Flights of Fantasy: “I Hate it Here” Lyrics Meaning, Explained
I Hate it Here is a twisting, twirling mystery of a song from master storyteller Taylor Swift.
The lyrics describe her inner fantasy world, which she prefers to live in rather than in reality. She escapes to her “secret garden” when the world gets her down, and there are several secrets buried in this escapist narrative.
What is Taylor really saying in this song, and what is she awarded an “eternal consolation prize” for?
Here’s my full English teacher analysis of Taylor’s I Hate it Here lyrics meaning, line by line and clue by clue.

I Hate It Here by Taylor Swift
- Title: I Hate It Here
- Written by: Aaron Dessner, Taylor Swift
- Track: 23, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology
- Pen: Quill
- Lyrics from Genius
I Hate It Here Meaning: Narrative Summary
- Setting: Inside a trapped life, dreaming of a happier circumstance.
- Characters: Narrator (likely Taylor), subject (“my eternal consolation prize”, “you”)
- Mood: Fatalistic, pining, depressed, escapist.
- Conflict: She hates her real life, and keeps going into a fantasy world for some relief.
- Inciting Incident: “I hate it here.”
- Quest: Live inside her fantasy world as much as possible.
- Symbols & Metaphors: “I hate it here,” “tell me something awful,” “poet trapped in the body of a finance guy,” “secrets,” “my eternal consolation prize,” “debutante,” “another life,” “scared to go outside,” “comfort is a construct,” “good luck,” “what’s what,” “secret gardens in my mind,” “need a key to get to, the only one is mine,” “precocious child,” “mid-sized city hopes,” “small-town fears,” “most of the year,” “pick a decade,” “1830s,” “married off for the highest bid,” “everyone would look down,” “never even fun back then,” “nostalgia is a mind’s trick,” “freezing in the palace,” “lunar valleys in my mind,” “better planet,” “only the gentle,” “in the dark, the night I felt like I might die,” “romanticism,” “inner life,” “lost on purpose,” “lucid dreams like electricity,” “current flies through me,” “rise above it,” “way up there.”
- Lesson: If you feel misunderstood or unhappy, you can always live in a fantasy world for temporary relief.
What is I Hate It Here About?
I Hate it Here narrates Taylor’s seclusion in her inner fantasy world. She describes hating her real life, and dives into dreams in order to get through her torturous days.
Who is I Hate It Here About?
I Hate it Here is likely about Taylor herself. The lyrics describe her uncomfortable situation in life, and how she uses dreams and fantasies to glimpse one moment of happiness.
I Hate It Here Lyrical Analysis: Line by Line

“Quick, quick, tell me something awful,” she says to the subject in the first verse. This sets up the fatalistic tone of the song: she wants to hear something worse than what she’s currently experiencing to make her feel better.
“Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy” means that she wants a “tortured poet” soul for a partner, but in a better body.
This reflects Taylor’s inner vs. outer world: she’s a “tortured poet” in the body of a pageant queen. Does she want the same of her lover?
“Tell me all your secrets,” she asks him, trying to get him to spill his guts. But it doesn’t matter what he says.
“All you’ll ever be is / My eternal consolation prize,” she tells him. He’ll never be enough, no matter how dark or intriguing his secrets are. He’ll never be the thing she wants. He’ll only be her “consolation prize” for living in a world that she hates.
“You see, I was a debutante in another life,” she explains to him, “but now I seem to be scared to go outside.” She was once a beauty who was about to have a “coming out party,” as debutante balls are called.
But that was in “another life”, or maybe in another era? It’s no longer happening, and she’s stuck.
“Debutante” could also mean that in her past life, she was a pretender. Like her “pageant smile” in Miss Americana, and “pageant queens and big pretenders” of Midnight Rain, was she once pretending or putting on a facade, and now she can’t anymore?
“If comfort is a construct,” she says, “I don’t believe in good luck.” If comfort is something that’s not tangible – it’s only something that you can only have in theory – then she doesn’t believe she’ll ever actually get it for herself.
It would take some serious “good luck” for her to get to a better, more comfortable place in her life, “Now that I know what’s what.” She knows how the world works, and she knows what’s realistic and what’s not.
1st Chorus: “Secret Gardens in My Mind”

