Taylor Swift has been known in the past year to have a lot of negative life events from her sexual assault court case, losing lots of friends and surrounded by playboys as described in her "reputation" album, and recently receiving backlash for announcing a political endorsement for Democratic candidates in her home state of Tennessee. Through these mishaps, Taylor reminded us again that she is not only a star but just an ordinary person.

Distracted by the whirlwind of college applications and broken friendships, it wasn't until the middle of my senior year of high school that I started listening to her new reputation album. As I started listening, there were some of the concepts I didn't understand until a couple months after my life had fallen into shambles beyond my control. I then realized the magnitude of similar things Taylor and I had gone through and how listening to the reputation album helped me get through the hardest times in my life. It taught me lots of life lessons I will never forget.

1. Play the Game

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Life is all about playing the game, hence "The Game Of Life." Have a plan for anything that comes your way.

5. Be done with playboys

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It's a phrase ladies have heard time and time again, but this time I mean it indefinitely. In high school, I was always a playboys focus of coping homework, being cheated off of, or texting, Snapchatting or calling at the last hour. Playboys are toxic because they never take you seriously and always manipulate. Personally, I've encountered enough manipulative people in my life where I don't have time to wait until the last second to reply to something. After I lost all of my friends my senior year of high school, I began talking to a guy I added on Snapchat one day. One thing led to another and we began FaceTiming every night. I slowly realized I was being manipulated by him asking what I was wearing and everything about what I was doing. At the time, my confidence was at an all-time low and I finally gained enough to cut off all ties with the guy. I blocked his number and on all my social media accounts. Now that I'm in college, life moves fast, and developing deep, meaningful relationships are important to me. There is nothing deep and meaningful about playboys. Know your self-worth.

6. Toxic people are done

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The best songs on the reputation album that describe this point are, "So It Goes…" and "Getaway Car." Time's up for toxic people. People stay so long in toxic relationships because they think it will get better, and it never does. Life is too short to indefinitely with people that hurt you because you think that no one else will help you or be willing to make new friends. I shouldn't have stayed with a couple of my friends that kept excluding me from gatherings out of the blue. I shouldn't have kept talking to that one guy that insisted on knowing every detail about me life. I shouldn't have kept talking to that guy that insisted I sit on his lap in my high school physics class. I shouldn't have kept talking to that guy that put a condom on my desk and said that I should have sex with another guy in my high school physics class. In all of these cases, I should have left earlier, thinking that these people would be better than the other toxic people I ran into. Once you decide to all-time, you cut all ties. There's too much that we tolerate to make ourselves think that we are winning the game, when really its all about civility and respect. We all deserve more.

I hope Taylor Swift's music has helped heal others and has created a more positive generation of role models. For these reasons, she will always be my spirit animal.