The Ghost of the Innocent: What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Writing Trauma

I am a guy who writes about the dark. I write about PTSD, severe panic, and the silence of locked rooms. My book is a collection of fragments gathered from the wreckage.

It might seem strange, then, to hear me say that one of my greatest writing teachers is Taylor Swift.

But if you really understand her work—beneath the stadium lights and the chart-topping melodies—you know that she is not just a pop star. She is a folk poet. She is an archaeologist of memory. And for indie writers, debut authors, and anyone trying to put unspeakable pain onto a page, her approach to songwriting is a masterclass in survival.

There is a specific song of hers that lives inside my chest. "Would've Could've Should've."

If you haven't truly listened to it, it is a devastating excavation of childhood trauma. It is about looking back at the person you used to be before the world got to you—before someone older, someone who should have protected you, took your peace. It captures that specific, suffocating grief of realizing you were just a kid, and you didn't even get the chance to figure out who you were before the damage was done.

"If clarity's in death, then why won't this die?"

That line hits like a physical blow. Because anyone who lives with trauma knows that exact feeling. You want the memories to die. You want the hypervigilance to stop. But the past refuses to stay buried. It sits in your chest like a ghost, demanding to be acknowledged.

That song is the reason I wrote my book the way I did.

Before I understood my own craft, I thought writing had to be big. I thought it had to be classical, perfectly rhymed, elevated—like a monument. I built walls of perfect poetry to hide the ugly truth behind (which eventually collapsed, as I wrote in Part III of my book).

But listening to Taylor's songwriting taught me the power of the micro-detail. She doesn't just say "he broke my heart." She writes about a damp towel on the floor, or a locked door. She understands that trauma lives in the mundane.

That is how I learned to write about John. I didn't write about the "abuse." I wrote about the doorknob turning. I wrote about how a child learns to become smaller than a room. I wrote about a dry toothbrush and showering in the dark. Taylor Swift's music gave me permission to stop writing about trauma from a distance, and start writing it from inside the room.

But her impact on indie writers goes deeper than just literary technique. It is about ownership.

The entire indie author community—especially those of us writing about mental health, abuse, and marginalized identities—watched her fight to own her masters. We watched her say: "You can have the machine, but you cannot have my art. I will rebuild it from scratch."

That is exactly what self-publishing is.

When traditional publishers or vanity presses try to gatekeep us, when algorithms try to silence us, when we are told our pain is "too niche" or "too unpolished," we do exactly what she did. We go into the studio—or in my case, the office with the yellow sweater—and we re-record our own lives. We publish on our own terms. We refuse to let corporate structures sanitize our wreckage.

To be a debut author writing raw trauma in today's world is terrifying. You are handing a stranger a map of your most broken places. You are terrified they will laugh, or worse, that they will misunderstand.

Taylor Swift taught a whole generation of writers that the most "niche," specific, seemingly embarrassing details of your life are actually the most universal. The more specific your pain is, the more people will see themselves in it.

"Would've Could've Should've" taught me that it is okay to mourn the child who didn't get to survive intact. My book taught me that even if that child is broken, he can still build a language out of the pieces.

If you are an indie writer sitting in a dark room right now, wondering if your fragments are too small, too ugly, or too sad to be a "real" book—look at the poetry hidden in plain sight on the radio. Write the micro-details. Own your masters. Let the ghost speak.

The full collection of my fragments—my own version of speaking to the ghost of the child I was—is out now.

linktr.ee/Jean.Hatoum

I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️ 



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