Volume 5, Entry 24: Wooly Bully

Confronting the tormentors still ringin' in my head

Since Taylor Swift released her latest studio album The Tortured Poets Department in April, I haven’t listened to almost anything else.

Packed with 31 songs and 123 minutes of original music, the album still holds me two months later. I’ve had several productive mornings where I loop the entire collection, starting on a random track but wrapping around again from there. The Tortured Poets Department oozes reflective melancholy, which just happens to be the tempo my brainwaves play at.

At some point, I have to break out, especially with concerts for the only other musical acts I care about on my calendar in the coming months, but I’m so fascinated by these songs that I haven’t felt compelled to pivot.

My fascination draws from several dimensions. Released from Reddit’s hypnotic grasp, I puzzle over these songs without context. Yes, I recognize references and know enough of her dating history at this point to make sense of many mysteries, but her lore lures me in less than connecting mine to it.

Taylor does, on this album and so many others, what I try to: she crafts art out of her own life. Fans flock to her for many reasons, but I think one reason for that wide adoration is openness: her woes, insecurities, and heartaches are right there, front and center. For one, that’s admirable—most people don’t publicize their lowest points, let alone sing them on stage to crowds of 76,000–but for another, it invites an intimate connection. It doesn’t take much for a listener to find something from their life drawn out by Taylor’s catalog when so much of her own fills it.

Because Taylor Swift is a woman, it’s no surprise that her songs frequently speak to situations outside my experiences. This never bothers me; there’s always something I can latch onto in her layered lyrics. I don’t need to find myself in one of her songs to love it. Still, those speaking directly about shared experiences are rare enough to always stand out, as two on this album do. The most direct of that pair takes me back to middle school and the start of high school.

Appearing on the album’s second half, “thanK you aIMee” addresses a cruel figure from Taylor’s youth. The song’s titular tormentor, Aimee, is a person with power who “threatens to push [Taylor] down the stairs at [their] school” and “wrote headlines in the local paper laughing at each baby step [she]’d take”. Taylor calls it a conflict that “wasn’t a fair fight”. “Aimee stomped across my grave,” Taylor sings, conjuring an enemy with the spiteful intensity to continue the clobbering when her target is six feet under.

Excepting that newspaper allusion, Taylor never offers a clear picture of what Aimee did to her, but there are clear indications of psychological distress. Describing her harassment as “always the same searing pain” in the chorus, Taylor pegs her as a source of agony, recalling how she “screamed ‘fuck you Aimee’ to the night sky as the blood was gushin’”.

On the surface, a song recounting a girl who Taylor’s “saintly” mother “used to say she wished [was] dead” would seem to be a perfect fit on an album that revisits so many painful relationships, but what initially caught my ear about “thanK you aIMee” was that this wasn’t a song about enduring torment and pain. On the contrary, the track speaks to the powerful victory of accepting the impact of someone like Aimee as formative.

Nowhere captures that better than the bridge:

I wrote a thousand songs that you find uncool
I built a legacy that you can't undo
But when I count the scars
There's a moment of truth
That there wouldn't be this
If there hadn't been you

Instead of cursing her oppressor and ruing the lingering wounds decades later, Taylor affirms herself for what she’s achieved, shedding her bitter hatred for a healthy perspective. It’s not about punching back at those who brought us down but rising above them. Revenge isn’t spite toward those who spit at us but thriving in spite of their shittiness. It’s growing stronger from attempts to make us weak.

Taylor’s vision for revenge is remarkably poignant:

And one day
Your kid comes home singing
A song that only us two is gonna know is about you

This revenge is bloodless and bold but also incredibly warm. Taylor’s strikeback isn’t perpetuated by hate or venomous words now that the tables have turned, but by empowerment: the daughter of the girl who made Taylor feel small feels big because of Taylor. It’s a generous sentiment: Taylor could write a call-out song and force an uncomfortable conversation between mother and daughter, but she doesn’t. She’s wiped away the gushin’ blood; now she imagines her torment fueling the uplift of her enemy’s child through the very song she’s singing.

