After years of projecting a pristine clean image, Taylor Swift appears to be coming out of that shell a bit. After speaking out on toxic male privilege and putting more attention into politics, she’s now opening up about her struggles with an eating disorder.
While Taylor Swift has previously alluded to her body image struggles, the singer’s Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, sees her talk about having an eating disorder in no uncertain terms for arguably the first time.
Taylor discusses the topic for several unexpected minutes in Miss Americana, and there’s a particularly honest sequence where she admits to times where she’s seen “a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or… someone said that I looked pregnant … and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit — just stop eating.”
In a particularly gutwrenching moment in the film, Taylor talked about a moment where she took a comment about her being skinny as positive reinforcement:
“I’d walk into a photo shoot and be in the dressing room and somebody who worked at a magazine would say, ‘Oh, wow, this is so amazing that you can fit into the sample sizes. Usually we have to make alterations to the dresses, but we can take them right off the runway and put them on you!’ And I looked at that as a pat on the head.”
After revealing her eating disorder struggles in Miss Americana, Taylor opened up further about the topic with Variety and expressed that while it was difficult for her to speak up but it “makes sense” in the “context of every other thing [she] was doing or not doing” in her life to talk about the issue.
“I’m not as articulate as I should be about this topic because there are so many people who could talk about it in a better way. But all I know is my own experience.
“And my relationship with food was exactly the same psychology that I applied to everything else in my life: If I was given a pat on the head, I registered that as good. If I was given a punishment, I registered that as bad.”
Taylor says this sort of thinking affected her health and stamina during her 1989 tour. Not only did she not eat, she says she had defences ready for when people expressed concern about her health:
“[She’d say] ‘What are you talking about? Of course I eat. …. I exercise a lot.’ And I did exercise a lot. But I wasn’t eating.”
This is a rare show of vulnerability from Taylor Swift and using her platform to talk about a big issue such as eating disorders is an important step forward in destigmatising the idea that people shouldn’t talk about or seek help for their mental health.
While Taylor admits that she’s perhaps not the best person to talk about the topic as there’s risk of triggering people with eating disorders by discussing it openly, it’s clear that she’s being careful with how she talks about it and has expressed how much happier and healthier she is now.
For many people struggling with their own problems, seeing someone as big as Taylor Swift talk so candidly about her struggles will be comforting and hopefully it’ll give people courage in their own fights.
If you, or anyone you know, is struggling with mental health issues, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.