an excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner. The belief is that if I can be the parent you never had, you will bond with me and always need me, and if you can be the parent I never had, all my pain will go away — what a sweet deal. Yet, over time, resentment bubbles up as the false self grows tired of performing and feels their partner is failing to adequately reimburse them for all the hard work with sufficient adulation. Swift has expressed this sentiment in her lyrics: “I know my love should be celebrated. But you tolerate it”. In Goodbye London, she sings of a long-term lover’s “quiet resentment”, asking, “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof”.
Of course, no external validation can ever be enough to scratch the old itch or rewrite the negative belief about not being good enough because it’s all been earned only by the efforts of the false self. The underlying shame intensifies, and more and more validation is needed to subdue it. More secure partners often tire under the weight of the pressure to make them feel special or to live up to their projections and expectations. In You’re Losing Me, Taylor encapsulates this predicament of wanting to be truly seen yet never showing up authentically when she sings “I wouldn’t marry me either. A pathological people pleaser. Who only wanted you to see her”.
Swift’s rage towards past lovers or friends who have wronged her is no secret: There are not many things you could call a man that would hurt more than the “smallest man who ever lived”, right Matty Healy? This pattern of idealization followed by devaluation in relationships, which is simply an immature mental model of self and other, common in autism spectrum disorders and personality disorders, runs rampant throughout Swifts music, with the majority of her songs falling into one of two categories: Giddy falling in love track, or seething break up track.
This can also give rise to what people call the “twin flame” fantasy; a concept directly alluded to several times in Swift’s work that represents this desire for perfect mirroring by a romantic partner in an attempt to satiate psychological lacking from childhood. These relationships can be very addictive and damaging. When two people who both have significant wounding in this area get together, they are explosive. This is what tends to play out in the twin flame dynamic whereby partners oscillate between periods of intense merging and violent separations, in which the long-cherished idea of the perfect union far outweighs the actual experience of it. As Swift puts it in Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, it’s “cooler in theory, but not if you force it… to be”, or more succinctly in Fortnight, “I love you, it’s ruining my life”. These relationships often seem to have an almost religious or spiritual element to them (Swift asks in Guilty As Sin “What if the way you hold me, is actually what’s holy?), and people can end up justifying all sorts of mistreatment, with sentiments like the one Swift expressed in My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys: “Pull the string. And I’ll tell you that he runs. Because he loves me. Cause you should’ve seen him. When he first saw me”.
The Tortured Poets Department immaculately describes all of this. Across several songs (E.g. Down Bad, I Hate It Here, Guilty As Sin, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, lolm, Goodbye London, How Did It End, Fresh Out The Slammer, etc.), Swift details the experience of being in a codependent relationship with an avoidant-type man whose mood she felt responsible for lifting, but in which she ultimately felt ignored, bored, misunderstood, and inadequately loved, whom she stayed with out of a sense of “long suffering propriety”. She then contrasts this with the antidote of a “crazy” “self-destructive” disorganized-type man who made her feel like the “chosen one” and showed her “cosmic love” in a “cyclone” of a relationship but almost immediately ghosted her, leaving her confused as to what had happened, with a shattered sense of self and suicidal ideation: “Like I lost my twin”, “I might just die it would make no difference”. This was a dichotomy Swift disparagingly characterized with the stereotypes of a “finance guy” vs. “poet” in I Hate It Here (presumedly detailing a fantasied escape from boring avoidant Joe) then a “hot-house flower” to an “outdoorsman” in How Did it End (seemingly after it didn’t work out with overly fragile disorganized Matty). Of course, neither dynamic will work for people in this situation, as what they are seeking through these partners can only come from within.
In the Prophecy, Swift laments, “Hand on the throttle. Thought I caught lightning in a bottle. Oh, but it’s gone again. And it was written. I got cursed like Eve got bitten. Oh, was it punishment? Please. I’ve been on my knees. Change the prophecy. Don’t want money. Just someone who wants my company. Let it once be me”. But such mysteries usually disappear when people see the impossible task they have been asking of others in relationships, and that it wasn’t just good company or shared values they were selecting their partners for. The real poetic torture of life doesn’t come from the tribulations of love affairs, it comes from grappling deeply with our own perceived badness.
