Taylor Swift's Eras Tour is what we desperately needed. Now what?

We are in Cincinnati or Milan, Glendale or Vancouver, and it is spring of last year at the Eras Tour debut show, or it is – with a big sigh – tonight and the very last of Taylor Swift’s staggering 149 shows that stretched across 21 countries and almost two years.

We are in a stadium built for touchdowns and bros, hours after we wrote work emails that said, "I’m sorry to bother you," or introduced our ideas in meetings by saying, “I’m not sure if this makes sense,” even though it did, of course, make sense.

Now we are here four years after Swift last toured, a span of time that included COVID and her release of four new albums and two Taylor’s Version rerecords.

We are here in a time when women can't show too much emotion for fear of being labeled unbalanced. Yet, if we are too reserved, we're boring. We are in a time when our credibility is questioned if we look too feminine, too sexy, too young, too old – too anything. But if we don’t look enough of whatever that is, we also are criticized. We are here in a time when our newly elected president posted on X in all caps: I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.

And so here we are with Swift in our sequins, in our most girly of dresses, sparkling and unapologetic in our joy. We are screaming and dancing as we watch a magnetic Swift rise from under the stage in a pastel haze to open the Eras Tour show. We are reclaiming our girlhood in glitter freckles, smiling and offering to take photos of the women in the row ahead of us (from the best angles, of course) and then showing them and retaking them if they want. We are tucking in each others’ bra straps, straightening their skirts, and smoothing their fly away hair.

We are singing and we are loud in a way women aren’t encouraged to be. We are ourselves and we don't care what anyone thinks. And it feels magical. Swift’s Eras Tour appeared in just the moment in history when we most needed it. The tour is just as much about fans as it is about Swift.

Taylor Swift wraps up historic Eras Tour See the record-breaking numbers

We dance through three and a half hours and 18 years of music that we have grown up with, that our daughters danced to at school formals. This is the music that carried us through break ups and mean girls, micro aggressions and self doubt, but also lifted us through mile 24 of a marathon and bachelorette weekends, slumber parties and carpool lines. We traveled through her 10 and then 11 eras (thank you TTPD), and those eras of our own lives.

We are here with our sisters and daughters, our moms and best friends – and becoming friends with people in row 9, Section D as we trade friendship bracelets. We are scream crying. We are quiet crying. We are happy crying.

Swift has a way of making the show feel somehow intimate even in a stadium. Her songs are personal and universal. We feel like she is singing the soundtrack of our lives. A communal catharsis of sorts, as we sing “ The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.“

The record-breaking-phenomenal-amazing-every-adjective-you-think-of-that-means-even-greater-than-the-last-word-you-thought-of has been analyzed, quantified, its very meaning discussed from every angle. Economists have debated the Switeconomy and the millions of dollars it brings to cities, where Minneapolis became Swiftie-opolis, where Swift became honorary mayor in Tampa, and where New Jersey claimed an official state sandwich: the Taylor Swift ham, egg and cheese. They try to quantify the the true value of the elusive blue crewneck sweatshirt in context of a tour estimated to bring in $4 billion.

Academics tried to capture Swift, too, with universities creating a whole sub genre of classes about Swift and the Eras tour, her impact on girlhood and her marketing influence, about feminism and power.

We watched grainy livestreams before we could attend the shows, guessing the surprise songs, special guests, how many proposals we'd see. When our show finally arrives, we know the setlist, the dance moves, the details choreographed to the millisecond from the Lady Gaga song “Applause” that signaled to Swifties the show was about to start.

We wanted to see it, even if we could almost recite the script Swift follows, the exact steps she takes across the stage, the same way she kisses her bicep before singing “The Man” at every show. And when we got it, it was even better than we imagined.

But it was more than the performance. It was what Swift and the tour created. It is a place where people are so different – the left and right, all religions, all people – and yet Swift shows us what we have in common. We feel safe.

In lines for the signature Love Spiral cocktail, where people were civil, even happy, we talked about how Swift had penned handwritten notes to truck drivers and gave them bonuses, donated to food banks in each city but never publicized it, and sewed a blanket for a friend’s baby during her downtime.

Dressed as Swift from every era, we cheer the young fan who receives the signed black fedora during "22" each night. We share our feelings the way Swift does, without fear. We even might belt out the wrong lyrics: “He looks so pretty, like the devil." We are our silly and and happiest selves.

As this tour winds to a close tonight, we now find ourselves trying to quantify and explain the meaning behind it all. A rare place where, unlike the professional sports games regularly held in the stadiums, everyone leaves happy. And we ask ourselves if there is a way to somehow measure happiness?

Because what if there is no bigger meaning here of this record-breaking tour, no larger message to take away, no real story to tell?

Maybe joy is all there is.

As the show comes to an end in a hazy dream of confetti and Swift disappears beneath the stage, just as she first popped up. And you almost wonder if it happened at all. Except that joy carries you, finds you later as you try to remember the details of the show you once had memorized. And this feeling becomes a memory. It might fade, but never goes away.

Laura Trujillo attended the Eras Tour in Cincinnati, Milan and Indianapolis with her daughter, Lucy.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Taylor Swift's Eras tour can be defined in one word: Joy.