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ninarogers · 7 years

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I have made a playlist for every month of my life since September 2013, save a couple misses. I have never been reliable at keeping a written journal, but I’m also a child of consumption. I don’t always define myself through my organic feelings: they’re filtered through everything I watch and listen to. I am not sad, I am Bridget Jones. I am not sturdy, I am Mary Tyler Moore. Everything is a reference, and I am just a meme aggregator. My playlists are the most accurate depictions of my emotional state I have on record.

Something to keep in mind is that these playlists are essentially my monthly easy listens. These can be taken as a summary of my monthly vibes. I don’t pick too obscure because I’m not in high school anymore, and I am a little lazy.

Data is beautiful. This isn’t, because I am not careful. But it’s an interesting way to look at my listening habits. Have a look…

Quick Takeaways

Groove R&B also missed the genre cut, to my surprise. A symptom of my latent anxiety: singing about getting bodied has the tendency to make me think about my physical body, a source of panic for me.

I Know Places really finished strong, but all three of its inclusions were on the same playlist (Nov 2014, when 1989 was released). Taylor’s appearance was interesting though–all my playlists are on Spotify, where her music isn’t. I imported the song just to listen to it three times an hour. Today, it’s not even my fave from the album (it’s I Wish You Would, of course).

Are You Strong Enough To Be My Man? Nobody is. Sheryl ruined me

Rilo Kiley finishing first is no surprise. They’re the only band whose lyrics I’d get tattooed on my body (but I don’t, because I’d have to tell people I have a song lyric tattoo). I am, however, surprised that Whitney just missed the cut when I have a shrine to her in my bedroom. Fake news?

My methods of dividing into genre and subgenre are not empirical, but they do reveal how I view certain sounds. I’ve defined a couple of the more esoteric subgenres below:

- Indie Sweet - Indie genre, with a sound that feels sweet to me. They aren’t overly produced or lyrically confrontational. They sound Nice. Too much, though, and I feel sick. Ex. Belle & Sebastian, Regina Spektor, Waxahatchee

- Shine as a subgenre - Anything with a sheen. It’s a little electro, maybe a little mad. It’s modern. Ex. The Cure, Something in the Water by Carrie Underwood.

- Indie Nah - Honestly, shit I don’t care for anymore. I liked the song in the moment, but it fell back into sounding like a murmur-y piece of garbage melody without any bite to it. Ex. all these band names that sound made up:

- Octave Pop - She can sing! Ex. Adele, Whitney

- Feelings Rock v Whine Rock - Distinction depends on if I empathize. I empathize with Sheryl Crow, not Rivers Cuomo.

- Weird Pop - Just as poppy as Poppy Pop, but they don’t play it on the radio. But they should, really. See below

- Vintage as a subgenre - If a song didn’t easily fit into an already defined category and was older than ten years, I put it into vintage. Nirvana, Sugar Ray, and Third Eye Blind should not be in the same category theoretically, but I am just a girl.

WHO WON????

Octave Pop

EMO: POPPY V. TRUE The fun ones go more with my vibes.

BEYONCE 4 is still my favorite. @ me.

WEIRD POP To be frank, I’m surprised Fiona even appears here. She’s usually too weird to pair with anything else.

VIBES V. VINTAGE An argument could be made for The Beach Boys as vintage since Brian Wilson singles landed there but ultimately don’t their vibes win you over?

AM I STILL MAD AT DRAKE? You have no idea.

HOW BOW WAH

These playlists, as I said before, are not entirely representative of my listening output for the last three and a half years. There are songs you repeat for days at a time, albums you become obsessed with, and little things you don’t feel like pulling up on Spotify. Here are some things I listened to particularly a lot, enough to make their own, unmonthed lists:

1. Moana soundtrack (looped for month of November) 2. All I Want For Christmas Is You (during period of inertion, December) 3. That Bleachers album (only good altogether, but really not good at all) 4. The xx’s Aaliyah cover (truly remarkable, it lasted me many snowy walks home in January 2014) 5. The Cure’s entire output all at once, all the time 6. Kill My Boyfriend by Natalia Kills (very good when you reach the Anger stage of a breakup, August 2014) 7. A Fleetwood Mac/Rilo Kiley entire discogs alternating songs playlist (the only thing during the drive to Los Angeles, Dec 14/Jan 15) 8. Various emo/pop punk band radio stations (an anytime affair, continuously) 9. Michael Jackson (bought a monster singles compilation that stays in my car’s CD player) 10. West Side Story

MISSING MONTHS

I missed a total of seven months in creating these lists: August 2014, December 2014, and July-November 2016.

August 2014

My college apartment’s lease had finally run out. I had six weeks until the next one started. My Cute Transience had no time to think about Ben Gibbard. I stayed in four different rooms in three different apartments for six weeks. All the mattresses smelled like potatoes. One room was technically a front parlor. Evanston IL never felt so suffocating.