The cosmic joke of this, however, is that the narcissistic rage itself contains the secret sauce needed for healing this very dynamic. The anger aimed at others exists as an attempt to maintain balance in the nervous system by counteracting the shame and depression. It’s coming from the healthy part, albeit in an extreme and unsophisticated way, that knows one’s worthiness. Swift perfectly describes this in her song Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? when she states “If you wanted me dead, you should’ve just said. Nothing makes me feel more alive…Who’s afraid of little old me? You should be”. You can hear Swift in real time surrendering to all the suppressed narcissistic rage in this song, as she belts out “So tell me everything is not about me. But what if it is? Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me. But what if they did? I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me”.
Swift has made news recently for apparently trademarking the phrase “Female Rage” with talks she plans to turn it into a musical. She has spoken previously about feeling victimized and penalized for being a woman in the entertainment industry. To me, this professional exploration is Swift embarking on a healing journey to reclaim her true self: her right to express herself authentically, real, raw, and imperfect.
However, I hope that rather than filtering this rage through a lens of victimhood and focusing too much on institutionalized female suppression, Swift can personalize it. Victimhood, whether loud or quiet, is simply another covert grab for power. Swift is at a point in her life when her innate power is undeniable and can be exercised overtly in any direction she wants. But to be in a place of choosing what we want, according to our deepest values, we need to be aware of the subconscious fears that otherwise influence us and release ourselves from their grip.
Anger, in general, is a stepping stone to love. The chaotic, rigid, and uncaring expression of anger that we (especially men) can associate with strength, is far from it. In its highest form, anger is sweet and constructive. It tells us how we need to protect what matters. It sweeps up the grief, loss, loneliness, and pain of what we’ve been through and what we must leave behind and catapults us back into the life-stream of the highest callings of our heart.
And ask anyone with a mother, sister, wife, girlfriend or daughter; there ain’t no anger like that female anger. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as they say. At the most basic level, female rage is about the protection of young. It’s a mother zebra fearlessly and aggressively defending her baby from a bloodthirsty lion that’s twice her size. Google that shit — there’s no more powerful force I know of in this world. As a mother, it gives me goose bumps because I feel it in my bones. Healthy female rage is not about being a victim, being angry at men, or screaming and venting just to get it off our chest: that’s just hysteria, and boy do we have enough of that in the world already. Healthy female rage is about fighting to protect innocence with total disregard for any other consequences. And this, our world is starving for.
And men aren’t the enemy. Our culture equally suppresses them in regard to their ability to express their true nature, which is why they’re limited in their ability to show up in a protective and complimentary way for the women in our world. Men also need loving back to wholeness. Demonizing them as the enemy simply puts us all back in the dark.
If instead of venting and finger-pointing, Swift uses her rage to face her pain and violently and unapologetically advocate for and embody the qualities of vulnerability, innocence, authenticity, self-expression, spontaneity, goodness, acceptance, love, connection, curiosity, compassion, etc, which seem to be her most powerful innate resources, the world is in for a healthy treat.
Swift has garnered criticism over the years for seemingly acting like a teenager in to her 20’s and 30’s. Indeed, it’s common for people on the autism spectrum to possess a childlike innocence and enthusiasm, as well as a childlike sense of justice and longing to drop the duplicitous charades of the adult social world so that everyone just gets along. This is a quality that can make them overly trusting of others and somewhat naïve. However, it’s also an endearing quality, and when appropriately nurtured and fiercely protected, it’s an unstoppable force of revolution.
