The way all of Speak Now is haunted in hindsight:

on childhood and growing up

Noah Kahan The View Between Villages / Taylor Swift Never Grow Up / Kim Addonizio The Women; Wild Nights: New and Selected Poems / @/twinnedpeaks (on tumblr) / Taylor Swift You're On Your Own Kid / リリイ・シュシュのすべて All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) dir. 岩井 俊二 Shunji Iwai / Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Hortenese Flexner and Wyncie King; Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn / Richard Siken Birds Hover the Trampled Field; War of the Foxes / The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2013) dir. Stephen Chbosky / Katie Maria The Memory of a Memory / Lorde Secrets From a Girl (Who's Seen it All) / Keaton St. James A List for Nightdreamers

Covered in mud, you look ridiculous and you have no idea Wish I'd never grow up, it could still be simple

Regression Grief

Does anyone else while regressing occasionally just sit back and think ‘what happened to me?’ Where did that time go? Why am I suddenly an adult with real responsibilities, when it seems like just yesterday I was running around my backyard and learning to read? What happened to the days when my biggest worry was whether I would play stuffed animals or action figures? I’m closer to being 21 than I am to being 10, and how can that be right? Why did that have to go away? I’m not ready for it to go away

I want it to come back, for real. Just for a day. I want to be a real kid with my siblings again.

I’m sorry for this insane rambling; I’m pretty regressed rn and I struggling with growing up.

thinking about "growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all" and "I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser" and "they expected me to find somewhere, some perspective, but I sat and stared right where you left me" and "I never grew up it's getting so old" and "will you still want me when I'm nothing new?" and "I got wasted like all my potential" but also "wish I never grew up, it could still be simple" and "give me back my girlhood it was mine first" and "she'll say she got the map from me" and "but the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light" and "when your girlish glow flickers" and '"I'll get older but your lovers stay my age"' and "tried to change the ending, peter losing wendy" and "you said you'd come and get me but you were twenty five and the shelf life of those fantasies has expired" and "just say 'I loved you the way that you were'" and "how did I go from growing up to breaking down" and how there are these fascinating, overlapping, and contradictory themes in taylor's work of both not growing up or changing and also of growing up and outgrowing situations and changing and the effects of that and as someone in their late twenties who bounces between feeling my age and feeling like I'm still a teenager and feeling old beyond my years (often in the same day), I'm not sure if there is anything more relatable than those feelings

There is a video I found from back when I was three, you’re setting up a paint set in the kitchen and talking to me. I’m five years old, it’s getting cold, I’ve got my big coat on.  She said I was seven and you were nine, I looked at you like the stars that shine in the sky like pretty lights. I hit my peak at seven. I’m thirteen now and don’t know how my friends could be so mean.  At fourteen there’s just so much you can’t do and you can’t wait to move out one day and call your own shots. Cause when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them. Good thing my daddy made me get a boating licence when I was fifteen.  Well, I was sixteen when suddenly I wasn’t that little girl you used to see. I’m crazier for you then I was at sixteen, lost in a film scene. Secret jokes all alone, sixteen and wild. Seventeen and crazy, running wild, wild. It’s like I’m seventeen, no one understands. I’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything but I know I miss you. How can a person know everything at eighteen but nothing at twenty two? Don’t you think nineteen’s too young to be played by your dark twisted games when I loved you so?  And I damn sure never would’ve danced with the devil at nineteen. It’s supposed to be fun, turning twenty one. I don’t know about you but I’m feeling twenty two. She’s still twenty three inside her fantasy. Oh, twenty five years old, oh how were you to know? Thirty two and still growing up now, who you are is not what you did. She said, I’ll be eighty seven, you’ll be eighty nine, I’ll still look at you like the stars that shine in the sky.

Every time Taylor Swift references an age in a song

Speak Now or Red this or that. Mine or Everything Has Changed? Sparks Fly or Treacherous? Back to December or The Very First Night? Speak Now or Stay Stay Stay? Dear John or 10 min version of ATW? Mean or I Bet You Think About Me? The Story of Us or Sad Beautiful Tragic? Never Grow Up or Nothing New? Enchanted or Message in a Bottle? Haunted or The Moment I Knew? Last Kiss or 5 min version of All Too Well? Long Live or 22? Ours or Run? If This Was a Movie or Come Back... Be Here? Electric Touch or State of Grace? Castles Crumbling or The Lucky One? Foolish One or IKYWT? Timeless or Starlight? Speak Now or Red?

Speak Now (Taylor's Version) // Never Grow Up // Track 8/22

eras tour surprise songs parallels

6/7/23—Kansas City, Missouri: Never Grow Up / When Emma Falls in Love

The bridge in Robin and how it's reminiscent of Never Grow Up needs to be discussed more

You got the dragonflies above your bed You have a favorite spot on the swing set You have no room in your dreams for regrets (You have no idea) The time will arrive for the cruel and the mean You'll learn to bounce back just like your trampoline But now we'll curtail your curiosity In sweetness

Lyrics under the cut

Never Grow Up    

Take pictures in your mind of your childhood room Memorize what it sounded like when your dad gets home Remember the footsteps, remember the words said And all your little brother's favorite songs I just realized everything I have is, someday, gonna be gone

happiness    

I can't make it go away by making you a villain I guess it's the price I paid for seven years in Heaven And I pulled your body into mine Every goddamn night, now I get fake niceties No one teaches you what to do When a good man hurts you And you know you hurt him too

Oh, I don't wanna grow up wish I'd never grown up...

so i did end up brewing an edit for speak now as per request of a close friend of mine who absolutely loves never grow up