Lost in the Closet: Escapism and Disappointment in “I Hate It Here” and “Peter”

How long can running away to imaginary secret gardens keep your problems at bay?

Taylor Swift has written plenty of songs about fantasy and escapism; as a theme, it’s been extremely prevalent in every album since folklore. “I Hate It Here” and “Peter” are two songs from the anthology portion of The Tortured Poets Department that, when viewed together through a queer lens, reveal a much larger tragic story about escapism in the face of homophobia and the struggle for self-acceptance. This analysis relies on the concept of the two selves, with the speaker separating herself from her queer identity and asserting that they may never be reunited. In “I Hate It Here,” she indulges in her own fantasies as a coping mechanism for the misery in her real life, and in “Peter,” she mourns the loss of this freer version of herself, whom she compares through extended metaphor to Peter Pan. Because these songs present a chronological story, we’ll go through them separately and point out connections along the way.

Poets and Frauds

Swift opens “I Hate It Here” with a sarcastic comment about men who feign artistic and emotional depth but actually conform to societal career standards: “Quick, quick, tell me something awful / Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.” The speaker has heard “awful” comments like this so often that it’s what she’s come to expect from small talk with a “finance guy.” The fact that this is The Tortured Poets Department sets her apart from the false poet she is mocking. Swift twists the knife by not using any of the internal rhyme present in the subsequent lines of the verse¹ in these first two, emphasizing just how not poetic he is. The speaker then admits that this boring man is, unfortunately, her “eternal consolation prize,” her reward for losing at life and love. The finality of “eternal” sets the tone for the pessimism that runs through this song and the speaker’s conviction that she’ll never get anything meaningful from a relationship like this.

The speaker explains that, whereas she “was a debutante in another life,” she is now “scared to go outside.” Debutante balls, also termed ‘coming-out parties,’ are designed to publicly present young women to high society. Given the modern queer meaning of ‘coming out,’ however, this lyric suggests that another version of the speaker was able to openly express her identity, but fear of societal rejection stops her from doing so now. This is the first of a number of connections between this song and 19th-century sapphic poet Emily Dickinson, who was a recluse for most of her life, and literally did not “go outside.” Notably, Swift has likened her writing to Dickinson’s poetry before, with specific reference to her “Quill” lyrics and the example of “ivy,” which was featured in Dickinson and applied to Emily and Sue’s love story.

Wish I’d Never Grown Up

In the chorus, Swift sings: “I hate it here, so I will go to secret gardens in my mind / People need a key to get to, the only one is mine / I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child.” She makes direct reference to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden, and expands upon the link to Dickinson, who wrote extensively about imaginary gardens. The figurative “key” indicates that other people can only know what’s really in the speaker’s mind if she gives them access to her most vulnerable place; she relishes this independence and isolation from urban civilization. The “here” that the speaker “hate[s]” is her physical reality and all that it entails, which she escapes in her mind “most of the year” as a form of comfort. Swift hints at another literary reference (and “Peter”) through her use of “precocious” in both this song and “But Daddy I Love Him,” where she sings: “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all.” J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stays young forever in Neverland—the speaker explains that reading books and being a “precocious child” allowed for a unique preservation of youth that Swift expressed a longing for all the way back in 2010’s “Never Grow Up.”²

The speaker continues to reflect on her childhood as she recalls how she and her friends would choose decades in the past that they’d most like to live in. She ruins their lighthearted fun by saying: “the 1830s, but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid.” (Upon first hearing this line, I looked up Emily Dickinson and discovered that—surprise, surprise—she was born in 1830.) The speaker’s romanticization of the past is quickly overshadowed by the harsh realities of the decade, and Swift calls attention once again to a fear of marriage to just some guy with money. The speaker dismisses “nostalgia” as a “mind’s trick” designed for the misguided idealization of the past as her practicality reminds her that she would also “hate it” in the 1830s. Even in her childlike imaginings of fairytale princesses, she realizes that, without modern household heating, “it was freezing in the palace.” Wherever and whenever she contemplates living, she knows that she would hate it, so she resolves to invent her own safe havens, like queer people have often had to do to evade the constraints of patriarchal society.