As a final note of growth, Taylor then alters the chorus. Ditching the “fuck you Aimee” from the previous two, Taylor reaffirms that she’s moved on:

All that time you were throwing punches
It was all for nothing
And our town, it looks so small from way up here
Screamed, "Thank you, Aimee" to the night sky
And the stars are stunning
'Cause I can't forget the way you made me heal

When Taylor closes with “thanK you aIMee” twice before strumming the final notes, there’s a moment of triumphant finality. The song doesn’t fade out; it ends. There’s nothing more to say. Aimee made Taylor feel small and told her she’d never amount to anything, and Taylor has ascended to riches and influence. Aimee was wrong—laughably wrong. What more is there to say?

The first few times I played the song, I missed the lyrics. The tune is catchy and pleasant amid so many drenched in blue, so the story took a few plays to land. When it did, the catharsis overwhelmed me. I instantly connected with the tale of overcoming and letting rousing success smother vicious voices into silence.

I love dozens of Taylor’s tracks, but “thanK you aIMee” had a uniquely instantaneous impact on me: for the first time in years, I let myself think about the boys who hurt me.

*****

On the second day of middle school, I stepped into an overlong lunch line with my friends. This incensed another seventh grader, Mickey*, who rightly but vulgarly insisted I had cut the line. When I didn’t respond, he jabbed my shoulder, which I also ignored. Then, he proceeded to mock my weight with a series of juvenile insults. I continued ignoring him, but when his insults stopped, he took up a more repeatable schtick: oinking. For the rest of our time in that lunch line, he oinked in my ear.

In truth, I deserved his objection. I should’ve been sent to the back; no matter how common joining friends in line was, I did the wrong thing. It’s not a decision I would make today. Mickey’s frustration was justified.

Everything else that followed was less justified. During that first year, my mom dropped me at the front of the school, which meant I entered through the front gate each day. This entrance, it turned out, was where Mickey hung out before school. At least, it was where he hung out at first: as soon as I appeared, Mickey left his perch to follow me, oinking loudly in my ear as far as he could follow.

How close was he behind me? Unlike Orpheus, I never looked back. I couldn’t smell his breath or anything, but I could feel him there. Roughly my height through objective eyes, the guy towered over me psychologically. With these narrow, in-set eyes and unmoving horizontal eyebrows, Mickey’s face terrified me; it was cold and callous like a pimpled shark’s and equally ferocious. I shuddered at the thought of facing those eyes; I imagined his jaw becoming a shark’s and lunging to rip my nose off.

Middle school started at 9:20, but I began asking for earlier and earlier arrivals. After my mom disappeared down the street, I would scurry to the side and sneak in the back way close to my first classes, but if my timing was ever off by even a second, a security guard would impede my path and send me back, right into Mickey’s web.

His eyes lit up every time he saw me.

Mickey wasn’t alone in that harassment. The shape of my nose combined with his farm animal impression meant the oinking found me everywhere. Only the Ag classes on the other side of town rivaled my PE class for porcine percussion. Even the one kid whose waistline made mine look like a flagpole joined in.

Oink symphony aside, the one guy bold enough to use it to my face was Stuart*. Stuart didn’t follow me like Mickey; we had several classes in common. Stuart was short but beefy, a football player who played football in capital letters you couldn’t miss because he wouldn’t let you. The only tone I ever heard from him was snide; his smile held a permanent sneer.

Stuart and I were neighbors, living one street apart in the same development. That meant our cars sometimes followed one another’s to school. This would be innocuous if not for the presence of religious iconography on the back of my mom’s car.

In the late 90s, the “culture war” played out on bumpers and trunks in the form of adhesive ornaments. There was a fish with JESUS inside it and a fish with legs filled instead by DARWIN, but of course, there were others, too. Most aggressively, there was a fish with the word TRUTH inside…eating a fish with legs.

My mom, insistent that the ideologies of Christianity and evolution need not conflict, plastered a legged Darwin fish on her bumper right next to a cross.

I wish I were kidding when I say that this motivated Stuart to come after me. For a while, it was just oinking—whatever; get in line—but then it became more invasive and forceful. Stuart’d tell me I was wrong and my mom evil; he’d say icily but with brimstone passion, “You can’t do that” regarding my mom’s ornaments.

