How The Eras Tour Helped Us Heal

At 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 8, I was lying awake in bed, fighting back both sleep and tears. My husband and kids had been asleep for hours, but I’d stayed up to watch Taylor Swift’s last Eras Tour performance. As she took her final bow, my Eras-less future was feeling pretty bleak. Scrolling through social media, I saw I wasn’t alone. TikTokkers had put together montages honoring the show’s run, Instagrammers went live to comfort fellow fans, and in a Swiftie Facebook group, members created digital Eras-themed yearbooks for others to “sign.”

Tours end all the time, so why did this sting so much? Probably because, for many fans, it was the safest they’d ever felt in public. It was more like therapy or a spiritual gathering than a concert.

I got hooked on the magic in May 2023, when I attended my first concert in Nashville. Before long, the merch started to pile up, as did friendship bracelets and glitter palettes. I streamed shows I couldn’t attend, hosted themed parties, and put together a “go kit” for friends buying last-minute tickets. I even left my family twice for international shows.

Many fans made more dramatic sacrifices. Take Marie Smith, a 28-year-old talent acquisition coordinator from Baltimore, who worked a second job in order to take her 9-year-old cousin to the Pittsburgh show. Or Kayla D., a 42-year-old nurse practitioner from Pennsylvania, who says she spent hundreds of hours making outfits for her and her daughter. And the day before Becca Walker, a 41-year-old guest service representative from Fort Collins, Colorado, attended the Indianapolis concert, she was in a scooter accident causing fractured ribs, a broken pelvis, two broken teeth, and a torn ACL. She still made it.

Everyone had their own reasons for making the pilgrimage. Rachel Lockwood, 60, says her husband bought her ticket when she was going through cancer treatment so she’d have something to look forward to. Nine days before the Indianapolis concert, she was hospitalized for a blood clot in her heart, but her medical team ensured she made it to the show. It was the healing balm she needed after a traumatic year.

“It was the one time in my life I walked into a bubble of strangers and was immediately welcomed, accepted, and loved unconditionally,” says Lockwood, a retired nurse practitioner from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “It made me feel like no one noticed my chemo scarf, my mangled chest, or my cane, so suddenly I didn’t either.”

As Swift revisited her musical eras over three hours, many fans took the opportunity to reflect on their own pasts, too. “If you’re an older fan, having this opportunity to walk through some of our fondest memories of the last two decades of her career has been the most monumental part of the tour,” says 32-year-old Sarah Chapelle, author of Taylor Swift Style and founder of the same-named blog.

Adds Tess Bohne, “We’ve got a canvas and the brushes, and Taylor is the colors,” says the 33-year-old content creator. “She allows us to create our own story for whatever we need in our lives from what she creates.”

During Red, for example, I remembered the messiness of my early 20s and said a silent “thank you” that I didn’t end up with my own personal Jake Gyllenhaals. The 1989 section transported me back to becoming a mom, playing “Wildest Dreams” as I nursed my son to sleep. In folklore, I felt a twinge of the pandemic’s loneliness and a surge of gratitude for the friends who kept me sane.

I left each concert feeling in tune and proud of every version of myself, like I’d just left a therapy session. (Screaming “f*ck the patriarchy” with 60,000 people certainly didn’t hurt.)

“Many people told me they felt physically safer at the Eras Tour than they had in any other public setting.”

Fandom often brings people together, but I’ve been struck by the safety people felt. In my experience, growth and healing happen best when I am secure in my surroundings, and many people told me they felt physically safer at the Eras Tour than they had in any other public setting.

Kelly Long, a 32-year-old customer support manager from Raleigh, North Carolina, attended the show in Munich. She says Swifties helped distribute water when it was hot. At other performances, fans helped each other get medical care during emergencies — a far cry from tours where folks, often excessively imbibing, can get aggressive. “It’s the one place in the world where everything is positive, all the vibes are good, and everyone is looking out for each other,” she says.

The environment also provided emotional safety. Kayla and her daughter have often felt out of place in social circles, she said, but not at the concert. And for most of my life, I’ve felt like too much — too loud, too emotional, too sensitive — and often misunderstood. But standing among screaming, crying Swifties in loud costumes and full faces of makeup, I could exhale, as though it was finally safe to be my whole self.

Obviously, many fans couldn’t attend the shows in person, but the community also existed online. Bohne, for her part, streamed 128 of the performances on social media, and folks have messaged her saying they made friends through her streams, or felt accepted for the first time.

Other fans, like Nick Braun, found niche elements of the tour to bond over, like the costumes. During each concert, the 22-year-old content creator hosted TikTok live events focused on the outfits. (Once, more than 900,000 people tuned in.) The goal? “Basically, you’d be invited to my living room, and we’d all nerd out about Taylor together,” Braun says.

Over on Facebook, the Taylor Swift’s Vault group — at more than 480,000 members strong — was a space where fans helped each other retrieve lost items, or grab merch from specific cities. And one fan, 24-year-old Olivia Levin, helped folks sell tickets to fellow Swifties and vetted sellers to prevent scams. When the Vienna show was canceled due to terrorist threats, Levin used her platform to connect fans who’d traveled overseas alone.

Whether fans were following the Eras Tour in person or online, we became part of something bigger than ourselves. We bore witness to it.

In this analogy, Taylor Swift isn’t God. I don’t think she’d want to be. (Read the lyrics to “Dear Reader” and you’ll get it.) Instead, she’s more like a bejeweled minister, who reminds us of what’s true about ourselves and each other through the music and the protective environment she creates. That’s part of her magnetic pull: Even in a crowd of 60,000 people or via a grainy livestream, she made us feel seen, safe, and like we belonged.

As she wrapped up the Dec. 8 show, Swift had a message for the crowd: “I never thought that writing one line about friendship bracelets would have you guys all making thousands of friendship bracelets and making friends and just bringing joy to each other,” she said before the final song. “That’s the lasting legacy of this tour, the fact you have created such a space of joy and togetherness and love. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”