Up, Up, and Away

In the second chorus, instead of “secret gardens,” the speaker opts for “lunar valleys,” even further from the reach of human civilization. Hidden in “valleys” between the mountains, she imagines life on a “better planet” where “only the gentle survived.” Swift presents a concept opposite to survival of the fittest that protects rather than targets the “gentle,” like the part of the speaker that never fully grew up or faced the challenges of real life. She dreams about this possibility as a last resort amidst depression and fear on “the night [she] felt like [she] might die.” The moon, a source of light, represents a beacon of hope “in the dark.”

Having just confessed her darkest thoughts, the speaker makes light of her feelings in the bridge: “I’m lonely, but I’m good / I’m bitter, but I swear I’m fine.” She does acknowledge, however, that she is “bitter” that she has to isolate herself in her fantasies and “save all [her] romanticism for [her] inner life.” The speaker’s “romanticism” refers to both being able to experience and “get lost” in queer romance, beyond the men she resents, and the artistic and literary movement beginning in the late 18th century. Romanticism highlighted the importance of the individual, which the speaker identifies in the feelings of singularity and loneliness reserved for her “inner life.” The “current” of her “lucid dreams”—dreams you can control—lights a spark and charges her with energy when life leaves her feeling depleted. Swift replicates this feeling for the listener through assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) with the quick succession of “dreams,” “electricity,” “me,” and “fantasies.” The speaker’s “fantasies” allow her to “rise above it” in an out of body experience or separation of the self where, “way up there, [she] actually love[s] it.” This is also a reference to flying, which connects imagination to Peter Pan again. Swift finally presents the inverse of the title in this last lyric with the word “love”: the only time the speaker is happy is when she indulges in unreal and apparently unattainable fantasies.

Or Hide in the Closet

Any hope in “I Hate It Here” is crushed in “Peter,” as the speaker reflects on how she missed her opportunity to unite her two selves and is now stuck with a reality that she hates. Peter is the embodiment of her queer identity, and was left behind in her childlike fantasies. The speaker begins by apologizing to this younger self: “Forgive me, Peter / My lost fearless leader / In closets like cedar / Preserved from when we were just kids / Is it something I did?” Swift calls back to her second album, Fearless, which she wrote on the edge of adulthood, to highlight the strength of youth; this notion resurfaces in “cardigan” (which also references Peter Pan)³ with the lyric, “I knew everything when I was young.” The “fearless” lyric is an even more direct reference to “The Man,” where Swift sings, “I’d be a fearless leader.” This connection reaffirms the fact that the speaker is talking to herself—or the “lost” version of herself that she could be, if the circumstances were different. Being a woman in a patriarchal and heteronormative society is a barrier to becoming a “fearless leader,” so she looked to the part of herself projected onto Peter for inspiration when she still could.

The reference to “closets like cedar” is one of the most explicit queer images in the song, as the speaker and her other self are “[p]reserved” or closeted. The fact that “closets” is plural indicates that the two were separated as “kids” and are now stuck in different closets, one that allowed her to grow up and conform to heteronormative society and another that conceals the fantasy of Peter described in “I Hate It Here.”⁴ Notably, however, Peter is “lost” (as Lost Boys inherently are) and the speaker wonders if it’s her fault. Although Peter’s carefree youth offered the speaker freedom, it is not compatible with her life now, and comfort and openness with her queer identity are unattainable.

The “goddess of timing” in the following line might refer to the Horae (hours), Greek goddesses of seasons and time. One of these is Dike, the goddess of justice, who is depicted carrying a scale—this was the first of Swift’s many costumes in the “Karma” music video. The speaker expresses desperation through her faith and disillusionment in these mythical beings: “She said she was trying / Peter, was she lying?” She thought the “timing” would line up to balance the scales and unite her two selves, but the goddess broke her word and instead sided with socially enforced conventions. Flying above the world with Peter, the speaker “didn’t wanna come down,” but she did because she “thought it was just goodbye for now.” She believed they would get another chance to be free together, but her realism got the better of her and Peter never came back.