One day, waiting for Humanities to begin, that curdling conflict boiled over. Walking right up to me and pinning me against a wall, Stuart introduced himself with an oink and started in on me for those damn ornaments. He insulted my mom, he called my family stupid, and every time I tried to argue back, he would laugh this “You can’t touch me” cackle, press his index finger to his nose, and oink. He oinked over every word of opposition I tried to offer.

Finally, our voices growing louder and louder, he stopped laughing long enough to tell me, with the confidence of God himself, “You’re going to hell.” After a pause for dramatic effect, his grin returned, and so did his index finger. Oink oink oink.

I yelled something back, but he just oinked. Others, not even knowing the gospel theme of our disagreement, joined him. His immovability infuriated me; I couldn’t fight back because Stuart, the football player, was stronger and tougher. I screamed one of those animal cries of rage and kicked the brick wall behind me with all my might. My toe might have been broken; I never told anyone, limping quietly for weeks.

Eventually, a staff member found and separated us, then walked me to the office. I missed two days of school, too terrified to go back.

While Mickey and Stuart got to me with persistent and targeted harassment, respectively, the third boy never raised his voice. Outwardly, Jerry* and I were buddies; we once got together for lunch at Chili’s a year or so after graduation. It’s only in hindsight that I recognized his cruel impact.

Jerry was a talker who always had “lessons” for me. He’d get this knowing look behind his glasses and offer a resigned smile that showcased his chipped tooth. Then, he’d let me in on the secrets of life.

His defining advice came in PE. We’d be sitting on the gym floor, stretching or doing crunches, when he’d nod to the attractive older TA. Setting aside the casual and unblinking sexism of the entire episode, he’d shake his head and look me in the eye.

“When you look like you, you don’t deserve girls like that,” he’d say matter-of-factly. Sometimes, he’d offer a resigned sigh, too. “You don’t deserve good things when you look like shit.”

I didn’t respond when Jerry said it. I never responded to it, let alone any other things he said. But I heard him. I definitely heard him.

“You don’t deserve good things when you look like shit.”

I can still hear him.

[[ I can still hear all of them. ]]

*****

“thanK you aIMee” isn’t the first time Taylor Swift has sung about bullying.

On her third album, Speak Now, Taylor’s sixth track is “Mean”, a bluesy tune clapping back at boorish haters. Written by a teenager touring her second album, “Mean” is an optimistic look forward in which Taylor envisions immunity from the cruel discourse she engenders.

Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Someday, I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?

Sung with a still-youthful voice that borders on childlike, the effect is that of a yipping puppy. I’m not there yet, she says with an unconvincing growl, but someday I’ll turn this around.

What I love about “Mean” is its self-awareness. This isn’t a song that rails against unfair criticism—the singer owns it all in the second verse:

You
Have pointed out my flaws again
As if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down
Trying to block you out
‘cause I’ll never impress you
I just wanna feel okay again

These words transform her: no matter what she sounds like, she isn’t a petulant puppy delusionally claiming she can take that Rottweiler, nor is she some righteous runt calling the criticism unwarranted. Taylor recognizes her flaws; she’s self-aware enough to know it’s not the content of the callouts but their tone and persistence. She hates hearing what she already feels so severely, but she only begs to feel okay, which she can’t while they’re “picking on the weaker man”.

Still, Taylor at nineteen presents a clear vision of revenge in her bridge:

And I can see you years from now in the bar
Talking over a football game
With that same big loud opinion
But nobody’s listening
Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things

More than any non-vocal element in the song, this snapshots Taylor’s maturity at the time. Revenge for her is obscurity. Slovenly irrelevance awaits those who heap hate on her. Enjoy the attention now, she barks. It’ll vanish when I ascend.

While I’d be hard-pressed to push back against any response by a nineteen-year-old ridiculed by grown adults, “Mean” helps me appreciate the renewed vision in “thanK you aIMee” that radiates perspective and “I wish you well” energy. That hurtful history is between her and Aimee, so Taylor “change[s her] name and any real defining clues” to prevent the conflict from going further. At 21, Taylor wished decades of drunken disdain on her enemies; at 34, she spares them. She’s above these fights and feuds now. She’s the “bigger man” at last.

