Taylor Swift and Flight Anxiety

Wish me and Midge luck.

I really don’t like to fly. I get anxious and I think I’m going to die every single time I step on a plane. You can talk to me about statistics and numbers and turbulence being completely safe all you want, but it ain’t gonna help. The only thing that helps is Taylor Swift.

In July of 2020, when the world was in absolute shambles, Taylor gave us Folklore, her eighth studio album. She dropped it out of nowhere and immediately it was so deeply important to me. Just as the newness of Folklore’s 17 tracks was beginning to fade, she hit us with a sister album, Evermore, in December. The people (me) lost their minds.

It’s almost hard to articulate what these albums did for me. Stuck inside, feeling depressed, reverting to a forgotten version of myself and re-reading The Twilight Saga for some reason, along came two albums that so perfectly captured this feeling of melancholia I was experiencing as I watched the seasons pass me by. They felt like portals to another world, and when she released her music videos to accompany the lead singles, it was clear we (Taylor and me) were on the same page. It was an escape to magical woods of a different time, one that probably didn’t even exist outside of our shared imagination. Both albums immediately felt like old friends to me.

When the world opened back up and we were able to travel again, I felt my flight anxiety get worse. Maybe it was the long break in air travel, or maybe it was just this newfound sense of fragility, but I was a sweaty mess at the gates.

No matter the flight length, I was too antsy to read or watch a movie. The only thing I could do was listen to music, close my eyes, and hope I would drift into a stiff snooze. I threw on Folklore, then Evermore, and just like that, two hours and sixteen minutes had passed. The opening notes of “The 1” immediately put me at ease. I was in the care of Taylor and her stories and nothing bad was going to happen to me.

I have taken many, many flights since and for some reason, the only thing I can do, even to this day, is listen to my “Folkmore” playlist. It’s like a soothing salve. I wait until we’re taking off to press play, and then I float away. I never get sick of it, I doze off at different parts of the album, I notice new lyrics, I remember a road trip to Yosemite we took in September 2020 when Folklore was so fresh, then I remember a trip to Rhode Island where I saw Taylor’s now famous Holiday House from the patio of a neighboring hotel.

Now, as we wait for the movers to arrive and load up all of our belongings, I am gearing up for a one way flight to Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. Adding to my already rocky relationship with flying is of course the uptick in flight accidents I’m hearing about recently, as well as the fact that I’m going to be flying with a furry companion, our cat Midge. When we moved to New York two years ago, my husband flew with her alone since I got to the apartment early to meet the movers, so this will be a new experience for me. I am nervous about it, but all I can do is administer drugs and hope for the best. Perhaps I’ll even channel Ms. Swift herself, who famously flies all the time with her own cats, albeit private.

So everyone please send us good vibes for our journey! We’ll be in coach, listening to Folklore.

Taylor and her cat Olivia, in the Miss Americana documentary, boarding a flight together.