Cosmic Disappointment

In the chorus, Swift repeats: “You said you were gonna grow up / Then you were gonna come find me.” By naming her other self Peter, the speaker highlights the futility of her hopes; Peter Pan, himself a figure of escapism, never grows up, so it was never going to work out for her: “Words from the mouths of babes / Promises oceans deep / But never to keep.” The “mouths of babes” is a Biblical phrase that comments on the young or vulnerable saying something profound, which could be applied to resistance from queer youth. Swift’s mention of “oceans” contrasts the sky or outer space that she associates with fantasy, and instead emphasizes a hope for Peter to be grounded with the speaker on Earth. Nevertheless, in accordance with the Peter Pan metaphor, Peter does not follow through on these promises or the strength they require.

The second verse begins with the speaker wondering what Peter is like now: “Are you still a mind reader / A natural scene stealer?”⁵ She characterizes Peter as clever and confident, with the implication that this is in contrast to herself, but then offers justification: “life was always easier on you / Than it was on me.” Being sheltered in the speaker’s imagination, Peter did not have to face the same hardships as her and could freely exist. She realizes that: “We both did the best we could do / Underneath the same moon / In different galaxies.” As two versions of herself, they are the “same,” while their circumstances remain cosmically “different.” These lyrics also call back to Swift’s reference to “lunar valleys” in “I Hate It Here.” Through fantasy and figurative flight, Peter can escape the confines of Earth, while the speaker is doomed to look up at the sky.

Lights Out

In the bridge, the speaker summarizes how she came to give up on Peter: “I won’t confess that I waited, but I let the lamp burn.” Despite everything, she is still insecure about longing to be herself, and kept expectations low by passively leaving a light on. She explains that while “the men masqueraded,” she “hoped” Peter would return with “feet on the ground.” Like in “I Hate It Here,” these “men” are inconsequential, merely “masquerad[ing]” in the periphery of the speaker’s life. In a sapphic context, she’s masking her true feelings in superficial relationships with men. The “feet on the ground” lyric links back to the other song, where Peter being “way up here” in the speaker’s imagination is what finally makes her happy. She hoped that Peter would come back down to the “ground” and join her in reality, instead of just being a figment of her “fantasies.”

The speaker wants to know what Peter has “learned,” adding that “love’s never lost when perspective is earned.” She’s never reached a point of self-acceptance that she hoped she would, waiting in vain for Peter to give her some “perspective” on the world in order to find the “love” she desires. She reveals that: “you said you’d come and get me, but you were twenty-five / And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired / Lost to the ‘Lost Boys’ chapter of your life.” Swift establishes “twenty-five” as Peter’s “‘Lost Boy’” age (which incidentally also appears in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” another song about feeling trapped in a secret) and extends the literary reference with the word “chapter.” These lyrics highlight another significant parallel with the bridge of “I Hate It Here”: “I’ll get lost on purpose / This place made me feel worthless.” Being “lost” in “fantasies” is how Swift characterizes Peter, a “‘Lost Boy,’” as well. The speaker’s hope of Peter returning has now “expired” and is itself “lost”—by considering her queerness a separate entity, she relieves herself of responsibility for trapping herself in this fate.

That said, she does hold herself somewhat accountable for giving up: “Forgive me, Peter, please know that I tried / To hold on to the days when you were mine / But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light.” Still, by the end of the bridge, she abdicates responsibility once again by referring to herself in third person as “the woman who sits by the window.” Her patience eventually wore thin and she gave up on Peter; she grew up to be a “woman” and succumbed to defeatism while Peter remained, in her eyes, a child. By the end of the song, any light—whether from the lamp or the moon—has been eclipsed by the speaker’s misery.

By weaving consistent motifs and phrases into these two songs (with smaller references to countless others), Swift tells the devastating story of a woman whose internalized homophobia and external circumstances keep her in the closet. By separating her queer identity from herself in the form of Peter, the speaker attempts to shift the blame for her unhappiness in the life she’s trapped herself in. Because she couldn’t “change the ending” (or “The Prophecy”) and has given up on accepting herself for good, she’s stuck with either becoming a recluse or accepting her “eternal consolation prize.”

1. “secrets” / “be is,” “construct / “good luck” / “what’s what”

2. By chance, I just came across a TikTok pointing out this article criticizing Swift for this during the Speak Now era.

3. “Tried to change the ending / Peter losing Wendy”

4. There is another reference to queerness and youth in “seven”: “hide in the closet.”

5. This directly contrasts “mirrorball”: “I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.”