Music and all the ways it heals (me).

I’ve always been a music geek, from being a kid learning the words to Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s Umqombothi to now, being a girl playing at adult making a playlist for everything. A lot of things have changed in my short yet long 23 (24 soon!) years of existence, but one thing that has stayed the same is my love and need for music. 

The notes and rhythm stay with me through everything, every emotion having an accompanying soundtrack. I love music so much I made a playlist that acts as the soundtrack to the series that is my life. 

A week or so ago, one of my best friends wrote an essay - Afro house, I think God made you for me, and it fully encompasses how I feel about the genre. Becoming a rave girlie is an experience that changed how I move. There’s something about being slightly inebriated and feeling the music course through your body.

If you meet a friend of mine, someone who truly knows me and spends time with me, they’d tell you that I’m tightly wound up. It’s there in my tense shoulders, in the strong set of my jaw when there’s something unpleasant to be done. Losing myself in the music and the beat has been cathartic, helping me appreciate my body as a form, and as a flow. 

Around the same time I read the essay, I recommended one of my favorite shows to a friend - you might know him, Bolu. Julie and the Phantoms, although canceled after the first season (fuck you, Netflix) is a show I will always treasure. A side plot I’m not even sure the writers remember is Julie losing her mom, and how her life changes after that. I watched the show for the first time around the time I lost my dad, and through the songs and Julie’s struggle, I found the first steps to live again. 

The rhythm in songs scratches my brain itch, and in a good way. It’s so easy to lose yourself in guitar riffs and someone else telling a story in your ear, and you don’t have to do anything but just be, a person, a being, as a particularly good electric guitar solo. 

In a world where the opportunity to be yourself is one you have to take, or, more often than not, make, music stays healing the parts of me I didn’t realize needed soothing. 

For the days that you don’t feel like yourself, open up a music app and search for a song that takes you out of your body and returns you after five minutes. 

What I’ve Been Listening To:

The first time I heard this song, it was in Iron Man 2, and God bless the music director for putting it there. It was also my introduction to rock music, and I felt like I had found God.

What I’ve been reading:

Nothing long-form I have read in the past couple of days is considered safe for work. So I’ll leave you with Gabrielle Harry’s Across Town.

This week, I’m grateful for sick guitar riffs, and boys in small towns who make music in their garages to ‘leave this old small town behind’.