I want to make the point here that I am not trying to expose Taylor Swift with this analysis, nor tear her down at all. Quite the opposite. I want people to continue to love and celebrate her the way they currently do. But I’d love them to have a bit more insight into why they love her so much. If we plucked an average Swifty from the crowd and asked them to qualify their love for Taylor, I imagine they’d talk about how she is amazing, inspiring, and relatable, and how her music has helped them through life. But if we were to distil this down, I think what’s really cemented the devotion of her fans is she makes them feel seen. She makes her listeners feel less alone in their experience of life. And I suspect part of her ability to do this is because she is so exquisitely speaking to the heretofore voiceless experience of neurodivergence. It’s the same reason why quirky indie films with manic-pixie-dream-girls and awkward male leads are so popular. The irony of where we are with this epidemic currently, however, is that while teenagers and adults with autism would have grown up in a time when they were, in fact, the exception to the norm, it is increasingly becoming the case that neurodiversity is the norm rather than the exception, and it’s a norm without any real models or guideposts.
The reason it’s so relevant to know that Taylor Swift may be on the autism spectrum is that she holds so much power and influence over our youth and popular culture that accurately understanding her psychology could have immeasurable repercussions towards saving a population that is currently going under in a mental health tsunami.
Recent estimates from the CDC found one in 36 children were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, and this rate is increasing every year, with prevalence having increased over 300% since the year 2000. Speculations as to why this may be occurring aside, it is a remarkably formidable statistic. There are very real concerns about how our society will be able to support all the children who fall into the low-functioning category as they grow up, but those with high-functioning autism also present unique challenges. Rates of mental illness are also soaring these days, especially among young people. Due to issues like long wait times, crowded services, accessibility blocks, and lack of early intervention, the mental health system is unable to meet the needs of the public as tens of thousands of people with severe and complex mental health needs are left untreated each year. While there are many factors likely related to the rising rates of mental illness, it’s my belief that autism spectrum aetiology, impacting the nervous system and people’s information processing, is playing a much bigger part in our mental health crisis than is currently recognized.
It’s nice that Taylor’s music helps people feel less alone. But more than that, her ability and willingness to communicate these subtle psychological dynamics through her music affords our youth the opportunity to understand themselves better, and from this comes an unlimited potential for healing on a grand scale.
Few things make me cringe as much as witnessing two people, both clearly neurodivergent, heavily masking with each other. There’s so much wasted energy, re-traumatizing, and missed creative potential in that. If one was brave enough to drop the mask, both would breathe such a sigh of relief and unlock a profound depth of connection. But this type of “bidirectional masking” is becoming increasingly common. Other celebrities who to me seem clearly autistic, with varying degrees of masking, include Jerry Seinfeld, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Cooper, and many, many, more.
More adults are seeking an autism spectrum assessment each year, yet much of it is either happening in silence or discussed on a purely intellectual level. My suspicion is that in the not-too-distant future such a diagnosis will be so ubiquitous it will lose much of its meaning, but of paramount importance will be making sure people know how to manage themselves within this experience.
If I were working with Taylor — or anyone who identified with these sentiments in her music — I’d help them recontextualize their experiences related to maladaptive beliefs about themselves. I’d make sure they could see their mental health symptoms in adulthood as an inflamed nervous system relative to the stressors of the environment and a set of ineffective behavioral strategies they learned as a child that the subconscious is just repeating indefinitely as a retained reflex. From this understanding, so many things can be done to enrich someone’s life.
I’d make sure they understood that while a bit of guilt can be useful to alert us to behaviors that don’t align with who we really want to be, shame, which tells us who we are is bad or wrong, is never helpful and we must become allergic to it. Because at the bottom of it is always innocence and misguided attempts to protect it. I’d help them learn to embrace all the suppressed self-protective anger and turn it into compassion for themselves by appreciating how hard things have been and how clever they were to have found a way through. I’d help them take accountability for their growth and choices as an adult, and help them learn some explicit skills, including emotional regulation, boundary setting, and communication, to negate the need for old dysfunctional self-protective adaptations and facilitate unmasking and more authentic self-expression.