But it’s at this point that I finally must acknowledge what diehard Swifties have been bristling over for a thousand words.

“thanK you aIMee” doesn’t actually do this.

You, like me, probably noticed the odd-looking title when I first introduced it. While Taylor has written entire track lists with lowercase letters—hello, folklore—The Tortured Poets Department isn’t one of them. Yes, two tracks—“loml” and “imgonnagetyouback”—do feature names with all lowercase letters, but “thanK you aIMee” doesn’t do that either. That three-word title features three capitalized letters, but not one starts a word. Put them together, and, voila, we see through Taylor’s “moving on” lyrics: KIM.

This song is about a woman named Kim. After glancing around online, I’m told it’s not just about some forgettable Pennsylvanian but Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star once¹ famously married to Kanye West. A feud over misrepresented phone calls between her and Taylor dates back eight years, a fight large enough that even I immediately thought of Kardashian, despite almost zero exposure to her work, when I read the song title.

The bully’s identity shouldn’t matter here, since “thanK you aIMee” is about moving on and acknowledging her antagonist’s role in her success, but I think it does in a pretty fundamental way. Remember that line illustrating Taylor’s newfound maturity? The “so I changed your name and any real defining clues” one?

Yeah, uhm…Taylor didn’t, though. She made the clues small, but then she spelled out her name. What read initially as taking the high road is anything but. Capitalizing those three letters transforms everything. “thanK you aIMee” isn’t ignoring the swinging arm of a bully and, despite all the power in the world, passing on an opportunity to inflict pain; this is pettiness, this is punching down—and all over a conflict that had otherwise faded into obscurity.

Far be it from me to criticize Taylor Swift, by the way. She can hold any grudge she wants; she can be as spiteful about anything she wants. Everyone’s struggle is different, but everyone’s struggle is real. She can do what she wishes.

With that said, I will defend her decision, but I can’t overlook the hypocrisy. She says she’s moved on; she sings like she’s let it go, content to imagine generous revenge. Other than the early reference to “a bronze, spray-tanned statue” of her tormentor, the song features almost nothing identifiable about the pseudonymous bully. She did it!

But then, the title. She can’t resist that jab. It calls into question everything and reverses my impression of the entire song.

Setting aside the platform difference that Taylor and I enjoy, “thanK you aIMee” also leaves me with the same questions on every listen.

How do I feel today about those guys who harassed me?

Given the chance, would I do the same thing she did?

*****

It’s odd to put faces to Mickey, Stuart, and Jerry. While their presence and words remain some of the deepest scars on my self-image and confidence, I tend to lump them together when I recall their impact on me. I willingly talk about how they affected me and how I carry that weight to this day, but I try not to picture them.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that remembering Mickey especially still unsettles me. I blink myself into dusty terror when I imagine his face, so narrow and filled with hate. He’s wild-eyed in my memory, ferocious; he wants me dead, and he gleefully administers poison to my sense of safety.

Stuart I recall every time I end up in a confrontation: my adrenaline ratchets up, I start to shake, and my composure fades into his empty oinking echoes in my head. The moment someone cuts me off, it’s Stuart oinking over me. I’m a helpless thirteen-year-old.

And Jerry? Jerry never terrified me, but his words somehow sting the most. He didn’t emulate an animal or act like a kid. He spoke intelligently. The way he said, so cogently, almost compassionately, that I deserved misery felt prophetic, like a visit to some grand architect who knew the universe’s programming. When Jerry said it, the words made sense. Jerry didn’t wound me; he helped me wound myself.

Back then, I wished for revenge on those boys. I wanted to see Mickey fall flat on his face and crack his teeth. I imagined winding up and slamming my fist into Stuart’s face, sending blood splattering against the brick wall. I didn’t wish violence on Jerry, but I might’ve hoped the TA would step on his fingers. All three made me feel disgusting and small. I hated them, and that was before I lived another 25 years to see that fear and ridicule seep into everything else.

