If you follow me on any social media platform, you may be vaguely aware that I attended two Taylor Swift concerts this past weekend. Some people asked me why I wanted to go to Gillette both nights, and others asked me why I even wanted to go to one. The first time I saw Swift live was in middle school; tickets were easy to get, and so few of her songs were played on the radio. Since then she has grown as an artist, and I have grown as a fan. I’ve seen her a few more times since the first, and I can honestly say that a Taylor Swift concert is an experience unlike any other.

1. There are others.

My friends and I created elaborate signs and draped ourselves in Christmas lights for both nights of the show. At any point we looked around us, we saw other people who had done the same. Every time we walked around the stadium, or walked to our seats, people complimented us and asked about our signs: how long they took to make, where we got the materials — and my personal favorite — if we had Tumblrs so they could share our pictures, and we would do the same to them.

2. Change is a beautiful thing.

Swift is constantly redesigning herself as an artist. She’s gone from a country sweetheart to the superstar wearing black leather and singing "Bad Blood." Each of her albums has its own vibe, and the transition from one to the next has been seamless. She was still able to make her old songs fit the vibe of the 1989 Tour, simply by changing the tempo or adding some extra instruments.

3. Swift has grown with her fans.

From fifth grade listening to "Tim McGraw" on my iPod Nano, to driving myself to class during my first semester of college with 1989 in my car’s CD player, she's been there. Now, listening to some of her older songs, including the few that she plays at 1989 shows, feels like being reacquainted with an old friend. No matter how much time you spend apart, when you’re reunited, it’s like they never left.

4. Each song has at least 60,000 different meanings.

Every time she plays a song, each person in the crowd hears it differently. For some, it may be about a relationship that turned sour, or a relationship that went, or is going, incredibly well. For some, it’s about their families falling apart or coming back together. For others, it’s about their own struggles with themselves. Not one interpretation of a song is right or wrong, and at her shows, thousands of people sing the same lyrics for thousands of different reasons.

5. No one deserves to settle.

On both nights, Swift made it clear to the crowd that each and every one of us didn’t have to deal with a topsy-turvy relationship, with every week bringing a breakup or getting back together. She told us that we deserve someone who is sure that they want to be with us.

6. Swift's fan base is incredibly diverse.

Walking through the stadium, I saw attendees who were around four-years-old, and some who were probably in their 70s. At first, I figured that these people were there as "withs"; a child with his or her parents, or a man or women with grandchildren. But as the show progressed, I saw that they were just as into the concert as everyone else.

7. Every single member of the crowd matters to Swift.

For every show of the tour, everyone was given a light-up bracelet that would change colors and illuminate to the beat of each song. To her, these bracelets illuminated each member of the crowd and made it so that she could see every one of us. When she stood on stage and looked out, she wasn’t just seeing 60,000 glowing bracelets, but she was seeing 60,000 people, 60,000 faces, 60,000 stories.

8. Haim is incredibly badass.

The female trio was the opener immediately before Swift. I’m not going to lie, I hadn’t heard much of their music before the tour. Their songs came up on Spotify playlists, and I listened to them, but never really thought twice about them as a group. Their energy on stage was intoxicating, their sound was unlike any I’ve heard before, and their songs were catchy without being annoying and headache-inducing. Since the shows, I’ve been listening to their music on repeat, and I think that I’m on my way to becoming a diehard fan.

9. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that Taylor Swift rules the world.

The two shows I went to featured guest appearances by Walk The Moon and MKTO. I’ve never been to another concert that had a surprise appearance by an artist whose songs I had heard on the radio that same day. They chose to come on stage during Swift’s show because they knew about the energy of her crowds, and they knew that they would have the opportunity to hear 60,000 people sing their lyrics with them.

10. The future is bright.

On Saturday night, Swift's surprise song was "Fifteen," from one of her early albums. One of the lines that stuck out the most to me was, "in your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team, I didn’t know it at fifteen." As a young teenager, Swift probably didn’t know that she would sell millions of CDs worldwide. She probably didn’t think that she would have billions of music video views, or that she would sell out Gillette Stadium seven times. I don’t think that any of those things will happen to me, largely due to my lack of musical ability, but I know that the future holds things that are unthinkable for me right now.

11. Sometimes strangers are ridiculously nice.

My friend and I had floor seats for the second night of the concert. Our tickets were not bad at all; we were in the 10th row behind the sound booth and the end of the runway. About halfway through the show, two women walked by us and one of them stopped and said, "I like your outfits. We’re sitting up in one of the front sections, and we’re leaving, so you can have our tickets." One of the security workers at Gillette brought us to our new seats, and we had a perfectly unobstructed view of the entire stage, and Swift was about 30 feet from us.

12. You're not your mistakes.

To quote from the speech Swift gave before singing "Clean" on night two,

"Be kind to yourself. Please…And I just want you to know that; that if you feel like life is raining down on you over and over again I need you to know that that doesn’t make you tarnished. Walking through a bunch of rainstorms but continuing to go on with your life, that makes you the opposite of damaged or tarnished. That makes you stronger, wiser, smarter, and ultimately, I think that it makes you clean."

13. And, maybe most importantly, I learned how quickly you can make friends.

About 60,000 new best friends, to be exact. You walk into a stadium knowing a handful of people because you’re attending with them, or went to school with them, or you both grew up in the same city. But the second she starts playing, you’re dancing and singing with them all just the same. Some of the pictures I have on my phone are of people I had never met before the show itself, but I now talk to them on Tumblr and Twitter.