Maturity is taking responsibility for ourselves and recognizing that not everyone is going to understand or like us, but if we can understand and like ourselves, not for our accomplishments, utility to others, or public approval ratings, but simply for being our unique, flawed, but ultimately innocent and unique self, then we develop integrity. This is where the true sense of acceptance comes from, which we have been looking for from others, and it allows us to genuinely show up in relationships without rigid expectations. For Taylor, this might look like allowing herself to disappoint others: to be jet lagged after a live show and plane trip from Japan before the Super Bowl, for example (Swift was heard claiming that jet lag was a choice following her appearance at the Super Bowl recently). It would also likely look like allowing herself to be vulnerable and present to emotions in here-and-now human interactions rather than just in songs after the fact.
Taylor’s professional output would likely decrease if she did this healing, as she would have less desire to prove herself, though I’m sure her creativity would remain. Often, when people first “unmask”, or stop ignoring their internal experiences in favor of how they think they should feel and behave, they experience a regression in skills as they learn to manage the newly recognized sensory overload. They begin a detox from running on the adrenaline that has kept them focused on maintaining the unsustainable mask. My guess would be that if Taylor did his work, she may notice higher levels of sensory overload and could suddenly find performing on stage with all the lights and loud noise a bit overwhelming. I also suspect she might cultivate more contentedness within herself and intimate relationships — if this is what she truly desired.
A lot can also be done on a physical level to bring down neuroinflammation. For example, often people with this diagnosis have a compromised gut and immune system, which affects the central nervous system, and appropriate interventions, which I won’t go into here, can make a huge difference in terms of people’s functioning and symptoms. Interestingly, another common comorbidity of autism spectrum disorders is hypermobility, which is also related to a compromised immune system. In a 2016 interview for Vogue, Taylor appears double-jointed and revealed she could pop her elbow joint out as a party trick. If you look up videos of Swift signing her autograph, she unusually holds her pen between her middle two fingers, indicating difficulty with finger extension common in hypermobility disorders. I’ve also noticed Taylor’s curved spine and posture becoming more slouched as she ages. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she suffers from pain, digestive problems, thinning hair, and other things common with these conditions that can be improved considerably with holistic interventions.
I’d also invite anyone who relates to all this to consider flipping the script completely on how they saw their mental health problems. We live in a world where we are celebrated for our masks and shamed for our authenticity, rewarded for manipulation and penalized for vulnerability. Many people blindly operate on a set of outdated societal programs with little awareness of the bigger picture. The epidemic of autism and other mental health conditions we are seeing currently, though challenging, has given us a population of incredibly sensitive, creative, original, and innovative people with the discipline to stick with a problem until mastery. A cohort of people who are closer to their intuition and felt sense as a primary mode of navigating the world. People who abhor pretense and champion authenticity. Nature doesn’t do anything arbitrarily, and my suspicion is that this phenotype has emerged at this time as evolution’s heroic attempt to solve larger social and/or environmental problems, but that’s just my hot take.
Nevertheless, the world certainly doesn’t need an army of natural innovators meekly attempting to approximate the previous status quo and self-destructing when unable to do so. Nor does it need a population intent on wrestling with shadows when they could simply turn on the light.
If I was speaking to parents of a neurodivergent child, I would emphasize the importance of encouraging them to claim their gifts. These children need to be given the benefit of the doubt, have their feelings and experiences validated and explained to them, and be provided extra skills to navigate the social world. On a deep, experiential level, these kids need to know that they are not defective. They need to be given a felt sense of their power in the world, through autonomy of choice, deep understanding, and predictable natural consequences. Play-based power reversal games can be so powerful here (you can look this up for examples).
These kids don’t need to be disempowered through coddling, nor do they need to be wrestled into submission and slapped with a label like pathological demand avoidance when they fail to comply. Healthy limits are necessary but so are earnest attempts to see the needs behind their requests around how things are done. Innovation needs to be prized over conformity. They need to be shown by the adults in their lives that it’s safe for them to feel and that their perspective is valuable.
