Even when I think I'm happy, I love a good sad song

After high school, I spent 10 months on a gap year program in Israel. Without sounding cliche, it was, overall, just wonderful. When I close my eyes, I can still see myself leaving the program: the sun has already set but the stars haven't come out yet. The taxi arrives - just a few minutes late. I give hugs to my friends; say my goodbyes and my “I’ll see you on the flip side”s. It's the end of a monumental year, and it's extremely sad. I get in the backseat of the car, the Israeli man behind the wheel takes my bags and throws them in the trunk, as if I didn’t have anything valuable. We drive away. The car drives through the neighborhood I’ve called home, retracing a route I’ve walked a hundred times, often after two am when we stayed out drinking too long, the busses had stopped running, and we were too poor to pay for a taxi. My mind is flooded with memories, glimpses of all the late night laughs, the heated arguments in class, and the times I snuck away from my program to head to the beach. I remember the four-hour long conversations I had with my friend Eitan as we were establishing our friendship, and the time my roommates bought me a comforter for my birthday because it was November and I had been sleeping with just a sheet for months. And as all of these good times and memories rush to the forefront of my consciousness, I realize that I’m not crying. I'm not even emotional. I’m just staring out a window. Though there is sadness that exists in my brain, I’m struggling to feel that sadness. At this point, I’m struggling to feel much of anything. Not just did the sadness not appear, but all the other day-to-day feelings are muted out like the noise-cancelling mode on the apple airpods that weren’t invented yet. I’m numb.

But I don’t want to be numb. There has to be more. So I put in my headphones and play the song “Read all about it” by Emile Sande. Part III. Not that I’ve ever heard Part I or II. I remember this song from a video I watched of a talent competition. In the video all the judges were crying, so I feel like this is the right choice. After one listen, something begins to stir. So I listen to it one more time, and I’m getting a bit closer. Some sort of emotion is hitting me. Another listen. And another. By this point, I’m seven listens in, and my eyes begin to water. I’m really going to miss this year. One more listen, I think a single tear begins to build up, ready to fall down my cheek. Then, just like that, the car abruptly stops, the driver gets out, and starts telling (read: yelling at) me to get out of the car. All of a sudden, I’m back to reality, and outside of what I assume are now slightly pink eyes, it’s like nothing ever happened.

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Different people have different ways to channel their feelings and process their lives. For some people, it’s through extended silent meditation, for some it’s through exercise, for some it’s through being alone and for others it’s through talking with their friends. There are those for whom alcohol is a helpful way NOT to channel their feelings and deep thoughts, and there are those who inevitably get emotional when they’re drunk because that’s the only time their inhibitions lower enough to feel. For me, I use music.

And that’s why I love it. As a person who has struggled to use the word love when it comes to romantic relationships, I find it quite easy to express love here. Maybe it’s because there is far less pressure of what it means to say that I love something that can’t react, interpret, and hold me to that love indefinitely, but I love music. I love that music helps me feel things I struggle to feel alone. I love that it fills the air, as if someone else is with me whenever I need. I love that there is music for every occasion - certain songs for when I’m trying to feel my sad feelings, and certain songs for when I’m trying to just loosen up. Songs for when I’m starting an early morning road trip and need to ease into the day, and songs for when my dinner party is winding down and I’m decompressing. I also love the way my body physically reacts to heavy bass drums, raspy vocal runs, or quick flirty bells. I find my face scrunching up and bobbing forward. My nostrils flaring. My mind channeling my subconscious desire to be at prom in a high school drama where all the students inevitably slow motion mosh pit to the song “rollercoaster” by the Bleachers. (This paragraph reminds me of high school when we had to write an ode to something. I should have written it about music. I probably wrote it about television. Or Target. I really loved Target growing up.)

I love that I can use music to channel my feelings, and the elation the comes with finding a new sad song that touches my core, but what comes along with those moments is what I now recognize as a possible emotional reliance on music. It took 10 listens of an Emile Sande song to cry a single tear. And though crying is by no means the benchmark for what it means to feel, the fact that I need music to get myself to even begin to feel makes me wonder whether music has become more of a crutch than an aid. Throughout college, I never cried without the help of something external like music or a movie, and once I knew I could use music, I slowly lost the ability to cry without it.

I never really understood feeling connected to a celebrity before. I obviously understood liking a celebrity, but the concept of “fan-girling” never made sense to me. Until I started listening to deeper, more emotionally intense music, and I found myself feeling emotionally bonded to a person I had never met simply because they wrote a song that spoke to me.

In my mind, we had gone on an emotional journey together. It didn’t matter that JP Saxe's journey wasn’t my exact journey - he was writing a song about how his ex moved on when he hadn't, and I've never really had that experience - but I, too, had an emotional journey in those 3 minutes. I was reliving the hurt that comes along with realizing that my friends didn’t include me, or the feeling of insecurity in my relationships, or the disappointment that comes with not getting into a program I wanted.

And it’s not really about the lyrics. Yes, there are some songs whose messages just hit in such an impactful way, like Modern Loneliness by Lauv, or Sad Tonight by Chelsea Cutler. But music goes so much beyond the words.

It's about how every song could become a bop or a sobfest depending on what story you're trying to tell. Like how Stay Next to Me goes from a party song to a love song just by changing the tempo and production. Every song is crafted to convey not just a message, but a feeling; curated note by note, beat by beat. When you listen to the song “Water on the Bridge” by Chelsea Cutler, you can just feel her journey. I’ve never experienced heartbreak like she expresses, and yet I find myself internally bawling, sending subconscious energy to her saying “I feel you, I totally feel you.” Maybe I don’t focus on the words because words limit the ability to adapt a song to what you need.

