“Because you’re a paycheck player. You play with your head, not your heart,” says Jerry Mcguire to Rod Tillwell when he expresses dissatisfaction with his “lowball” offer.

I couldn’t tell you the plot of Jerry McGuire as I was passively watching it while folding my laundry. But this exchange stayed in my head for weeks.

Because “heart” is one of those things that we cannot quantify but instinctively know. It’s like a barometer that can tell you there’s air pressure but can’t put a number on it. The best we can do is saccharine words and glitter emojis. 

And it’s stuff of stardust that only some people seem to have. 

Like Taylor Swift. 

Taylor Swift’s music isn’t my go-to on Spotify. I don’t think I’d ever spend money attending one of her concerts. At some moments, I drank the Hatorade for her. 

But she also fascinates me. 

And it’s because you can never listen to a Taylor Swift song unscathed. A select few are meant to get you out of your seat and dance, but once you come across a song that gets you wistful, you can’t help but analyze the individual behind it all.

Everyone has memories they’ve neglected. Past experiences that live in a liminal space with no meaning assigned, like a paralegal who forgot to organize and file away court documents. Taylor Swift is like the new administrative assistant who comes in for a day and reorganizes your file cabinets so you have more space for new memories. Instead of paperclips, she puts them in parchment envelopes and wax letter seals them. 

Of course, she won’t go without leaving a note. And it will indeed say “xoxo, Taylor” at the end. 

If past lives were real (as I believe they are), she’d be an engineer, and maybe part of that is because she doesn’t seem to back down from a challenge. I don’t think she goes scot-free when it comes to cookie-cutter pop songs, but if there’s one thing she’s not, it’s a paycheck songwriter. She shows you her soul. She lays bare how she can be petty, immature, and maybe reckless with her heart, knowing full well she’ll have pews of judgment. Something is alluring and private about her songs like she’s letting you into uncharted pathways of her brain for a pit stop. Then, you spend the rest of the journey meditating on what you just heard and how it might apply to you.

Yes, there is an argument about privilege that needs to be made. I don’t deny that Taylor Swift probably had many advantages in life and was blessed with the ability not to let painful prejudice cloud the goggles of possibility. But then I remembered that many girls are similar to her, with the same demographic and perhaps a similar upbringing. But they don’t seem to captivate people in the way she does. And that’s certainly something. 

“Heart” is nebulous. Most people will spend their whole lives trying to master it like a scholar, but it’s not a curriculum or score. It is just is. You will undoubtedly feel it from artists, even if you aren’t a fan of the art.

I guess most fans wouldn’t technically consider me a Swiftie. But god damn. She has heart, kid.