I haven't been the happiest person I know for the past few months. In fact, I've been feeling so low that I've been finding it impossible even to do the things I used to love. In short, I just haven't been the person I was before.
Ever since I moved to India last year, I'd felt the need to connect to people who I could share my thoughts and ideas with. I'm not saying anything against the people I know in India, but somewhere I felt that my classmates and schoolmates would never look at life the way I did- of course, we had all been in different situations and places- and would not understand. If I ever even thought about things such as the meaning of life or what it meant to be truly happy, I know their response would somewhere include the word 'weird' or one of its many synonyms.
For the past three or so months, I had been in great emotional turmoil. I knew that deep down I was unhappy and was trying everything I could to try and be happy. But nothing worked.
Today things changed. A friend ( who I am grateful for - since he is perhaps the only person who is as deeply contemplative and interested in literature as I am) was sharing some songs, I was taken back to a song I used to listen to when I was still in Malaysia. And with that, things changed. I revisited all my favourite songs - those that had been removed from my iTunes a year back and then the memories came rushing in. I spent several hours listening to all the songs I had loved, recollecting all the memories I had associated with each.
And suddenly I realised that people in fact did not change. Their old personality eventually gets buried deep under the new roles and pretenses that they have to play with the passing of time. And underneath my current appearance of a studious girl who doesn't have friends, I am in fact still the same girl who loves beaches, plays football, and had a grand time at my tenth grade prom - all I need to do is uncover a few layers.
Music helps you do that, really. It's a link between the past and the present and the future. Music lasts for ever.
Here's a quote from the book Just Listen by Sarah Dessen that sums up precisely what I've tried to say in so many words :
Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment.
And no matter whatever happens, a song you can always go back to. You need never lose yourself again.
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