Playlists as portals

Don't forget your 14-year-old self.

My childhood friend and I circa 1997. We still called each other on landlines and passed notes in hallways and collected actual ticket stubs from concerts and movies.

Have you listened to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “The Impression That I Get” as an adult? It’s the soundtrack to my first date during the summer I turned 14. I remember it playing as I sat nervously in the front seat of a Jeep Wrangler with a lifeguard I thought was cute. Napster launched a few months earlier and he learned how to burn c.d.’s on the family computer. I’ve always thought of it as a catchy, horn-heavy song from a band that’s faded away from the spotlight, but it is actually about the inevitable tragedies in life from the perspective of someone who hasn't experienced them yet:

Have you ever been close to tragedy or been close to folks who have?

Have you ever felt a pain so powerful, so heavy you collapse?

Have you ever had the odds stacked up so high you need a strength most don't possess?

Recently, I rolled down my car windows on a chilly March evening and yelled along to all the lyrics on my drive home from a long day at work. Let me just say … it was healing.

Music has the extraordinary ability to transport us to a specific time and place - to a different version of ourselves. At 14, I was naïve. At 40, I’m resilient.

Last week, my husband and I met one of my oldest friends for dinner at a restaurant near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. She was there with her husband and their two children. For three hours, we chatted about our families, travel plans, mutual friends, our health, and our childhoods in Columbia, Missouri.

“Guess what? I made a playlist and it is all 90’s music,” she laughed, touching my arm and leaning in close to me. “It’s our youth.”

It’s hard to think of the 90’s as my youth. Maybe it’s because Y2K-inspired trends like baguette bags and platform shoes seemed to have resurfaced for a bit, but don’t the 90’s feel closer in the rearview mirror than they actually are? Maybe it’s all relative.

By the time I walked into my apartment that evening, she sent me the playlist. “It is our youth,” I told my husband as I scrolled through every song, tapping on “6 Underground” by the Sneaker Pimps and “Celebrity Skin” by Hole. I thought Courtney Love was so angry, so powerful, so cool.

A couple of days later, the opening of “Glycerine” began playing through my earbuds. I was standing in the free weight section of a local gym, but if I closed my eyes, I could have been 14 again. I could have been standing on the hill at the Riverport Amphitheater just outside of St Louis with my older sister. It could have been May, it could have been pouring rain, we could have been soaked. “Glycerine” could have been the final song on the set list that night and when the guitar chords stretched into the night air, we could have both agreed that we were glad we stayed even though we were soaked because Gavin Rossdale is a God and life is good and maybe it could always be that way.

My sister and I stopped talking many years after that concert, but there was so much live music in between. My friend pointed this out to my husband. “When we were kids, Lexi and I went to so many concerts,” she said. “And her sister was always our chaperone.”

It would be easy to let resentment harden my heart, to not allow space for it all - the good and the painful and the boundaries and the silence. But I need friends who can slide into a booth next to me and see the 14-year-old version of myself who stood next to her friend and her big sister at a Better Than Ezra concert singing “Good” at the top of her lungs. I need friends who can say, “Family is complicated and life is a lot sometimes.”

That’s how I’ve been feeling lately. Like wow, this is a lot.

“Wow, this is a lot,” I keep saying to my husband and parents and friends and colleagues. This - life, infertility, recovery, taxes, the housing market, the unread messages in my inbox, the doctor on Instagram who said I should be putting estrogen cream under my eyes now that I’m in my forties - estrogen cream, like, for your vagina – all of it. It’s a lot. Right?

What can I do about it? Just keep going, I guess. Just keep going and leaning into friendships that sustain me and listening to playlists that remind me of how far I’ve come. And, occasionally, I can roll down my windows and sing at the top of my lungs because I’m here and I’ve made it this far and I’m okay.