The first time someone calls themselves a fan is not usually due to a single moment. Sometimes it sneaks up on you slowly, like waking up one day and realizing Taylor Swift is consistently your top Spotify artist every year. Sometimes it arrives all at once, a rush of adrenaline while you sit in the Ticketmaster queue for hours. And sometimes it comes through disappointment, like watching Red lose Album of the Year in 2013, then opening Tumblr to feel comfort in the collective sigh of disappointment. Those are the moments you realize you are part of something bigger.

What makes Taylor Swift’s fandom unique is the way it embeds itself into people’s lives. Her albums become markers in time: Fearless takes you back to a high school dance, Red holds the weight of heartbreak, 1989 reminds you of reinvention, Folklore offered hope when the world was shut down. Over time, her catalog becomes less about her and more about you. One fan said plainly, “I don’t listen to those songs and think about her, I think about me.” That is the pull of fandom at its deepest.

Taylor’s lyrics have a way of collapsing the distance between her life and yours. One fan, Olivia, remembered hearing “Teardrops on My Guitar” in high school, right in the middle of an unrequited crush on a boy named Drew. The lyric, “Drew looks at me, I fake a smile so he won’t see that I want and I’m needing everything we should be,” landed so hard she said her mouth dropped open. “How did she know?! Well, she didn’t. But she made me feel like she knew exactly what I was feeling at that moment in time,” Olivia shared.

That is the peculiar power of Taylor’s writing. It does not ask you to dream bigger or pretend life looks shinier than it is. Her songs are not aspirational. At least they don’t feel that way to me. They feel like your own diary read back to you.

Years later, those words still grow with people. Olivia shared, “Her music has been the soundtrack to my life for over a decade… I like to joke that Taylor’s music helped raise me, but it’s not really a joke. When I felt misunderstood or left out growing up, turning to her music really felt like turning to a friend for comfort. At 28, in some ways, I feel like I’m still growing up. Her music continues to meet me where I’m at and help me navigate the ups and downs of adulthood.”

Even when the story is not yours, it still finds a way in. And it feels a lot like an inner dialogue. Another fan, also named Olivia, put it this way: “She is relatable in her hyper-specificity. I don’t listen to those songs and think about her, I think about me.” PS - how amazing is Olivia’s work (featured post below)?

That is why Taylor’s albums do not just arrive and sit alongside her fans. They attach themselves. To heartbreak, to grief, to celebrations, and to growing up. Another fan, Lauren, recalled walking three miles down the West Side Highway each day with Lover in her ears. “Cornelia Street,” “Cruel Summer,” and “Daylight” carried her through a time when she felt a little lost. She shared, “It’s incredible how Taylor can make her songs about her lived experiences feel like the words were ripped out of your own diary.”

Her lyrics feel real, personal, and bigger than her. Another Swiftie, Caroline, shared, “Her demonstrated ability to grow her storytelling beyond her own lived experiences magnifies her impact. It feels like almost everything she does is either to produce incredible music or it’s for the fans, and in most instances it’s both.”

Taylor’s catalog is not written to inspire you to become someone else. It is written in a way that helps you feel seen as who you already are.

One of the most electric parts of fandom is connection. I believe it’s the piece that pushes people into becoming a huge fan.

After interviewing so many of Taylor Swift’s fans, I started to wonder if they invented group chats. The second news breaks, phones light up with messages, emojis, and links. One fan, Allison, shared that she found herself in a Whole Foods parking lot, latte in hand, frantically refreshing Instagram and texting memes after Taylor announced her engagement. She had been in a spotty service zone and could not risk missing anything. The urgency was funny but also telling. Swifties do not want to experience these moments alone.

Friendship bracelets have become their own subculture. One fan, Allyson, described making dozens of them, slipping tiny Italian flag beads onto each before the Milan shows. She swapped them in the airport, on planes, even with a Beefeater (yes, like the guard) at the Tower of London. “It was like a secret handshake,” she said.

Another fan commented about the sudden flurry of messages from relatives who are not Swifties but still wanted to share in the excitement. Their enthusiasm was its own act of care: a way of saying, “I know this matters to you, so it matters to me too.” In that way, Taylor’s fandom spills outward. It draws fans to one another and also pulls in people who may only touch the orbit briefly.

