Feely Tunes for an Existential Cocoon: Be the Main Character of My Teenage Angst
I enjoy songs that are tangled with melancholy, nihilism, ire, and pain; I always have. When I listen to them now, I'm just going about my day with wonderfully mastered, beautifully sung background music, but adolescent me hung onto every word, lived in the acoustics, and embraced the emotions. I felt like they were speaking right to me; the music was narrating my life. I was never the social animal in high school, nor was I the bookworm or jock or artsy type. I was just a subtle blend of just a smidge of everything which seemed to amount to having many friends but none too close. It was basically being an un-lonely loner. Having everyone at arm's length was a bittersweet thing; it suited my weirdly borderline ambivert personality because no one else seemed to be like me (I know, I KNOW, how cliché), but it made me question whether I'd ever have a close circle of people around me. I was always very introspective, thinking about how my life as it is, a precursor to a young adult, is all I know, the most important thing to me, and yet there are also so many more years ahead of me that seemed to be an endless road with no direction in sight. My mind felt so unruly and unclear that it was like the static on an old box TV. I walked down the hallways of my high school, rode the bus to and fro, and perused the aisles of the grocery store and the library blasting my playlist and blocking out the world around me. From me, my oversized hoodie, skinny jeans, high-top sneakers, earbuds, and 4th gen iPod Touch to you - let's relive my teen angst.
