I was awake at 5am. And I never get up early. I sat in my kitchen staring out at the twilight sky as Taylor Swift’s voice played through my headphones. ‘I don’t know how it gets better than this,’ she sang, and I could not agree more. But my tab-riddled laptop overheating on the kitchen table told a different story. Loaded on the screen was a mix of lyric pages, meme templates, transatlantic live chats and a few necessary decoys – newsy tabs that I could quickly click on if by some freak accident my flatmate got up at 5am as well.

A few hours later my flatmate emerged. ‘You’re up early!’ She was correct to be surprised. My typical lockdown morning routine consisted of groggily moving from my bed to the couch in time for Frasier. I hadn’t been up this early since… well, since Taylor’s album Evermore came out in December.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said. Because really: I Could. Not. Sleep. I couldn’t sleep the way a child can’t sleep on Christmas Eve. Or the way a 33-year-old woman who runs a secret TaylorSwift stan account can’t sleep on Fearless (Taylor’s Version) Eve.

The album appeared online at midnight Eastern Time. I had spent the previous day listening to the original album non-stop. Burning the sound of each guitar string, each whimsical aside and every soaring violin into my brain like a student on the night before a big exam. This morning I would get the answers: what direction had she taken with the rerecord? Does she still laugh on ‘Hey Stephen?’ (She does.) But the biggest question of all remained: how had my life come to this? I’m a busy person. Pre-pandemic, I often had to turn down social engagements because I simply did not have time. But somehow throughout it all, I always had time for Taylor.

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Taylor is the same age as me, so I like to think we grew up together. When she was rallying against the small-minded people at her school, so was I. When she was dating Harry Styles I was also… interested in dating him. And when she split up with Jake Gyllenhall, I was sitting in my parked car with a notepad and the CD booklet from her album Red, extracting secret messages from the lyric pages. Dissecting Easter eggs (mysterious details Taylor sprinkles like confetti throughout her music videos, album artwork and interviews) has always been a key part of the Swift fandom and it feeds into a playful part of my personality.

And it really was all fun and games until I gave up social media five years ago. Social media is a minefield – everyone knows that. It’s addictive, it makes you jealous and dissatisfied with your life, and it takes up so much time.

The first thing I learned from a life without it is just how true that is. It is seriously time consuming. I had way more free time. Perhaps a little too much. Just as I was growing accustomed to a life with no public presence, someone else was hiding from the world too: Taylor Swift.

"It’s a safe space to talk where nobody will say: ‘And how’s your job going?'"

Kim Kardashian had released a recording which made it seem as though Taylor had lied about knowing Kanye West was going to diss her on his song ‘Famous’. The public backlash was harsh and, well, swift. #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty trended worldwide, snake emojis were thrown around, Taylor asked to be ‘excluded from this narrative’. Then she simply ducked out of public view. For a woman who had been practically everywhere since she was a teenager, this was an impressive feat. Rumours circulated that she was leaving her apartment in a suitcase.

When I excitedly shared this suitcase rumour with my friends, they were less than impressed. But online (in particular, on Reddit) I found plenty of people who cared. People who had Googled the suitcase, people who had checked the dimensions and squeezed themselves into similar-sized suitcases to see if it worked. In short: people like me.

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That same night I made myself a Reddit account named after an obscure Swift lyric. ‘What do you think her next album will sound like?’ I innocently asked the fans on the Taylor Swift subreddit and was quickly rewarded with comments, theories, speculations. In the days and weeks that followed I warmed to the simplicity of that world and found my stan voice. In real life I might be cynical, moody or fed-up. But as a Swiftie, I never experienced humdrum emotions. I was always ‘screaming’, ‘dying’, ‘dead’. Taking things up a notch, I made an Instagram stan account and shamelessly used hashtags to generate followers. By the end of the first week, I had hundreds. Now, I have thousands.

Participating in stan culture is infinitely more fun than regular social media. It feels like sitting at the kids table at a family event. It’s a safe space to talk junk where the cold axe of reality will never fall. Nobody will say: ‘And how’s your job going?’ or ‘What do you think about Brexit?’

When I started the account, Swift was a person for whom nothing was happening. She was quite literally nowhere to be seen. Running the Instagram was a hobby I could dip in and out of for a bit of a laugh. But as Swift got busier, so did I. My account became bigger and bigger, some days taking up hours of my time. It makes me feel energetic, youthful and sort of important. But also, there are times when I feel that the account runs me rather than the other way round. I’ve woken up and frantically made memes from my bed more times than I can count. I find myself distracted at enjoyable events, wondering if I’m falling behind on Taylor Swift news. I asked a waiter for the WiFi password at my friend’s wedding.

‘I’d like to be like you,’ a colleague of mine said to me recently. ‘Having no social media is very healthy.’

‘Yes, very healthy! I thought, a bead of sweat appearing on my forehead as I considered the phone in my handbag abuzz with neglected notifications from Swifties across the globe.

‘What do you do with all your free time?’ she laughed.

‘I read,’ I said. I mean, it’s not a lie. She didn’t ask what I read.

This story originally appeared on ELLE UK

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