So I Showed Up At Your Party
Miss this letter if you don’t appreciate existential musings via Taylor Swift lyrics. Because I’m gonna write about it – I keep coming back to “Betty”.
“Betty” is the 14th track on folklore, the ghost album Taylor dropped without warning in August of 2020. “Betty” stood out to me right away; its acoustic guitar, the squeak of fingers moving on strings, and the harmonica mean it’s the only song on the album that sort of sounds country, although maybe the correct genre is “coffeeshop”. What the hell do I know? I’m not a music critic.
*Edited to add: A T. Swift interview mentioned that they wanted it to sound like early Bob Dylan, so, not too far off.
I keep thinking about how it’s the perfect model for a certain kind of short story. A character sketch, a tracing of awkward and regretful choices, and a dilemma that brings us just up to the moment of denouement and drops us there, on Betty’s doorstep, forever waiting to see how it will turn out.
The song leads with a laundry list of a teenaged boy’s regrets for all the things that happened thanks to a series of shitty decisions on his part — Betty, switching her homeroom to get away from him; rumours from Inez that turned out to be true; the dance that he fucked up on by disappearing and then getting mad/jealous when Betty danced with someone else; the other girl who drove up like a figment of my worst intentions — the girl that he slept with all summer, while dreaming of Betty. In between the list of regrets, the boy, James, keeps wondering what’s going to happen when he sees Betty again.
The brilliance of the song is that most of it takes place in James’ head, right up until it doesn’t. The first time we drop into ‘real time’ is when he’s standing on the doorstep about to ring the doorbell. Betty, right now is the last time/I can dream about what happens when you see my face again. He’s on the porch, he rang the doorbell, he’s waiting to find out his fate.
Then, in case it’s all getting too romantic, Swift drops this line:
Will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends?
Excuse me?
That liiiiine. I was originally offended on Betty’s behalf but now I just shake my head and laugh. How better to encapsulate high school, where we are stuck with those we are stuck with. We think it will be forever, but most of it won’t last past next year. You finally have (had) a girlfriend, or boyfriend, but man, some of their friends are… dumb. And we’re not going to back down from that, we think you could do better, probably better than me, too, but I really miss you, babe.
Do you forgive me?
Here is where I’m not going to do the high school English teacher thing and say: So, class, what do you think she did? Because the ending is the perfect Schrodinger’s box of yes and no. She forgave him; she did not forgive him. She got back together with him; they were never, ever, getting back together. Both could have happened. Some of those could have happened at the same time, or on the same night. That was high school. Just about the equivalent of the whole rest of your emotional life compressed into two or three years.
I think part of the reason the song feels so familiar is that we are all, to some extent, living in our heads while we skip over the boring or uncomfortable parts, waking up on Betty’s doorstep, kinda wondering how we got here. The things we do now are building the things we’ll look back on later. If I’ve had a theme over the past year, it’s that doing small things daily adds up to progress, which is gratifying and important to me, but also, I can’t hang my happiness on it.
I mean, I don’t think I’ve caused any heart-sick love triangles lately. Maybe you need to be a little bit miserable for a little while if you’ve done that. You know, think about what you’ve done.
But in general, sometimes life happens and we get off track. Sometimes we put in a lot of effort going down a track only to find out it’s the wrong one. It does me no good to only let myself be happy when I think I’ve done a good job checking off all the boxes on an imaginary scorecard.
So, this: I’m realizing more and more that the daily practice is important. It must be a priority, in whatever way I can make it a priority. But it’s just a practice of being present and creating a small thing. Being happy deserves to be separate from that; it deserves to be a priority over everything else. Because I don’t need to punish myself or those around me when I feel I’m falling short — I just need to recognize, and adjust to where I want to be going, over and over and over again. And be happy anyway, because we are enough.
So hey: If you feel prompted to write a short story in the style of Taylor Swift’s “Betty,” send it to me and I’ll read it. Maybe I’ll try and write one myself.
Christi
! Book Recommendation !
I’m only partway through this one, but I’m recommending it anyway: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.
I picked it up because it was recommended by multiple people from both sides of a recent political debate I was reading on social media. If you’ve been wondering why large swaths of people are voting the way they do, this is the kind of book that’s near and dear to my heart — it’s not an examination of issues or history or policy (those are great too, but don’t always give a satisfactory explanation), it’s more of a deep dive into the overarching psychological reasons that govern how individuals organize themselves into groups, and why that matters in how we align ourselves.
Links are Amazon affiliate, but please feel free to support your local independent bookseller.