For this to be the case, the adults in their lives need to do their own work to stay regulated as best they can (much easier said than done). Aspiring to provide such an upbringing would start to break the cycle of emotional trauma and subsequent dysfunction in these kids as they grow up and form the fabric of our society. Parents don’t have to be perfect, it’s just about moving in the right direction. Nevertheless, this is some big-league parenting being asked of today’s Ma and Pa, so if Tay could lighten the load through her example in any way, the gains would most certainly be felt far and wide.
2. Her fame is inorganic
Ok, time for controversial Swiftism number two! Now, before an army of Swifties try to burn my house down with fire solely generated from their arduous loins and blown out of their massively out-of-joint noses, hear me out. I’m not trying to cut the woman down; I’ll repeat, I think she is a bona fide and indisputable genius of the highest accord, who deserves her success. And it seems to me she is genuinely a very good-intentioned person. She also seems to work extremely hard and is intelligent in her career moves. However, I also know how our media works and things end up in front of eyes for a reason. I don’t believe any talent alone is enough to achieve total media monopolization the way she has.
I’m saying, keep your head about you in all matters. Your love and appreciation for Taylor is fine and understandable. It’s great that you draw inspiration from her. But adult “Swifties” spinning in circles like a 4-year-old at their first Wiggles concert is cause for significant concern. When your respect and appreciation tip over into that crazed, manic, drop to my knees and start to hyperventilate at the mention of her name, hysteria that people are displaying more and more lately, that’s not a natural or helpful state to be in. At all. Ever. Period. And in my opinion, it’s manufactured.
We famously first saw this level of fanaticism, not dissimilar to what we see with religious or cult indoctrination, with the Beatlemania of the 1960s, whereby girls were fainting, rushing the stage, and generally losing their minds over the band to the point that onlookers questioned their mental stability, and studies were done into the phenomenon. Mass hysteria, also known as Folie a deux, describes the psychological phenomenon whereby the power of suggestion can be used to elicit hysterical symptoms or extremely irrational feelings or behaviors, which can then spread rapidly throughout a group.
Beatlemania was understood at the time to have been a result of the introduction of television into people’s homes and the ability of the media to influence young people’s emotions and behaviors on a global scale. Beatlemania also occurred at a time in history marked by mounting political tension, with unsettling military interventions in Korea and Vietnam, atomic bomb testing, threat of nuclear war, and youth revolutions forming within opposing factions of society. So if not a deliberate distraction, the population was certainly primed for an emotional discharge. The current sociopolitical landscape could be considered equally tumultuous and it’s certainly possible that a viable political decision could be to distract and subdue the population and release a bit of tension with the blonde in a bodysuit.
At this point, Taylor could tell people to chop off their pinky fingers and string them onto some dental floss to make a choker chain, and they’d probably do it. I believe the media has intentionally drummed up this level of blind influence through continuous psychological manipulation and repetitive messaging to the point that it’s hijacked people’s subconscious into an emotional frenzy, which then separates them from their rational thinking brain when it comes to the concept of Taylor Swift.
In the same way that you didn’t realize your ex was a bit of a jerk until years into the relationship, high levels of arousal, whether pleasant or unpleasant, cloud our judgment. Highly emotional stimuli activate our brain’s limbic system, which turns on the fight or flight response of the autonomic nervous system. This creates agitation in the body, which can be experienced positively or negatively. It also leads to black-and-white thinking and readiness for rapid action by reducing cortical function in brain parts responsible for higher order thinking skills like logic, cause and effect, and pattern recognition. Anyone attempting to control or influence others will appeal to arousing their emotions first and foremost for these reasons.
The way the media has crafted people’s perception of Swift to garner veneration, including her interlude as the victim who had her award snatched by Kanye West and her masters seized by Scooter Braun and the Soros family, who then triumphantly rose from the ashes, seems very orchestrated and geared towards this moment when she stepped forth in all her glory, almost deified.
I’m inclined to postulate that at some point along the way, Taylor, being the insecure, naïve, beautiful, natural genius that she was, has been co-opted, used, and groomed, perhaps even unbeknownst to her, by the entertainment industrial complex for a specific and significant purpose. If Taylor starts getting more political in the coming months and years, you might remember this article and wonder if I was on to something.
