Music

Music is something I love deeply, the way you love something that knows you too well, something that can reach places inside you without asking permission. And sometimes, though not always, I dread it. Not because I dislike it, not because I am unmoved by it, but because music moves me too much. It opens doors I did not plan to walk through. It pulls memories forward by the hand. It brings the past back not as a picture, but as a feeling, full-bodied, immediate, impossible to ignore.

Someone told me I hate music, which is almost funny in how far it misses the truth. I don’t hate it. I respect it. I am careful with it. Music makes me feel things, deeply, vividly, without apology, and most of the time, that is a gift. It reminds me of the best of times, the golden hours of my life when everything felt possible, when love was easy, when I didn’t yet know what it was to lose my footing. It moves me. It softens me. It reminds me that I am still here, still open, still capable of being undone in the most beautiful way.

But sometimes music brings back not the best of times. Sometimes a song doesn’t just play, it arrives, carrying with it old versions of myself, old feelings I worked hard to survive, old anxieties that know exactly where to sit in my chest. When certain songs come on, I feel it before I understand it: a heaviness, a tightening, a sadness that doesn’t announce itself loudly but settles in quietly, like a fog. And at this point in my life, I don’t want to live there anymore. I don’t want to revisit every place I’ve been just because a melody remembers it for me. The feeling is real, unmistakable, like a tide that rushes in without warning, and so sometimes I step away, not out of rejection, but out of self-preservation.

I do know this, though: I can always put on classic rock and things will be okay. Classic rock is my comfort, my steady ground. It’s what I play when I feel good and want to stay that way, when I need familiarity that doesn’t demand anything from me. It doesn’t ask me to explain myself. It doesn’t drag me backward. It holds me right where I am and says, you’re safe here.

Classical music is something else entirely. It’s where I go when I want to feel deeply but without words, when I want emotion without instruction, movement without memory attached to lyrics. Original scores, especially, let me flow through the day in my own rhythm, quietly romanticizing my life without overwhelming it. Hans Zimmer speaks to me in a language only instruments know, one that bypasses the mind and goes straight to the body, the breath, the soft internal places that don’t need to be named to be understood.

For a while, music became too much. I was in an erratic environment, loud and fast and without boundaries, and every sound felt like an intrusion. Music wasn’t something I chose, it was something that happened to me, overstimulating and relentless, and it drove me to the edge. So I stepped back. I went quiet. I needed space from it, not because I had stopped loving it, but because I needed silence to hear myself again.

And then, the other day, something shifted.

The boys and I were driving down the road, the sun low in the sky, that kind of light that feels like an exhale at the end of the day. I put on my favorite song, Into the Mystic, and I can’t fully explain what happened, only that it was good. I smiled from the inside out. Not a big, showy happiness, but a quiet one, the kind that settles in your chest and stays. The car felt peaceful. The moment felt held. And suddenly I was daydreaming, not about the past, not about what hurt, but about our future, the three of us, moving forward together, steady and intact.

Music didn’t take me backward that day. It met me exactly where I was. And that felt like coming home.