Just like most of my age-mates, I spend hours every day making my ears uncomfortable listening to music. To wash dishes, you need music. To do laundry, you need music. To iron and fold your clothes you need music. To study, you need music. If you are like my brother, to shower “comfortably”, you need music.

Eventually, after listening to the same twenty songs over and over, I bet they start to sound drab. I have over one thousand songs saved on my phone and still, I can complain.

Worn out to exhaustion. And I don’t mean the music, I mean the enjoyment. We listen to music so much we don’t even miss it. Oh, what to do? What to do?

“Why not go on a little sabbatical?” I thought.

“Sure, would be an interesting experiment”, me again.

Stage 1:Has it always been this way?

I didn’t know the voice in my head could get this loud. It’s usually a whisper, a soft voice, now it’s as audible as if someone was talking behind me. In a rather frank voice, I might add.

Stage 2:Pandora opens

What butchery, what slaughter, what …let me just say it was pretty bad. Every thought that I had pushed back, for I don’t know how many months, came rushing in. Fears, disappointments, anxieties, exes. Fam, I was worrying about things I didn’t think I cared about e.g. my long-term fertility. I didn’t know when your brain goes quiet bad thoughts pound in like a dam just broke. Where is Wanda Maximoff when you need her?!

Anyway, I have lived a short life, so after fifty minutes I ran out of memories to torture myself with. Yeeii, youth!

Stage 3:Catharsis

There is a book my YouTube algorithm seems to think I should read; I get like 5 videos on it daily. It is called, “How Not To Die Alone” by Logan Ury. If they are trying to drop me hints, they truly aren’t subtle.

In that book, the author talks about being intentional in moving up the love ladder. ‘Decide, don’t slide’. She goes on to talk about how most couples move through their love cycle just progressing upwards naturally without much thought. An example she states is how a couple who has been dating for six years feels the next step is to get married just cause it’s what’s next. At this point, the actualization of Logan’s advice started to happen.

I started actively thinking about my day. The things I wanted to do. The things I wanted to do that week and how I was going to do them. The things I would normally forget without a reminder, I remembered. I thought about the important people in my life and how I should call them more. Open-eyed meditation fits the description. The experience was something I would pay for.

Stage 4

There are few better feelings than missing a song and then getting to hear it. Try it sometime.