My struggle to avoid Taylor Swift concert spoilers is nearing its glorious end

With only 33 sleeps until the biggest pop star on the planet arrives, already I can hear the groans from some readers, exhausted by the amount of space one singer and her tour can take up.

How can the Eras Tour still be going? It’s surely been years, a colleague might complain.

Well, yes, it sort of feels like it when you consider the first Eras show was in March of 2023 in Glendale, Arizona, back when headlines revealed a three-and-a-half hour performance that might be her best to date.

By the end of the Eras tour, Taylor Swift will have performed 151 shows across five continents. The tour has already grossed $1bn – the first to do so – and could go on to make another billion in 2024. And the show has garnered an average of 380m views a day on TikTok, owing to the endless neatly packaged loops of the tour so far.

I have tried to avoid them all.

For Swifties in Australia, 2024 is really just the beginning of the Eras tour. Shows start back up again in early February in Tokyo, then move on to Melbourne and Sydney.

For me the past 10 months have been an exciting yet excruciating battle of self-control. My naivety, in hindsight, didn’t predict how overwhelmed the media would be by Swift – dating the NFL star Travis Kelce, Time’s person of the year, her sexuality in the spotlight. And while everyone else has reached saturation point with her as a topic, I’ve been avoiding as many articles and videos as possible. No easy feat.

You see, terrified of spoiling (arguably) the greatest live performance of my generation, I decided last year to forgo reading the 44-song set list and forbade myself from watching anything on social media.

It’s been a tough time.

The real exercise of self-constraint started right after that dreadful week in June 2022 when tickets went on sale.

Never seen Taylor Swift live before? Overwhelmingly, Eras was the only time to do it, which meant buying tickets was one of the most stressful times of my life. I wasn’t just competing with other super fans – I was competing with almost everyone, and their aunt, uncle, mother, and friend of a friend who only discovered All Too Well through Sadie Sink.

By that point I’d proudly logged off TikTok. Goodbye algorithms, hello productivity. But on what I thought was the safer app of Instagram disobedient reels started popping up with sparkly bodysuits, split-second stage-dives and cruel summer intros.

Then the fear really set in: how was I going to make it through months without seeing anything Eras-tour related?

My iPhone’s volume. I might not be able to control visuals but I can control volume, which now remains almost always off whenever I am on Instagram, for fear of ruining the set list and surprise songs – oh how I wish to go back to when I didn’t even know that was a thing. Sadly too many cocktails with a friend will reveal Eras secrets.

Now, I must preface that my friends have (jokingly) respected my more than a decade-long obsession with Swift. They semi-get where I am coming from.

They have listened to me retell the story of my 16-year-old self weeping beside Andrea Swift – the singer’s mum, for those who don’t know – after a friend and I were selected from the crowd of her Sydney Red concert in 2013, to be The Lucky Ones and join a VIP section. Taylor, with her transitional straight blond hair and red and white sequined costume, high-fived me, with my fearlessly loyal curls and 22 inspired T-shirt, as she went by.

Friends get why I would want to try to replicate a sliver of surprise at her show, when the above moment was one of the most shockingly surprising moments of my little life.

But then came the texts from friends who wanted to see the Eras movie with me. They were overjoyed I’d managed to win the Swift lottery and snag tickets but also wanted me to ruin the entire show by going to the cinemas to pre-watch it? I’d entered an unexpected danger zone, and politely declined to multiple sources. I’d made it this far.

When I told a colleague about my set list goal she was shocked. She absolutely needed to know the entire concert so she could carefully plan a toilet break and not miss out on anything huge. I felt a nostalgic pang in my bladder from when I couldn’t dare leave the mosh at a Dua Lipa concert. I hadn’t thought about the dreaded toilet break … would I be able to hold on?

Now I am writing with only six weeks to go and I still don’t know the full, ordered set list. I know more then I would’ve hoped but I am proud of how far I’ve come.

Because still not knowing what Swift will say, about which song and when, is how I have entered all her concerts since I was 13.

It’s something I don’t want to risk not feeling.