There is always a song in my head. I whistle and hum and sing a line from something. An old show tune, a current ear worm hit, a song I have always loved. Music is never far from my brain.
I walk into a room, I turn on music, sit at my desk to write, and I first select the playlist. Nothing can happen without music. The first thing I do when getting in my car is attach my phone and select the music we will drive to today.
It is not an obsession; it is a need. It has always been there. I can recall standing on my father’s knees while he held my hands, and I danced to The Beatles singing “ She Loves You” pouring out of the radio. I was almost four years old. It had probably just been released. When I say I grew up with music, I quite literally mean as pop was invented, I was there.
As a survivor, it is one of my most useful tools. It has the power to soothe me and make me feel safe. It enables me to close off the world and sink into the safety of familiar music and hide away for a few minutes until my brain unscrambles and my heart rate slows down.
It often says the things I struggle to articulate. The words land in my ears, my brain quietly agrees, and I take comfort knowing someone can say what I can’t.
Sometimes it is ten house tracks in a row thumping away the fear of something as I sit in the dark and try not to feel. Or numbing myself with perfect songs so that I stop feeling too much.
Playlists of songs that unlock emotions and allow silent tears to fall that would otherwise be unshed. Emotions can get locked down and stifled, and music can unlock them and let them out.
I have a playlist I curated with a fellow survivor comrade. We just added tracks that had helped us, the brief being that if I was helped by it, someone else might be. There are probably many varied reasons why we each added the songs we did.
That playlist has become something I return to all the time. Sometimes I play it through and it soundtracks the next couple of hours. Other times I just dip into it to listen to specific songs that I need in my ears at that moment. It is here if you would like a listen. It is called Songs For Lost Boys. Because, well, you know, Peter Pan and everything Neverland.
There is a healing property to music that is universally understood by survivors. It’s okay, I know normal people get it as well. Modern tech gives us the most perfect tool that has ever existed; we can carry a phone that can access millions of songs and we can find anything we need to suit the moment.
We can have earbuds that are noiseless and cut off the world and keep us safe in a locked-down world that excludes anything scary like crowds or noise or families or disruption or chaos. At the click of a button, they are all dispersed and we can exist in our happy place of our own creation. Every song hand-picked and curated for our souls.
If I am alone and feel overwhelmed with emotions and I can’t cope and there is nobody around to talk to, I can take a cup of coffee, walk into my garden with two fluffy dogs ambling along behind me, because you know no way do they want to miss out on a possible adventure; they will curl up on a blanket beside me and I slip earbuds into my ears and fill my head with something like Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, and the panic subsides and the garden and the music returns me to a place of normality and a little tummy needs scritching and all is right with the world.
Music is more than the sum of its parts; it touches us in places we can’t reach and walks us out of darkness into the light.