There are some rooms in my memory I don’t like to open. They smell like old anger and broken promises. One of them belongs to my dad, who’s a man who was supposed to be safe and instead became something I felt like I had to survive. Whenever I was younger, I learned fast that silence can be dangerous, that love could turn sharp without warning. But somewhere between all of that noise and hurt, I found something that didn’t lie to me: music.
Music didn’t tell me everything would be okay. It didn’t pretend my childhood was normal or soft. It just sat with me in the truth. Whenever I put my headphones on, it felt like someone else was finally understanding how loud my thoughts were, how heavy my chest felt. Lyrics gave words to emotions I didn’t know how to say out loud: fear, rage, loneliness, and hope. Sometimes a song would hit so close it felt like it had been written specifically for me, for that exact moment when I needed it most.
What confuses me about music is how something you can’t see or touch can hold you together. A melody can feel like a hand on your back when you’re about to fall apart. A beat can feel like a heartbeat, reminding you that you’re still alive. I don’t know how a few chords and a voice can pull you out of a spiral, but they do. They pulled me out more times than I can count.
Growing up with trauma made me feel like I was broken in ways no one could fix. There were days I felt trapped inside my own head, replaying things I wished I could forget. Music gave me a way out, not an escape, but a release. When I was angry, it let me scream without hurting anyone. When I was sad, it let me cry without being ashamed. When I felt numb, it made me feel something again.
As I got older, especially moving into this year, music became more than just survival; it became identity. I started to understand myself through the songs I loved. They helped me realize I wasn’t just what happened to me. I was also what I felt, what I dreamed about, what I chose to keep listening to. In a world that had taken so much from me, music was something I got to claim as mine.
There’s a strange kind of power in that. When you grow up in chaos, you don’t always feel like you have control over anything. But pressing play? Choosing a song? That was agency. That was me deciding how I wanted to feel for the next three minutes. Sometimes that was all I needed to keep going.
The truth is, my past will always be a part of me. I can’t delete it. I can’t rewrite it. But music taught me that pain doesn’t get the final word. There are still songs left to be played, still stories left to be sung. And somehow, in all that noise and beauty, I learned that I am not just a survivor of a messy world, I am a listener, a feeler, a person still becoming.
