Taylor Swift’s Nothing new has unlocked a new fear in me, that I did not know can exist.

“Are we only biding time, till I lose your attention? And someone else lights up the room.”

The person I look up to, the person who tells me to keep going, that it will be all worth it- is my future self. I see her as this perfected version of myself, whom I’ve seen with only my own 17-year old’s perception. I never bothered to think how would she feel and think about me, other than being proud of me for being capable of coming so far. Taylor Swift’s recently released Nothing New put up a new and different perspective to this relationship I have with my future self. I understand her a bit better now and it scares me. The song brings alive my future self, as we both exist at the same time. The hope I look her at with, is similar to the hope with which a child looks up to their parents, blindly believing them to be the heroes in their life. But this hope concerns me. It makes me wonder is it the vanity in my present self that I always look up to my future? That the same vanity is telling me that things will change once this happens, things will change once you become this. As Sally Rooney puts it, “I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen yet. But what if that’s not true?”

So I look for new things, new and different forms of happiness that exist which I haven’t felt yet, in my future self. She will have those. I will make sure she does. I tell myself. But the idea of not looking up to my future with something new- isn’t that scary? What will be the reason for living if I cannot keep growing, keep amusing myself with my capacities. The newness, which I dread for now, in my future self’s time would not be new anymore, and what if she has no one to look up to. The room goes dark, I won’t be the one to light it up, to get excited about the future, but someone else will. The thought of depending on someone to have the will to keep going and be excited about life, never occurred to me till I heard this song.

What if the outer world’s cruelty has so much power, that it crushes anything that I can look up to? Or maybe my future self forms this vague understanding of happiness, which she knows she’s not achieving in this lifetime- I get lost. And then I get scared, and every second of the time stings like a needle. The feeling that it is passing by, and I have lost my novelty. The song has torn my understanding of my future into two different pieces. It’s like my future self is weeping and apologizing and telling me if I want still her, if I’m disappointed in her, and I shut my ears tight, and say “I’m only seventeen I don’t know anything.”