Each one of these connections affirms that being a fan is not just about Taylor. It is about how her music creates openings for recognition, for conversation, for moments of kindness between people.

Fandom is not passive. It takes labor, sometimes invisible, sometimes extravagant. And more often than not, it takes time.

One fan laughed that her “official” moment of becoming a Swiftie was not when she heard a song or went to a concert, but when she sat in the Ticketmaster queue for over five hours with three devices open, trying to get Eras Tour tickets. That is the strange math of fandom: devotion measured not in dollars spent but in hours willingly given away.

Those hours accumulate in what fans themselves call “fan projects.” Some are private, some public, but all are gifts of time and care. Allison remembered attending the Foxboro show in a denim jacket she had covered in hundreds of gemstones and lyrics from Bejeweled. When it was over, she offered the jacket to another Swiftie in a Facebook group, asking only that it be passed along again. Today, that jacket is still traveling across the country, show by show, a glittering artifact of shared love.

Others take place at scale. Allyson described fan projects during the European leg of the Eras Tour as “a love letter to Taylor.” In Italy, the crowd sang “Sei Bellissima” back to Taylor. In another city, fans brought balloons that glowed like orbs during Willow. Each moment was fleeting, but it mattered because it was theirs. Allyson shared, “You could tell it was so unexpected and Taylor was delighted by it. And we’re all like, hey thanks for entertaining us, how about we return the favor for a sec.”

Sometimes the work is simpler: staying up past midnight every time a new album drops. Olivia admitted, “Did I stay up until 2am when the Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology dropped? Yes, I did. Was my circadian rhythm messed up for an entire week after that? Yes, deeply so. Do I have regrets? No. It’s the greatest album ever made.”

These fan projects are not about proving how much money you can spend, but about how much of yourself you are willing to invest. Together, they ensure that being a fan is never just consumption. It’s contribution. It’s love.

Taylor’s lyrics are often the entry point, but the Easter eggs are what make the fandom feel like a secret society. They turn casual listening into participation.

Some fans admit they are not clever enough to decode the clues themselves, but they love that others do the work. Alexandria laughed, “I love the Easter eggs and lore but I’m not smart enough for my brain to decipher and figure them out. Love the other Swifties for their part in that.” It reminded me that not all fans need to be the same. There is power in the variations! I often hear from others that they avoid fandoms out of fear that they’ll encounter someone who’s a “bigger fan” than they are. You might! That’s okay.

For others, Easter eggs make Taylor feel present, as if she is leaving breadcrumbs for her listeners to find. A capital letter in a liner note, a color palette on Instagram, a lyric that points forward to a future release. It all adds up to a feeling that she is not just speaking to you, but speaking with you.

The effect is a kind of secret language. It’s romantic, in a way. It’s a shared code that deepens the sense of belonging. You are not just listening to music, you are part of an ongoing exchange that stretches across years, albums, and even generations of fans.

The Easter eggs may start with Taylor, but they end with the community. Each puzzle she sets in motion is an excuse to gather, to speculate, to laugh at wrong guesses, and to marvel when someone gets it right.

It is easy to say Taylor is the center. She is. But the true gravity of her fandom lies in the orbit.

The orbit is why someone who first heard Our Song at summer camp in 2007 can now bond with her eight-year-old niece over the same artist nearly two decades later. It is why a forty-year-old, happily married woman can still feel gut-punched by a lyric about teenage heartbreak.

The orbit is lore and language, signs and symbols, labor and laughter. A jacket passed from fan to fan. A Slack status lit up with emojis. A follower count held steady at 1,989. A group chat buzzing the moment news drops. These rituals remind fans that their individual experiences are part of something larger.

That is what makes a fandom like Taylor’s endure. Albums end. Posters come down. Tours wrap. But the orbit continues.

And if you look closely, you start to see that the orbit is about so much more than Taylor. It is about her fans and the complex, rich, and beautiful lives they bring with them, with Taylor providing the soundtrack.