“I hate it here,” she says in the first chorus, “so I will go to secret gardens in my mind.”
Where is “here”? It’s the world where she was once a “debutante.” She was about to debut something, but was shut down.
So what does she do instead? She goes to “secret gardens,” alluding to the 1911 Frances Hodgson novel The Secret Garden. The garden in the book represents a magical place that distracts the protagonist from her traumatic real life.
But we’ve heard of secret gardens before from Taylor, in Cruel Summer’s “snuck in through the garden gate.” In that track, a forbidden romance was what she was after. But here, it’s escapism: she wants to run away from her torturous real life.
“People need a key to get to” the “secret garden,” and “the only one is mine.” Only she can unlock her secret desires and fantasies, and no one else will ever get to know about them. Are they locked “in lowercase inside a vault”?
“I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child,” she says, describing her escapism into literature when she was young. But like we learned in But Daddy I Love Him, “growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all.”
Is she stuck in her youthful fantasies, unable to let go?
“No mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears,” she says of her big dreams. Her fantasies are not small. She’s dreaming about making it big, like in Welcome to New York, and getting out of the small town like in White Horse.
“I’m there most of the year,” she says of her secret garden, “’cause I hate it here.” She hates where she’s at, stuck as the would-be debutante, passing the time with guys who will only be her “eternal consolation prize.”
“I hate it here,” she repeats. But this time, “here” has a double-meaning: she hates the real world where she’s physically stuck, but she hates her fantasy world because it’s not real.
Verse 2: “Nostalgia is a Mind’s Trick”

“My friends used to play a game,” she says in the second verse, going back to childhood games, “where we would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this.” She’s looking back on her childhood friends, and reminiscing about their fantasies.
“I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists,” she says about her desired time-travel destination, “And getting married off for the highest bid.”
Why the 1830s? It’s the era of the romantic poets: Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, et al. She wants to live among the tortured poets, just like she wants her lover to act like a poet “in the body of a finance guy.”
🪶🤍 Are you a tortured poet? Find out with my TTPD Lyrics Quiz! 🤍🪶
“Without all the racists” alludes to the common practice of slavery in the era. “Getting married off for the highest bid’ ‘ describes the common practice of dowries and advantageous matches.
After she chooses to time-travel to a notoriously harsh and boring decade, “Everyone would look down ’cause it wasn’t fun now.” Taylor has ruined the vibe of the game with her fatalism.
“Seems like it was never even fun back then,” she muses. Was there ever a time in her life where she was having fun? Like in But Daddy I Love Him, “I forget if this was ever fun.”
“Nostalgia is a mind’s trick,” she says, thinking about this past experience. It wasn’t a good kind of nostalgia; it’s just looking back on a terrible period in her life. Is there anywhere she could time-travel to that would satisfy her?
No, she says. “If I’d been there, I’d hate it,” she muses, “It was freezing in the palace.” There’s nowhere else she could go to feel good again; only her fantasies.
If she got to rewind back to the 1830s (like in the Bejeweled music video, maybe?), she’d be freezing, sitting in her palace.
But what she could also be saying here is rewinding back to her former eras: the fairytale and kingdom metaphors that were heavy on Fearless and Speak Now. It wasn’t that great the first time around being a teenager, she thinks, so why would she go back there?
2nd Chorus: “Lunar Valleys in My Mind”

“I hate it here so I will go to lunar valleys in my mind,” she says in the second chorus. What are “lunar valleys”? Possibly the imagery of Midnights: the 13 sleepless nights of her life.
“When they found a better planet, only the gentle survived,” she says. This recalls “I’ll build you a fort on some planet / where they can all understand it” from Down Bad.
She imagines a rapture-like scenario, where only good humans get to go on to the next planet, and her world will be populated with only “gentle” souls.
“I dreamed about it in the dark,” she says of this “lunar valley,” or the dark nights of Midnights, “the night I felt like I might die.”
She’s talking about one specific night here, and if I had to pick one fatalistic night of Midnights, it would be from Dear Reader: “burn all the files, desert all your past lives.”
In that track, she wants to leave her old self behind and become someone entirely different, just like she does here, and she warns – ominously – “never take advice from someone who’s falling apart.” In I Hate it Here, she’s similarly falling apart, only really living inside a fantasy world.
“No mid-sized city hopes and small-town fears” will be there on this new planet. It’ll be the place of her perfect fantasy, far from the madding crowd.
“I’m there most of the year,” she says of her fantastical new planet, “’cause I hate it here.” She mostly lives in her fantasy world, but again, “I hate it here” takes on a double meaning.
She “hates” her real world, but she also hates her fantasy world because she can’t physically be there all the time.
Bridge: “I’ll Save All My Romanticism for My Inner Life”