Swift has spoken out previously in support of Democratic candidates and the importance of voting, which caused unprecedented increases in voter registrations and inspired various legislation. Swift’s Wikipedia page calls this the Taylor Swift effect. It claims that while she is left-aligned, she is an anomaly in American culture, with approval ratings higher than both Trump and Biden, such that she can bridge the divide between left and right and draw various demographics to her cause. Journalists claim she could vastly influence the outcome of the upcoming 2024 election. I certainly can’t see it being a coincidence that her world tour is culminating in an election year. I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman ended up running for president herself in the not-too-distant future based on the sheer volume of effort that’s been put into crafting her image and building momentum for her by this machine.
The way Swift’s relationship with footballer Travis Kelce has been documented from start to finish in recent months, for those of us playing along at home, also feels unnatural. The way we have photos of their private events and coverage of every milestone in the courtship all over social media shows they are deliberately attempting to make this all very public, not just that they can’t be bothered hiding it. The relationship might be genuine to those in it, but it also smacks of marketing 101.
Kelce was purportedly paid 20 million to promote Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer make big money, much of which is invested back into things like news advertising and political lobbying, which their marketing team would call “strategic communication”, the overt goal of which is to influence public opinion and decision making. Last year, Pfizer lobbied 12M to influence healthcare policy, legislation, drug approvals, and other industry-specific issues. The ties between politics, the media, the entertainment industry, and our health care system seem to run deep, but when it comes to this entertainment industrial complex, suffice it to say that a rising tide undoubtedly lifts all boats.
My advice to anyone offended by being likened to a frothy-mouthed four-year-old for liking themselves some T-Swizzle would be self-inquiry. Females are especially vulnerable to this type of emotional contagion and celebrity worship, as are those with mental health conditions such as anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and particularly those on the autism spectrum. The actual invitation in this situation is to use all the passion directed towards Taylor for your benefit.
There is a defence mechanism we all use called projection. Projection occurs when we unconsciously transfer our uncomfortable feelings, thoughts, or traits onto someone else. Whenever we strongly judge someone else, whether positively or negatively, the origins of this judgment are based on disowned parts of our own psyche. So, you can ask yourself, what is my feeling towards this person telling me about myself? For example, it could be very productive to ask yourself in what ways you are not owning your own greatness, voice, power, creativity, or whatever other qualities you are living out through the over-identification with Taylor. Rather than allowing your identity to be heavily pinned on your love for Taylor, figure out which qualities you admire in her and set to work trying to embody these more in your own life.
In doing this, you stop perpetuating the disempowering myth communicated by most of Swift’s lyrics that your salvation lies in finding the perfect someone with whom to form the perfect union and instead place the power back in your court in the universal pursuit of wholeness that Swift’s music so powerfully speaks to.
3. Her music is dangerous
Ahh, not the music! Is nothing sacred! Hear me out; I mean, you’ve made it this far. I enjoy Taylor’s music. I find her lyrics fascinating, as witnessed by my above-demonstrated encyclopedic knowledge of them! (though, in full disclosure, the only album I listened to in its entirety is her latest one; I was only familiar with the songs that ended up on the radio from previous albums). But I’m in awe of her ability to pump out these songs that are perfect little nuggets of human emotion. So, I can see why they have captivated the hearts of millions worldwide. And herein lies the problem.
Like any art, good music is meant to evoke an emotional response in us. It moves us. It makes us feel. We like to feel. We live in a world where doing is becoming increasingly popular, and feeling is becoming more difficult, so people are hungry for things that make them feel. But, when we’re engaging with an external stimulus so as to either stop feeling numb, or distract ourselves from another uncomfortable feeling we don’t want to deal with, it’s avoidance. Avoiding ourselves will always lead to problems for the individual and for society. This is exactly why people use drugs, to change how they feel.
