Do You Believe Me Now?

You can mark my words that I said it first.

At the time that I created this blog, Taylor Swift’s career was nowhere near where it is now. I started this blog during covid as a way to share why the music created by this particular artist resonated so heavily with me. This was during a time where it was still relatively uncool to like Taylor Swift, which is now a pretty unthinkable point of view since she’s America’s pop darling with a rabid fan base. It’s amazing to me that decades of listening to the same artist can pass, and yet the new music she has written can cut even deeper than the old favorites that I’ve circulated on my playlists for years. None cut deeper on this album for me than Cassandra, which feels practically autobiographical from where I sit, and outlines what seems to be a canonical experience of women both historically and in the modern age.

One of my favorite central themes of Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, is how she weaves in mythology references. In myth, Cassandra had the gift of prophecy - she could see the future, and while it was a gift, it was ultimately her downfall. Even more ironic is the fact that what Cassandra prophesied was not just any vision - she saw that the Trojans were hiding within their gifted horse, and would siege the city. She saw that the sheep was actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and she screamed for someone to believe her, and still no one listened. There are other interpretations of the myth that have her prophesying the origin of the war itself, that if Helen was taken to Troy, the ultimate fall of Troy would occur. Or, if you choose to interpret the myth even further into the war, it is said that once Cassandra was married off to Agamemnon, she foresaw his downfall, and he not only killed her, but ultimately died in battle after not listening to her.

There’s something uniquely feminine about that story in the fact that a woman saw the very nature of someone’s character, tried to warn the town, and not only was she not believed, but she was slaughtered for it in an attempt to allow everyone to revel in the spoils of war that would ultimately be their downfall. I’ll remind my readers that the Trojan myth is from around the 7th century BC - we have been studying the way women walk through society since prior to Christianity’s existence, with this myth being a seminal case study.

The true tale of the Trojan War really illustrates what happens to the women of both sides while all of the men are out fighting one of the dumbest wars in the history of mankind. The war originates around a woman, who is at the center of a feud created by three other women, who were all vying for the one currency they had - the attention of a powerful man. Helen of Troy never asked to be Helen of Troy, she was forced into a role she never wanted to be in. She was thrown under the bus by men and women alike. The cost of the Trojan War is measured in women’s experiences - Briseis, Penelope, Hecuba, Andromache, among others, all pay the cost for the war in different ways. Even more cruelly is the fact that the war itself was created by a man who was bored and sought entertainment.

We know that these are tales as old as time, but Cassandra’s story persists to the point that in 2024 it is the center of a song by Taylor Swift. I find much similarity between Cassandra and I, and she has long been a central fascination of mine. For example, the first time I was called a bitch by a man in a professional setting, I was 20 years old. We were in college and attending a professional conference, and I remembered thinking to myself that this was probably a maturity issue on his part. It hurt to hear, but in the long term, I shrugged it off and thought to myself, “this wouldn’t happen in the ‘real-world.’” But then, just a few years later, it did happen in the ‘real world,’ on a phone call with my boss. I was similarly stunned, not only by the choice of words used to describe me (especially in the context of the conversation we were having), but by the tone of voice and the level of vitriol. It wouldn’t be the last time he would call me that word, nor the last time I’d hear from others that he was using that phrasing to describe me in private conversations with my coworkers and across our network. In fact, that phone call where he called me a bitch launched nearly two years of harassment that only ceased once I quit that job. He desperately wanted to quell any unrest or opinion that could threaten his position (so they filled my cell with snakes) and his method of doing so was to ensure that no one would believe me, no matter how much I persisted.

I’ve been trying to patch the cracks in my own walls, but I frequently find myself seeing them and losing track of what I’m saying. How do we prevent one era of our life from completely informing (and in turn, destructing) another? I believe this to be the true, central theme of The Tortured Poets Department, rather than the popular take that it’s a smear album against Matty Healy. When we lose one love, how do we prepare ourselves to trust that another won’t leave the same way? When we are ridiculed for years at a job, how do we go to another one and trust that the same outcome won’t occur? Where is the balance between spying red flags before they harm you, and assuming the worst in everyone around you?

Swift explores the idea of prophecy between multiple songs - most obviously in the interplay between Cassandra, and The Prophecy, where she laments what she believes to be her own personal prophecy. She fears that she will always find herself on the losing side of the battle, and that at the end of the war, she will always find herself alone, without anyone beside her. Even in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, she explores what happens when you’ve been trained to be on the defensive and trained to attack (they say they didn’t do it to hurt me? But what if they did?). Where she laments the negative impact these moments have had on her in Cassandra, she takes hold of them with power and energy in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?.

Years have passed since the phone call where my boss called me a bitch, but my defensive posture at the sign of any potential threat remains. The Trojans ultimately died for their mistake of fact, and for not believing Cassandra, but there’s no such retribution in the “real world.” At least, not in my case, and I don’t believe there often is for most women. Swift’s lyric, “blood’s thick but nothing like a payroll,” proved to be accurate in my case. When I spoke up, I was told that this man made too much money for the organization in a time when we were struggling, and that if it was going to be a question of his word against mine, it would always be his word that would win. They said it exactly like that, too, yet another thing I didn’t think someone would so casually admit to me out loud.

The truth eventually came out about my old boss, though the fear that it would somehow impact his career was unfounded. Yet another reality that this song “when the truth comes out it’s quiet” that the author completely nailed. This person who so ardently maligned me continues to be a behemoth in his field, and I continue to parse through those experiences from a new city, in a new daydream that I created for myself after the last one failed. But every now and then, I am suddenly reminded of how it felt to try to warn the town that he was going to ruin everything, and instead be told that not only was I the problem, I would need to sit down and shut up if I knew what was good for me.

You can mark my words that I said it first
In a morning warning, no one heard
No one heard
Not a single word was heard

I believe Swift uses the term morning as a double entendre - both the morning aspect of the warning coming sooner than the threat could arrive, and that there is significant mourning that often comes with these warnings. The knife of my personal experience was that this man was no stranger to me when I decided to work under him. Quite the opposite - I had known him for years. I had been recruited for that position. He had asked me to join the team. I uprooted my life and moved cities to take that job. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make to go above his head and report his behavior. I did so before the hoards of women that came after me tried to echo the same sentiment, which also fell on deaf ears.

What kills me about Cassandra is how young she was - most interpretations of the myth put her around 16 years old. If she had lived, would she have lived in fear of experiencing disbelief at the hands of her community for the rest of her life? Would she have continued telling others of her prophecies, or lived with them in the shadows?

Both in 7 BC and now, one thing has remained true. Even a woman who is positioned as one of the most powerful people in the world asks themselves - do you believe me now?