That was a challenge given to me by a therapist several years ago. At the time, my marriage was falling apart and I was working for a tyrannical micromanaging boss. All I wanted to do was hide in my home office with the lights out and watch Netflix. Recognizing my need for help and that the help I needed was beyond what I could provide for myself, I took the scary step into a counseling facility and signed up for weekly therapy sessions.
As I returned week after week, two things became apparent. First, my depression wasn’t a chemical imbalance or biological condition. She diagnosed me with situational depression, which meant if my situation changed my depression would lessen and possibly vanish. The other obvious thing was how my emotional vocabulary was prohibitively stunted. I knew the main emotions: happy, sad, mad – basically, the main characters from Inside Out. But the finer feelings, the nuanced variants were harder to comprehend. I couldn’t express the difference between frustrated and confused or the escalation from eager to thrilled. Afraid to show that which I couldn’t describe, I’d often bury my emotions. Anything I couldn’t hide spewed out in over-dramatic fashion.
Knowing I wasn’t able to change my circumstances, my therapist instead sought to expand my emotional vocabulary. She had me list every emotion I could think to label and sort them according to those I felt capable of expressing versus those that challenged me. Then she asked me about my soundtrack.
“What songs would be on your soundtrack?” She asked.
I was excited. As an audiophile and music junkie, this was the type of question I’d been preparing my whole life to answer. Even in the depths of depression, I found refuge in the songs that spoke to my soul.
“Well,” I said, “There’s a lot.”
“Define a lot.” She said.
“I have a playlist in iTunes titled Soundtrack to My Life
She chuckled then asked, “How many songs are in that playlist?”
“Over 600.”
“How about you whittle it down?”
I stared at her without replying. The task seemed too daunting to contemplate.
She continued, “Think it through, if someone wanted to know who you were, what it was like inside your head, and you could only play them a song, what song would you play for them?”
“I don’t know if I could only play a single song.” I said.
“Maybe narrow it down to five.”
She gave me homework. Over the week, she wanted me to sort through my list of more than 600 songs and pick out the five I felt represented me the most. The five songs that best explained who I was, how I felt about myself, and the story of my life. She wanted me to bring the list with me into the next session. The following Tuesday, I gathered my results, scribbled onto a sheet of lined notebook paper. Only, I couldn’t break it down to five. The closest I could get was 25.
Over the next few weeks, she asked me to play one song from that list. Then we would discuss why I selected that song and how it made me feel. We did the same thing the next week and the week after. Slowly, I discovered new ways to express my emotions. I found verbiage previously foreign to me. Months passed and circumstances changed. Those situations causing my depression were altered and I slowly worked my way back to better state of mind.
Even after my therapist gave me a clean bill of mental health and graduated me out of counseling, I kept that handwritten list of 25 songs. I never stopped thinking about the assignment she gave me.
Music is therapeutic. It has always been my safe place. Songs written by other people have always helped me understand myself. When I couldn’t find a way to express myself, a talented lyricist gave me words I couldn’t invent on my own. Time and time again, I’d hear a song for the first time and think to myself, “Yes, that’s it. That is what I’ve been struggling to say all this time. That perfectly describes how I’m feeling.”
In the years since compiling the 25 songs representing me, I’ve intentionally deliberated the content of the original 600 track playlist. Using my list from therapy as a foundation, I curated a new playlist. I culled songs from the big playlist and added new songs to reflect my current phase in life. Then I sorted them thematically to help me make sense of this expanded list. Finally, I gave it a title: What It’s Like to Be Me.
This is the true soundtrack to my life. If anyone really wants to know who I am, they could listen to these songs and know more about me than I could ever tell them in conversation alone.
Throughout the next twelve months, I’m going to share this list in small increments. Little by little, I’ll take you on a musical journey through my life from childhood through today. The songs themselves will not follow a chronological order as their release dates don’t always align with the era of my life it describes. But in the end, I hope it all makes sense.
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