Knowing what I do now, I should hate those guys. I should hate them deeply, cursing their awful existences as I run my fingers across the scars they made worse. What’s it to them if I plaster their names everywhere as retribution for corrupting parts of myself? It’s a tiny exchange for helping train a sensitive child to hate himself. Fuck those guys.

And yet, I don’t hate them. Their enduring presence, in my mind? I hate that. They are contaminants I’d love to be rid of. But them, their corporeal forms? I can’t hate them. I can’t.

Mickey, who was on my track in middle school, ended up in several of my classes during the next two years. He seemed clueless as to what he’d done to me only months earlier. He was similarly clueless in the classroom, barely able to hold onto ideas, let alone a conversation; he’s the kid who swallowed a pushpin in his math class and needed an ambulance and surgery to get it out. It feels rude to call him “dumb”, but he was out of his depths in eighth-grade history and the gentlest of Spanish 1s. He never graduated from high school.

Jerry, on the other hand, had no trouble with high school. As he’d always planned, he graduated and jumped immediately into the Marines. When we split boneless Buffalo wings at Chili’s in 2005, he was on leave, raring to return.

I didn’t know then that he would be dishonorably discharged soon after. That he’d been accused of a crime, according to the newspaper. It was a charge he disputed, but he also failed a psych evaluation, so who knows what’s true? In any case, it ended his career before it started.

And Stuart—I think the most about Stuart. He transferred from our middle school to a rival high school’s, joining a better football program. He was great there, an unbelievable defender and captain. Too small to play at the college level, he remains an all-timer on that campus, every bit the star he always carried himself as.

But Stuart also had a younger brother, Landon*, also a star athlete and precisely the same age as my brother. Stuart and his brother were close, so you know Landon followed his brother across town and excelled on the gridiron, too. He wasn’t Stuart, but he was good—if memory serves, he played well for a section title winner.

Years later, Landon worked at a store his brother managed. One night, after finishing a shift, Landon drove to a nearby public park. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and reconciliation attempts were unsuccessful. Landon killed himself. According to the newspaper, Stuart and his family were devastated.

…

I found no vindication when all these blows took place in these guys’ lives. Mickey’s fate made sense—school wasn’t a good fit for him—and maybe Jerry’s does too if I squint. I still felt terrible for both; I wondered what would be next for them. I can imagine both lives cratering.

This is especially true for Stuart. Our whole confrontation, once so big that I centered a narrative essay around it in Mr. Bandy’s class, suddenly became minuscule. All those oinks, yelling, and eternal damnation faded into silence, a muted clip of two animals fighting over a fish filet. I wished him healing in my prayers every night.

Time can quickly flatten people from our past into obstacles and monsters, but Stuart was human, as were Jerry and Mickey. When they got under my skin, they were more than just human—they were children. They left psychological marks on me, but they were stupid kids, immature in some cases, parroting rigid fathers in others, but never anything more than immature, asshole kids who became flawed adults just like all of us.

I have no idea what any of these guys are doing these days. I’m not digging, either. But I do know that it feels wrong to wish them ill or even type their names. I’m in a good place right now. Calling any one of them out in any way would be punching down.

That is to say, you don’t need to look for capitalized letters here.

There aren’t any.

*****

If I extend empathy to old harassers, you know I will for my favorite singer, too.

I can’t deny that Taylor’s decision to “sneak” in Kim’s name strikes me as petty and unnecessary. Stirring in that old drama only serves to sour the flavor; everything tasted amazing before!

But there’s more to “thanK you aIMee” than what I’ve quoted. After reiterating her kind mom’s curses, each chorus closes with the same refrain:

I pushed each boulder up that hill
Your words were still just ringin' in my head, ringin' in my head

To evoke Sisyphus and his perpetual punishment accurately captures the effects of bullying. We grow around that abuse, and we learn to heal because of that abuse, but it also leaves scars unlike so many others. These scars, for me at least, always feel freshly formed; they’re more like scabs, always on the edge of oozing. And because they happen when we’re young, we grow up with them, such that they become organic and foundational parts of ourselves.

