Shaun Wood

I've Got the Music in Me

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She was so young, she still saw all the wonder of the world with wide eyes. She spent her Christmases enraptured with a snow globe in her grandmother's house that would play songs about snow with a few twists of its handle. She spent her days putting on concerts, singing in her room, playing around with her dad's guitar. She spent countless hours in her dad's old, white, beat up suburban with the giant speakers, bouncing with the beat of the rock and roll he played over the radio. She spent her young life surrounded by music, so it was no surprise to anyone that when she grew up, music was so ingrained in who she was that she walked to the beat of the soundtrack in her head. When she was sad she played loops of Taylor Swift, when she was happy she danced around her room to whatever pop song she had stuck in her head that day, when she was angry and turned Evanescence and Joan Jett up in her headphones as loud as possible. And as you've probably guessed by now, that girl is me. In only my second year of high school, I am experiencing textbook pages that my children and grandchildren will read as I read about the Spanish Flu in 1912 and the London cholera outbreak of 1854 and the Black Plague in the Dark Ages. In this time of uncertainty, I am doing what I have always done when I am stressed or sad or angry: I am turning up the music.