Every Swift release sends the internet hunting for which ex each song is about. This one sent me straight to mine.
The first thing he did was see me.
Junior year of college, I worked multiple campus jobs, helped other people with their horses on top of caring for my own, went to class, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. From the outside, I had it handled. I had nearly a 4.0 and was president of the campus events organization.
When you look like you have it handled, nobody looks any closer. But I felt completely unseen. No one understood me. No one got it. I’d felt that way for a long time, back through middle school and even elementary school.
Then someone did, or I thought he did. He seemed to. For the first time in a long time, I could breathe and relax. I caught myself slacking on schoolwork and my campus jobs, and I noticed, but I didn’t care much, because the feeling I got from being with him mattered more.
If you’ve been over capacity long enough, you know that feeling. Help is nice, but being seen feels like fresh oxygen.
That’s why this happens to capable women so often. I have a master’s degree. I was patient zero. Intelligence doesn’t protect you here. If anything, it’s a disservice. Our lack of capacity is what leaves us open. We were raised on try harder, do more, and we learned that carrying more than we could hold was how we earned acceptance. So when someone shows up who seems to lift some of that off you, it registers as love, as the thing you’ve been waiting for and searching for so long.
Reflected light
The line in “Patient Zero” that really made me stop was:
By the time we were living together in Colorado, I was so over capacity. I was working multiple jobs and finishing grad school. I’d realized the degree I’d worked so hard for wasn’t exactly what I wanted, and my landlord was riding me over ridiculous things. Who insists on watering a hundred-year-old oak tree daily? Seriously, who does that?
Again, he took some of it off my plate.
What I didn’t notice was everything else leaving with it. Going out with friends became a problem unless they were our friends: people he knew, situations he could control. Taylor sings that he loves how everybody else loves him, and that’s the part I missed. He took the weight, then the light, and the weight came back heavier than ever.
It’s easy to hear a song like this and go straight to relationships. It doesn’t only happen there. I’ve had a boss who got to bathe in my reflected light, too. My work was behind the scenes by design, and that was fine. But the light should have been shining on the work and the people it was for, not a single person. And it wasn’t just one boss it happened with.
The flicker
I can’t tell you when my light went out. I don’t think anyone in these particular situations can, because the dimming happens so slowly you never notice it. What you can notice is a flicker. I call it an ember.
My first one came in a church class built on the twelve steps. I was on the ninth, making amends, and I was thinking about my mom and my dad. All at once, I saw how I’d treated them and what I’d said. My dad had already passed. It was my aha, oh crap moment. He tried so hard, and I said those things to him and never listened, never really saw him, the very thing that haunted my own thoughts.
The person I’d become wasn’t who I wanted to be, or who I ever thought I’d be.
Nothing changes yet in the ember. You just see where you are for the first time.
Notice where mine came from, though. I didn’t see my own dimming. I saw the ember in how I’d treated the people who loved me.
The ghost
In the video, Taylor keeps knocking over Dakota Johnson’s drinks because Colin Farrell is poisoning them. At the end, you find out she’s been a ghost the whole time. She can’t say anything. All she can do is knock over the glasses.
That’s exactly what it’s like to love someone who’s in it. My family tried. God, they tried so hard. Some of them said it outright; others didn’t have to. It didn’t matter. I wanted to be seen. I thought I was being seen. I wanted the relationship to be true, and I wasn’t going to hear it from anyone.
Now I’m on the other side of the glass. As Taylor likes to remind us, I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
When I recognize the pattern in someone else, even with a different person, everything in me wants to warn her. Taylor names the conflict exactly:
It's not for me to tell
Someone else what to do
What I love is that she doesn’t stop there. She’s said all of it to his face. To the woman, she says she’s been expecting her call.
I don’t know if that’s the whole answer. What got me out wasn’t anyone’s warning. It was seeing the fighting and the chaos through my kids’ eyes and knowing that wasn’t the relationship I’d want them to be in.
The video never shows whether Dakota gets out. We just see her standing at a grave with two roses, then leaving one. And in the scene where she drives TikTok crazy, she takes a rose with her.
If you’re the ghost right now, keep knocking over the drinks. When the call comes, pick up.