Artwork by Michelle Yee

Staying ahead of time-tested trauma is work. Taylor might never have sung words more relevant to me than “Your words were still ringing’ in my head, ringin’ in my head” because she’s right! I can still hear their oinking, I can still hear their voices, and that ringin’ constantly threatens to reduce me to a pitiful, scared child. They made me that then; somehow, their ghosts make me feel like that even now.

But I refuse to burn them. They each suffered rough moments in adulthood, and they’ve been through enough to not need my bitter curses decades later. I’m not moving on; I’m just not going to target them. I want to be like the Taylor singing the song, not the one titling it. I want to be bigger now than they were then.

That said, I understand the woman who titled the song. Betrayed by someone she trusted and considered a friend, Taylor saw public discourse turn on her and drop her into a dark place. Lies and venom from a friend in the public eye sound like they could wreck a person for years. It’s the kind of thing that might prompt that one extra frustrated stab at something that simply refuses to go away.

I get it. I wish she hadn’t, and I bet, somewhere inside her heart, Taylor wishes she hadn’t, either. But I get that impulse. No healing growth can ever entirely drown out childhood torture.

Last week, I talked about this piece in the writing class I taught. My goal was to demonstrate an interview-style activity to help students flesh out ideas for an over-long draft, so after I demonstrated with Alyiah via Zoom, the class then interviewed me. I chose this piece because the song was on my mind.

The questions they asked floored me. They pushed the idea of connecting the song and these memories in directions I’d never considered. It marked my first true victory of the week: incontrovertible proof that an activity I designed could work precisely as intended. Much of this piece owes to them.

Still, one question stood out above all the rest. I’d established my position—frustration with Taylor, ambivalence about the same with Mickey, Stuart, and Jerry—when a student asked me a question I hadn’t considered:

If the three boys hadn’t suffered, would I feel the same way I do now? Would I be so willing to let them off the hook if calling them out wasn’t punching down?

It’s a damned good question. My bullies found me in childhood; Taylor’s targeted her during established adulthood. “thanK you aIMee” might speak to a shared experience, but our timelines are off. Maybe, given the chance to take down a fully-grown tormentor from my twenties, I would lash out in precisely the same way she did.

Except I know that I wouldn’t. I know this because I haven’t mentioned a fourth bully who found me later and made me miserable at that age. I’ve had so many chances to hurt this person in precisely that “thanK you aIMee” way, but I never have. I’ve never even been tempted.

Those capital letters Taylor injected won’t go down as my favorite choice she’s made, but three petty presses of shift won’t undo everything positive that’s come from listening to that song, either. That’s why I’m ending this piece right here. Including anything more threatens to drop unnecessary clues, and I don’t want that.

“thank you aIMee” taught me how bittersweet the wrong catharsis can taste.

---

Immense thanks to Michelle Yee for the illustration. Her artwork is my favorite part of this piece and captures my hard takeaway from remembering and recording this week.

Writing this felt therapeutic, but I began to hate it more and more during revisions. Returning to these miserable stories and then remixing them with Taylor Swift’s petty letters, the downstrokes each guy faced later, and all the stuff thinking about this swirled up sucked. It sucked. I should be above fearing a thirteen-year-old weirdo with acne, a Napoleon complex zealot, and a guy who dished microaggressions before I knew the word, but yet the memories of these people activate something gross in me. Not one of those assholes would even recognize me today, and yet I spent hours tearing this thing apart, trying to decide whether I could invoke situations so small, so focused, or so juvenile.

At some point, I should have accepted that if these guys’ ghosts haunt me, then it’s okay to invoke them in a personal essay about “bullying”. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

But I desperately want this over and out of my head. I’ll have to return to Mickey someday because there’s a direct line between him and teaching, but not soon. I won’t step on them, but I need to keep them at bay for a long, long time.

I’ll do better next week. I promise.

1. A reader alerted me to the fact that Kardashian and West are legally divorced as of 2022. That I had no idea further speaks to my absent awareness of either individual. I regret the error, since my goal was to be exceedingly fair to my and Taylor’s “bullies".