Music is a drug, like any other, and should be treated as such. Studies have shown that listening to music affects our heart rate, pulse, mood, and discernment. In medicine, a quote attributed to Paracelsus says, “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison”. This refers to the fact that the harm or benefit of a particular substance is not fixed by its nature but instead by the amount of exposure to the thing. Something can be safe or beneficial in smaller controlled doses, but totally dangerous in larger amounts. This is my suggested approach to music, particularly incredibly evocative or emotional music.
Music is extraordinary; it allows us to transcend ourselves and our circumstances, conjures joy, courage, and other helpful states, and brings people together through unifying emotions. But, traditionally, emotionally evocative music has been used ceremonially. Before music could be recorded and carried in our pockets, it was traditionally used sparingly, in the right setting, and with a clear intention. However, the way we engage with music these days, indiscriminately, often as a constant or necessary backdrop to our lives or an escape from our actual experience, makes it just as destructive as an over-reliance on eating, spending, alcohol, or other state-altering substances or activities.
The body doesn’t know the difference between imagining something and that thing actually happening. Even if we put aside the problematic implication inherent in Swift’s music that romantic love is the pinnacle of human experience, when we get to the point that on a 15-minute Monday morning car ride to school, the kids have experienced having their hearts broken, getting revenge, and falling in love, all before first period, we have a generation of people who are inevitably incredibly overstimulated and desensitized to feeling. This can lead to or exacerbate symptoms of anxiety and depression and generally saps people of their drive to lead meaningful lives. Their body believes they’ve already had a full and rewarding day, emotionally, so there’s no need to chase those experiences in real life. Everyday human interactions pale in comparison to the highs we feel through music. We lose interest or develop unrealistic expectations of others. Or, the chasing of real experiences becomes more and more extreme, and people end up doing things like cheating on their spouse or quitting their job on an impulse, which might seem like a good idea at the time but may create long-term problems for that person and can slowly degrade the moral fabric of society.
Pythagoras is quoted to have said “The highest goal of music is to connect one’s soul to their divine nature, not entertainment”. It’s wonderful to have resources, like music, to use as a tool to help us regulate — to excite us when we are flat and calm us when we are anxious. To move stuck energy through the body and bust open dams in our mind. Swift’s music is especially gifted at giving a voice and sense of validation to the nooks and crannies of people’s inner lives, which are often ignored, judged, or poorly delineated in their own minds. However, we need to recognize that the goal of peak experiences isn’t the feeling in itself. Stopping here too long looks like self-indulgence and disconnection. Instead, we need to use whatever is stirred up in us to help us lead richer lives in our here and now; to engage better with the world around us. We need to feed it back into our lives constructively. Because we grow through relationship. And this part is easier said than done.
Swift’s music, especially, is smacking us right in the social engagement system, the part of the nervous system that turns on our relaxation response, making us feel safe and connected. It’s primarily controlled by tiny muscles in the inner ear which detect human voices. Elon Musk famously tweeted about Swift in 2023, saying, “Stay away from her”. “Her limbic resonance skill is exceptional”. He referred to Swift’s unparalleled ability to strike an emotional chord with listeners. It’s in how she uses her voice, the music, and the lyrics, and it’s happening very much on a biological level within the listener’s mirror neuron system. Much like parents speak to their babies in a melodious tone with exaggerated intonation and repetitive patterns, in what’s known as parentese, Swift’s music tickles our nervous system in a particular way that makes us feel at one with her and provides a sense of wholeness and completion. Musk recognized, as I did, the vulnerability of a listener under this degree of influence. I agree we’d be better off approaching this music with specific conscious intention, restraint, and caution to avoid being desensitized or distracted from real social matters.
So there you have it folks. Taylor Swift is a genius autistic who has been co-opted by the power and profit-driven machine that runs our politics, business, and entertainment industries to produce an emotionally manipulative, covertly disempowering, and culture-shaping product that has people clamoring over each other to gleefully, and detrimentally, consume like candy — but who also has the potential to single-handedly save the world.
Change my mind!