My Life Sounds Like This

​For me, music is so important because it makes me feel emotions to their fullest. I connect every song that I listen to to the emotion I was feeling during that time. I like music that has a similar vibe to my own personal emotions. Often this helps me process my emotions and feel them in a safe space. Usually, my emotions are sad when I turn to music, but other times songs have been so relevant in happy parts of my life that they evoke bliss and safety when I listen to them.

In the spring of my senior year of high school, I listened to the song Fearless by Taylor Swift on repeat every single time I was in the car. At the time my best friend Kate was dating a boy who played baseball, this mixed with my avid love of baseball resulted in us attending every home game and even some away games. 

I would drive to her house, have a song playing when I arrived, but have Fearless queued so that it would be the first full song we listened to. We would sing the whole song, but we would sing some of the lyrics so passionately that it didn’t matter how loud the song was, you could always hear us sing those lyrics. 

We would pull into the school parking lot and play it one more time before we got out to watch the game. Sitting in the car, singing to each other, feeling nothing but joy. Now when Fearless comes on my body feels as if I am driving in the school parking lot with my windows down in 60-degree weather. Not the 60 degrees of fall that is cool and refreshing after a long, hot summer, but the 60 degrees after a bitter winter, when you pull out your shorts and tank tops and roll the windows down even though in 6 months this exact temperature will feel too cold for a tee shirt. I feel this warmth but then it disappears and so does the memory that comes to mind. The memory is almost less of a memory and more of a quick flashback that I can’t hold onto. It's like a picture comes into focus and then immediately blurs into the back of my mind.

The pure bliss of being a second-semester senior at a school that caters to senioritis and the feeling of summer coming and the excitement of college on the horizon is exactly how I feel listening to Fearless. But only in small parts. Only at the lyrics that Kate and I would scream at the top of our lungs. 

The first time I remember feeling this bliss was singing You’re Beautiful by James Blunt. When I listen to this song and recall that moment, dancing with my parents at the top of the stairs of the house I barely remember from my childhood, I feel complete happiness. Though, when I am able to fully immerse myself in that memory, it feels like I'm wading in and out of it. I am tumbling in and out of this memory similar to how a child who can't touch the bottom of the pool has to jump up and down to both breathe and continue to move to where they can touch.

I never get to the part of the pool where I can touch. When I’m submerged in the pool I feel the security of happily married parents who love and care for me with everything they have, but I quickly realize that this is a false sense of security since I’m drowning in the water, so I push with all of the strength that I have back up to the surface where I am glad to breathe again but I am struggling to stay afloat. 

I allow myself to feel this safety to the fullest extent every time I listen to both of these songs. They are such different songs but they make me feel the same way. The way that these are different is that my memories around Fearless are much fresher because that song was prevalent in my life much more recently but I barely even remember the feelings I had around the time of my You’re Beautiful memory. 

You’re Beautiful is a song my mom plays occasionally in the car and I find that every time it plays it slowly removes itself from my original memory. I have this feeling that is attached to the song, but the more times I listen to it out of context, the less I am able to pull myself back into the core memory that I associate with that song. This makes me worried that my memories will all fade like this. 

Although, I don’t know if that would necessarily be a bad thing. While the two songs I shared both evoke happy emotions, as mentioned earlier, most of the time I turn to music when I am in a really bad place. I often wonder if I listen to those songs when I am happy and if it will change my perception of my memories. I let the memories drive the emotion more than the songs, so maybe if I continue to do that, the emotion that I feel when I hear the song will change and that will change my overall remembrance of the memory that was originally attached to that song. 

One example of this is that when my parents got divorced I had a go-to playlist to listen to because it helped me process the emotions I was feeling, so all of those songs immediately made me feel exactly how I was feeling the same night they told me. Later in high school, I was going through a really hard time with my friends and I turned to that same playlist. Now when I listen to that playlist I am reminded of my hard time with my friends, and not how I was feeling about my parent's divorce. 

This is what makes me think that if I listen to Fearless or You’re Beautiful too many times in the wrong context they might lose the emotions they evoke. I think that this is such an interesting phenomenon because you would think that if a song makes me feel a certain way, it would always make me feel that way, but that obviously isn’t the case. This is why music is such a universal language because it speaks to us how we need it to.