“I’m lonely, but I’m good,” she says in the bridge. But we know from I Can Do It With A Broken Heart that she’s far from good.
In that song, she says “I’m good, ‘cause I’m miserable, and nobody even knows!” She’s lying to herself, and in denial about her mental health.
“I’m bitter, but I swear I’m fine,” she tries to reassure the reader. But we know she’s not fine at all.
“I’ll save all my romanticism for my inner life,” she says, keeping these romantic ideals and fantasies locked away, “and I’ll get lost on purpose.”
🪶🤍 Are you a tortured poet? Find out with my TTPD Lyrics Quiz! 🤍🪶
She’ll wander through her fantasy life of romanticism, but is it really romantic, or fatalistic? She’ll “get lost” inside her fantasies, and maybe never make it back to reality.
“This place made me feel worthless,” she says of her real life. But is she also talking about her fantasy world, which makes her feel “worthless” because she can’t actually get there in reality?
“Lucid dreams like electricity,” she says about her fantasy world, “the current flies through me.” Lucid dreaming is when you can control your dream from inside your dream, and that’s what she does in her fantasy world.
“The current flies through me” means she’s only excited – only “zapped” back to life like in the Fortnight music video – when she dreams.
“And in my fantasies, I rise above it,” she says, flying through the sky, looking down on the place that made her “feel worthless.”
“And way up there, I actually love it,” she says, finally content. But she can’t live in that high-up, faraway place every moment. She only gets to go there in dreams, and not in reality.
This is her central thesis of the song: she’s only happy in her fantasy world. Only there can she attain what she really wants.
Final Chorus & Outro: “Tell Me Something Awful”

The chorus repeats, and this time we know what her “secret garden” contains: her innermost desires. “People need a key to get to” this inner world, but “the only one is mine.”
Like in I Can Do it With A Broken Heart, “nobody even knows” her deepest, darkest desires. And she’ll keep it that way, because – for whatever reason – her desires are not compatible with the real world.
The intro circles back around in the outro, framing the narrative with “Quick, quick, tell me something awful / Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.”
She’s back in her real world now, and asks her lover to be fatalistic with her. She wants more depth from him than he’s capable of having.
‘Be someone else for me,’ she beckons. But he can’t, and she has to make due with her “eternal consolation prize.”
But what is she being consoled for, exactly? We may never know. That secret is contained inside her fantasy world, and only she has the key to unlock it.
I Hate it Here Meaning: Final Thoughts
This track is the most mysterious and intriguing on The Tortured Poets Department, and we may never know all the hidden meanings buried in the lyrics.
But what do we know, based on concrete evidence? Taylor may look like she has everything she could ever want, but she doesn’t. There’s a big piece missing, and she keeps that piece locked in a vault.
Whatever she is awarded her “consolation prize” for is the missing link: she lost something big, and went from being a debutante to a dreamer.
More Songs From The Tortured Poets Department
- Stevie Nicks’ TTPD Prologue Poem
- TTPD Epilogue Poem “In Summation”
- Fortnight
- The Tortured Poets Department
- My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
- Down Bad
- So Long, London
- But Daddy I Love Him
- Fresh Out The Slammer
- Florida!!!
- Guilty As Sin?
- Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
- I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
- Loml
- I Can Do It With A Broken Heart
- The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
- The Alchemy
- Clara Bow
- The Black Dog
- Imgonnagetyouback
- The Albatross
- Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
- How Did it End?
- So High School
- thanK you aIMee
- I Look in People’s Windows
- The Prophecy
- Cassandra
- Peter
- The Bolter
- Robin
- The Manuscript