Taylor Swift Regrets Nothing

If I had to have one celebrity best friend, my wish is currently in a three-way tie between Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Anna Kendrick. Of course, Beyoncé would be less like a best friend and more like a saint-like Regina George that I would be worshipping, so maybe I should just stick to Kendrick and Swift. It's already been proven that Swift is the best at giving advice, whether it's to friends, to fans, or to herself, but she's at it again in her latest interview. The January 2015 issue of ASOS magazine features a photo shoot with the pop star and an insightful chat about life and fashion. According to that interview, Swift has no regrets in her life — and, in fact, thinks all of the bad was necessary for all of the good.

"As much as I would really like to have saved myself heartache, embarrassment or gossip, I also know that my biggest mistakes have turned into my best lessons and sometimes my greatest career triumphs," she said. "If my life had been turbulence free, no bumps in the road at all, maybe my music would be more beige." Does anyone else now have Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" stuck in their head now? ("No regrets. Just love.")

That attitude isn't just a good one for her to have; it's also good advice for fans of Swift to follow. In fact, you don't even need to be a fan of Swift in order to mimic that kind of self-confidence. Once again, Swift has proven that she is one of the most relatable young celebrities out there right now. She's built an entire career out of opening her diary and letting us run through the pages in lyric form, sharing her pain and heartbreaks and sadness and misguided anger with us to help us deal with our own, and now she's promising us that all of those negative emotions do have a silver lining.

Quite honestly, where Swift is in her life at this point is a success story in and of itself. She's been called anti-feminist, she's been called childish, she's been called love obsessed, and, if "Blank Space" is to be believed, she's been called insane; now she is both respected and respectable as a musical artist and as a person. To be honest, I think that Swift had to go through everything that she went through — the failed relationships, the public scrutiny, all the times she had a line in a song that was petty or slut shaming or even, back in the early days, a little homophobic — to get to the level of wisdom that she has gained now. Who Swift was when she first became a household name is so far from the mature young woman she is now that those of us who have been following her career from the start could literally cry warm tears of pride.

The thing that has always, to me, differentiated Swift from any old celebrity giving their fans advice on this thing or that thing is that, for the most part, she's been there. She's had her own share of tragedies (and I don't believe in comparing levels of sadness, so they're just as valid to me as any other kind of tragedy) and she has emerged all the stronger for them. You need the bad to appreciate the good and you need conflict to appreciate the peace. Do you think that Swift would appreciate feminism, her friends, and the single life with quite as much passion and dedication if she hadn't learned from the string of times she had been burned in love? Do you think Swift would know herself quite as well as she does now if she hadn't spent so many albums figuring that out in song?

So, just as Swift has embraced her mistakes and missteps, her tragedies and her failures, because they made her who she is today and she managed to transform them into positives, so too should we all take a page out of her book and stop reliving the embarrassment of that time in first grade when we wet ourselves playing dodgeball. (Oh, god, the horror.) Everything we go through in life is part of an ongoing lesson and will make us stronger people for it, surer in our ability to handle the next tragedy relatively unscathed.

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