Taylor Swift’s music has always been emotional, but her last two albums feel like a full-circle evolution of healing in motion.

In The Tortured Poets Department, she gave us catharsis, an onyx sky, dense and raw. It was heartbreak, grief, and release.
And now, with The Life of a Showgirl, she’s giving us light, opalite energy, healed and living her best life. 

This new season of Taylor’s art (and maybe of her life) mirrors the exact process so many of us walk through when we heal: the shift from surviving our emotions to living through them.

Holding the Duality

In this week’s episode of Trusting Dorothy, I share how Taylor’s work captures one of the greatest emotional truths of all, duality.
The way we can hold two emotions at once: the love and the  sadness, the grief and the gratitude.

Sometimes these emotions don't exist 50/50
The goal isn’t to eliminate one side, it’s to hold both and be able to move through the emotions.

Mindfulness teaches us that emotions are waves. Some are gentle, some are fierce, but none of them last forever. When we can stop fighting the waves and learn to surf them, we experience resilience instead of resistance.

Taylor’s Songs as Mirrors of Healing

• So Long, London — Love and grief intertwined. A love letter and a goodbye in the same breath.

• Down Bad — The beauty of irrational sadness. The self-awareness that knows it will pass, but still lets it be felt.

• I Can Do It With a Broken Heart — The dance of performing and processing; showing up even while you’re still healing.

• Father Figure — Anger as love for yourself; strength as self-reclamation.

• Cancelled! — Humor as armor; healing that doesn’t always look graceful.

• Eldest Daughter — The moment the armor comes off; strength and softness meeting again.

• The Fate of Ophelia — Transformation through surrender; the woman who rises from what once could have drowned her.

Each of these songs shows us that emotional healing isn’t about being unshakable, it’s about being whole.

What Taylor Reminds Us

The darkness was never wrong. It was the soil for the light.
Healing isn’t neat. It’s vibrant, messy, and can doesn't have to exist in darkness alone.

Just like Taylor’s music, we can move from onyx to opalite, from catharsis to joy, from suppression to integration.

The duality is always something to feel, not something to fix.
When you can hold both, you can move through both.

👉 Want to go deeper? Explore Within: A Return to Self , my 21-day journey into calm, clarity, and self-trust. Learn more here