To be honest, I rarely pay attention to the words in songs. I know the jumble of consonants and intonations that allow me to fake sing in the shower, but couldn’t actually tell you what each line is saying. It’s kind of like eating a burrito where some bites are clearly meat, some are clearly pickle, and for some bites you get brief snippets of bean and lettuce and rice but can’t fully pick apart what is what. Some phrases of a song I can articulate pretty clearly, some parts I can pick out a few words but can’t piece together the full line, and some phrases I know include a “sh” somewhere, and that’s about it. (Apparently people don’t put pickles in their burritos. To be honest, I don’t really eat burritos, so I apologize if that offended you.)

At face value, music helping me feel doesn't seem that problematic, except I think an important distinction is that music helps me feel, but it doesn’t help me process; and that’s scary. Sometimes I find myself listening to some of the slower, more intense Chelsea Cutler, and feeling super emotional. I get so physically invested in the sadness of her music or the breaks in her voice, that I find my body wanting to curl in a ball and just lay forever. And, after about 45 minutes in said ball, experiencing Chelsea as she contemplates what even is the purpose of life, I feel like I’ve had a nice cathartic emotion-fest, and am ready to conquer the world of emotional stability. I feel lighter. Even free. But, when I think back and reflect on what happened, what emotions did I actually express? What was I feeling? Was I at all contemplating the purpose of my life or was I merely an onlooker as she did? I have no idea. It’s like when you have a whole meeting at work where everyone leaves feeling super productive, as if there is a clear list of next steps, and then when you think about it, you’re like “wait, what did we actually just decide? What just happened?” Am I tricking myself into thinking that I'm undergoing a healthy form of processing when I'm not? I feel like I've become addicted to this catharsis, and in my yearning for it, I'm ridding myself of feelings that are there for a reason. Feelings that are important to feel, and process, and think about, not just to rid myself of.

As a person that as a strong need for control over my life, having the ability to alter my mood simply by playing certain types of music allows me to use my brain to control my emotions. I get to choose when I feel sad, and for how long. I get to choose the exact moment it’s time to bounce back to the world of supposed carelessness. And always, I choose them when it’s convenient.

It’s great to be able to use music to hype myself up for a pregame. But over time I realized it’s problematic that, when I’m feeling especially lonely and anxious but I have plans I “can’t” bail on, I just throw on some Kygo and completely ignore said problems altogether. It took me a while to understand that maybe the reason I connect so deeply to sad music, even when I’m in such a seemingly happy mood, is because I’ve spent so long repressing emotions, that my happiness is just covering up all this shit I haven’t processed.

And it’s not just music. In college, I knew that if I went to Netflix and turned on season 4, episode 5 of Parenthood, during the final scene when, SPOILER ALERT, Kristina tells the whole family she has cancer….Boom. I’m immediately emotional (emotional is just a euphemism for cry, because you know, I don’t cry. Just kidding. Everyone cries. Even if they don’t admit it. Just like everyone poops.) Sometimes in college I would watch the same scene maybe 4-5 times a week. And sometimes I wouldn’t watch it for months. But I never really thought about why I was or was not watching it and how that may have reflected other stuff going on in my life. (Does everyone have tv or movie scenes that they use to get in touch with their repressed emotions, or is it just me? K. Cool.)

And even when music isn’t being used to actively change my mood, or repress emotions, or as an emotional crutch, it’s a filler of air. Earlier I mentioned that I love music because it makes me feel like someone is there, but the flip side of that is that I can use music to never have to feel alone. I still don’t have to address any of my own thoughts. It helps me pass the time.

I listen to it everywhere. When I’m walking. When I’m working. When I’m on a plane. When I have a chill weeknight dinner party that I’m nervous could have awkward silences. For the longest while, I never saw a problem with that, but sometimes it dawns on me that I feel physically anxious with just the thought of long car rides or walks without access to music.

I recently watched a scene from “This is us” when Jack and Rebecca drove across the country in like the 70's and I thought ‘how do they do that without an aux chord? What do they do when there isn’t the radio on? Just think? Talk?’ and that was when I realized how much being alone with my thoughts scares me. To be fair, I should have seen it coming. I’d been sleeping with a fan every night for the last 10 years and it obviously isn’t because of the temperature (shoutout to therapy for helping me no longer need a fan to sleep). It says a lot that when people ask me what one of my proudest accomplishments are, I say that one time I ran 11 miles without any music. I mean, I’ve run more than that, at a faster pace, but something about spending that long with no music, having to push myself, is a proud accomplishment for me. But it also makes me feel weak. Like, the things our ancestors had to go through, and I can’t go a single day without headphones because god forbid I’m alone in my brain for 10 minutes.

This reminds me of a time that I went to the gym with two friends in college in the middle of winter. My headphones broke, and I couldn’t find my backup pair, so I had to revert to my backup backup pair, which wouldn't stay in my ears. We got to the treadmills - which were in the very front of the entire gym - and I immediately realized there was no way for me to run with music unless I held my headphones in my ears.

So, rather than just go on a run without music, I held up my headphones. And, as I was going on a sprint with my hands to my ears, the knot in my shoe came undone...and I tripped. And since my hands were holding in my headphones, I couldn't catch myself on the way down: cue, faceplant, bloody chin, visit to 3 different urgent care centers, and getting my face glued shut at holy trinity hospital.

I think a lot about the way that I deeply use and appreciate music, and how, for so long, it has been such an important catalyst for my journey towards processing life and becoming more in tune with myself. But, just like I ended up using a fan for years to sleep, has my love of music turned into reliance? I don’t drink coffee because I worry that it will help me wake up instead of helping me develop healthier sleep habits, but coffee is socially recognized to be addictive. Is music the same? How do I find the balance between utilizing it and needing it? Is there such a thing as too much music?