For a while, home was where my youngest felt safest. I’ll leave it there, because the rest is hers to tell. So when the Eras Tour came to Levi’s Stadium, I didn’t assume anything, but she wanted to go. She wanted it badly enough to move toward it, and watching her move toward it was its own kind of wonderful. There was so much planning. What to wear. The friendship bracelets to make, all those little beads spelling out song titles and lyrics, laid out and strung together in the days before. She was going with her sister, which mattered more than I can say. The two of them, who did everything side by side when they were small, were going to do this side by side too. Her sister would be right there. That was the thing that made the door openable.

Levi’s Stadium holds tens of thousands of people. Sixty thousand, more or less. For a young woman who had spent a long time in her own house, that is not a concert. That is the deep end of the entire ocean.

While she was there, she sent me a video. It was her, singing along with her sister, in pure joy. Not performing joy, not posing for the camera. Just lit all the way up, mouthing every word, surrounded by a stadium of people doing the same, glowing in that way you only glow when you have completely forgotten to be afraid. She sent it to me from the middle of all those thousands of people, because she wanted me to see it. She wanted her mom to know.

I have watched that video more times than I can count. I know the distance she crossed to be standing there singing. For a night, the thing she loved was bigger than anything that had been keeping her home, and Taylor Swift and a sister and a fistful of homemade bracelets walked her all the way out into the world.

It was a turning point. A night the door swung open and stayed open a little wider afterward. And I sat at home with a video on my phone of my daughter singing her whole heart out in a stadium, and I was undone by it. Not just because she was happy, though she was, gloriously. But because of what got her there. Music did that. The right songs, loved hard enough, drew her out into a stadium full of light and let her stand there singing along.

I have always believed in what music can do. I keep whole people inside songs. But I don’t think I ever saw its power more clearly than in thirty seconds of shaky phone video, my youngest daughter glowing in a crowd of thousands, singing along to the thing that was finally worth a risk. She sent it to me because she wanted me to see her joy. What I saw was my daughter finding herself again.