December 2014

I quit my job. I left Evanston for home in Tennessee. I had the vaguest plan to move to California, but I had no job or apartment or any ties anywhere. I drove home with all my earthly possessions stuffed in my Honda Civic. After three weeks of my mom asking why I didn’t have a boyfriend and my dad slipping me the Nashville classifieds I shoved all my garbage back into my Civic and drove 2000 miles to Los Angeles. It took eight days, four stops, and two days of being stranded in small town Texas to get there. I almost died (existentially, and literally). It took me two years to process this as something that happened to me in my life.

July-November 2016

My anxiety had been building steadily for the last three years. My physical health was declining, ever so slightly, enough for me to feel paranoid for even thinking about it. Have you ever been scared of your body? Has your body ever betrayed you? Have doctors? I asked so many what was wrong with me and they told me to drink more water, see a therapist, stop worrying about it. (Later, I did do all those things, and they did help. But not with my state of mind.) It’s so strange to feel yourself turning inwards but to have no desire to stop it. I was afraid of thinking about what was wrong, so I thought about nothing. I was afraid of distracting myself to the point of forgetting, lest my body decline even more, so I did nothing. I felt nothing for six months. I don’t recommend it.

CONCLUSIONS

- The graph doesn’t show how much country is making a general resurgence in my life–but, of course, only the Shine variety. Get Jason Aldean out of here

- Emo music has dropped off my monthly playlists, but my All Time Low radio station is always within the last five lists I’ve played. When I’m in the mood, I can’t just have one–I need it all.

- Indie dropped off in December of 2016–softboys were hard to take right after emerging from a cocoon of depression. I replaced it with a song off the Hamilton mixtape (Satisfied–honestly not my fave!) I did listen to Wait For It (original recording) for days at a time, on loop. I don’t recommend, on the whole.

THE PLAYLISTS Some are better than others.

September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 December 2016 January 2017

NB: Spotify removes all instances of my Chance and Taylor Swift inclusions. Check the raw data to be sure.

And here’s my raw data. I input it all by hand, so. It’s probably missing some.

#depression #mental health #music #charts #this is pointless

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ninarogers · 7 years

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How does your anxiety feel?

Mine feels like: 1. A cold egg cracked on the back of my neck, radiating out from my spinal cord through the rest of my body like a cruel cancer. It tingles, then shakes, then comes to a stop. It is unforgivingly frigid. The anxiety snakes its way around my shoulders and backs, hugging my abdomen and seeping deep into a pit in my stomach. "Butterflies in my stomach" is much too kind a phrase--it's much more a flock of vultures, circling around any hope or happiness I have, waiting for an opportunity to streak down and peck the life out of me. 2. A heart attack, but it's happening all over my body. It starts in my chest, priming my fear. Sometimes it's sharp needles poking me. Sometimes it's an elephant's foot, concentrated strength round as a golf ball pressing down on my sternum, over and over. Then it moves to my arm--always the left. My bicep rests on pins and needles while my mind considers: is this really It? Or is this just anxiety? Then, the fear morphs into more throbbing pain, up and down the left side of my body. My stomach, my ovaries, my leg, my neck. Sometimes I stiffen up and assume the worst: meningitis, maybe, a slow death like that. As soon as I concentrate on one area of my body, it moves somewhere else. Schrodinger's panic. 3. The thoughts that don't go away, like that my body is irreparably damaged. Maybe I won't be able to have a baby. Maybe the medication that I'll be starting in 12 hours, the one that I'll have to inject myself with on a regular basis, with the laughably long list of possible side effects (including many types of cancer), the medication that I'll have to take for the rest of my life, won't even work. Maybe that leg pain is leukemia. Maybe the floaties in my vision are nascent blindness. Maybe I did this all to myself, and it is all my fault. 'My body is falling apart' is a joke I make, but I mean it sincerely. 4. An itch that won't go away, very literally. It's the eczema spreading across my desert skin worse than drought, erupting through my joints and coming to rest on my fingertips, my palms, my nail beds. "Maybe it's incurable." Scratch, scratch. "He's not into you like that. He's probably just being polite." Scratch, scratch. "The world is ending, and you're wasting your time thinking about your inconsequentialness, your physical." Scratch. 5. A lump in my throat, thick and fearful. Someone gave me a Xanax once after witnessing one of my panic attacks. It's still sitting on my desk in the clear plastic cup I took it home in. It's dusty now. I can't ever take it. What if my fragile corporeality violently rejects it, leaving my dead body in a pool of vomit that nobody finds for weeks? So I stay inside my mind and I don't come out. I don't eat or sleep. I lose my ability to enjoy anything. I fall into a deep depression, and I don't even know it. That happened to me recently: I realized that I'd spent March to October of last year in a debilitating haze, and I didn't know. I only realized it when, naturally, my Spotify top played songs playlist came out and the only things on it were shitty emo songs I played in January on loop, and the ten or twelve albums I had listened to in November, over and over, not realizing I was so hungry for music because I had starved myself of it for so long. Fear starts in my throat but it ends in my mind, shutting it down, letting nothing and no one in. I'm doing a lot better now.

#tw anxiety #anxiety #mental health

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