Music is something that has stood beside me through so many events in my life, both good and bad. It only takes a second for a few chords from a familiar song to make me remember something in the past. In fact, there are sometimes events I haven’t given any thought in a while, yet a little tune can make thoughts swarm through my thoughts immediately.
The crazy thing is that I noticed this earlier in life, yet it did not start to really affect me then as much as it does now. For example, I had this boyfriend when I was younger and right after we met there was a miscommunication and we lost touch for a bit. During that time, there was a song called “I Miss You” by Aaron Hall and it reminded me of him. To this day whenever I hear the song, it reminds me of that.
The thing that is not so great is that sometimes songs that are great can take you back to a negative event. There are two distinct times that this has happened in my life. The first was when I was at the funeral of my grandmother and I started thinking about an uptempo Jennifer Lopez song in order to stop the tears from falling. For years I could not listen to that song without feeling like I wanted to cry.
This happened to me again a couple of years ago when I went through a really bad breakup. Around the time that we started having problems, I started listening to Pitbull a lot since it would take my mind off all of the things I was going through. Unfortunately, this one song started to scroll through my head often because of the lyrics sort of mimicked details of what I was going through. I cannot listen to that song these days without thinking about my ex.
I know that this will more than likely happen to me many more times in my life. In some ways, I wish that it did not happen since it can make a perfectly good song become an enemy. On the flip side, sometimes we need reminders of all of the things that we have experienced in our lives. We can cherish all of the good memories and take lessons we learned from the bad ones and use them to make the future a much better place.