An Ever Evolving Playlist of a Girl

I close my eyes and slide back through time.

Into my old skin.

Skin I wanted nothing more than to shed.

I see faces all around me laughing, jeering.

Their laughter rips through me and right into my fresh little heart.

I wore it on my sleeve, then.

It pushes the tears from my tear ducts and only causes them all to laugh harder.

"You're so fat!

Weirdo!

Ugly bitch!

Fat ass!

You should just kill yourself."

These are just some of the things that they would say.

Because of this I would retreat into myself.

Headphones on so loud I couldn't hear them anymore.

Slipknot's Vermillion blasting in my ears.

I would float down the hall, detached.

"She isn't real." The lyrics would repeat, and I wasn't.

Nothing was.

The lockers would blur and extend.

The faces of my peers would elongate like caricatures of themselves.

It wouldn't be until years later that I found out what this was called.

Depersonalization, and derealization.

I was moving in and out of a state of dissociatiation that had its own soundtrack.

There was nothing but my own little world in my mind and all these songs.

I would go home, and my alcoholic mother would shout and scream.

My siblings and I stuck in this never-ending dysfunction.

So, I would slip my headphones back on and listen to Linkin Park.

Oh man were they not the ultimate band to ever exist?

For me, then, they were everything.

They were teen angst personified.

They put words to all the things I could not say.

One Step Closer was my song for everyone including my mother.

"I can not take this anymore....Everything you say to me takes me one step closer to the edge and I'm about to break."

I contemplated suicide daily.

"Wish I could find a way to disappear."

I would turn my boom box on in my room and crank it up so loud.

All I wanted was for my mother, for anyone, to hear my heart to hear me breaking, and care.

Crawling by Linkin Park was another of my anthems.

It's lyrics beautiful and haunting.

They all resonated within me on some deep personal level.

This is where I began to write.

I took my notebook everywhere and filled it with every broken part of me, trying to make myself whole.

The entire Hybrid Theory album pushed me back from the edge as my pen filled page after page with ink and words.

A Place For My Head must have been on repeat for weeks.

Thank you, Chester, for showing me my talents and keeping me alive. Rest in peace.

My mother's drinking got worse.

My siblings and I all tucked ourselves into different corners of our small house with our different music.

My brother playing Eminem, and T Payne, Bone Crusher, DMX.

My older sister introduced me to Linkin Park, and many other bands.

Truth be told I was hiding out listening to Christina Aguilera's Beautiful as I wallowed until I happened to hear the flowing living sadness of her music and adopted some of her favorites as my own.

My little sister following suit.

It was our escape.

And here comes

Simple Plan- Welcome To My Life

Another song that was like it was written for me.

Then Good Charlotte's The Young and The Hopeless came into my life, as well as a few friends.

No longer was I hated, or invisible.

We would sing their songs loudly.

"My high school it felt more to me like a jail cell a penitentiary."

It was so relatable we would jump up and down singing.

Avril Lavigne and Evanescence helped me to come back into my love for singing.

I had always had a good voice, but I was just afraid of the response of others after being bullied for so long.

I wanted my own band so badly.

I could envision my friends and I on stage showing the world who we really were.

Then those friends went as quickly as they came, and I was taught that teen girls are sometimes as fickle as they are cruel.

Then things took another nosedive and I retreated into myself again.

Back into stasis with Evanescence pumping through my speakers.

So many songs accompanied me into the darkness.

I revisited older bands at this time.

Counting Crows- Round Here

That song really stuck with me and I find myself even now listening to it when I am depressed.

"Round here we always stand up straight.

Round here something radiates......and she knows she's more than just a little misunderstood. She has trouble acting normal when she's nervous."

I was so alone.

Being wrapped up into the web of a man older than me.

He used my vulnerabilities against me.

Made me feel even more like an outsider.

All tools he could use to better groom a stupid girl like me.

"And the girl on the car in the parking lot says man you should try to take a shot. Can't you see my walls are crumbling? And she looks up at the building said she's thinking of jumping. Said she's tired of life, she must be tired of something."

I was so tired, more than tired, but these are the growing pains.

These are the lessons we learn along the way.

I fell down far into the deep blue of my depression then.

Stopped going to school.

Stopped talking.

I had found a typewriter at a goodwill and began to type my poems and songs like the greats before me.

I'd also post them on the internet while simultaneously pirating music on limewire.

Every day I would write.

Cutting deep within myself to understand who I was.

Why I was.

Bleeding ink.

When I finally broke out of that vicious game with that man my fight song for it was

Guano Apes- Girl Who Kissed the Dawn

I would belt out the lyrics as I played the song loud in rebellion to his brainwashing.

"Don't you talk to me

Pull the string, don't want to be your doll

You can't cover me up

Because I'm the girl who eats the scrub."

The lead singer Sandra Nasic taught me to find an inner strength within myself I hadn't known I was capable of.

When I finally broke the surface of those dark depths, I was seventeen.

The hardcore scene came on and I felt like I had found my people.

We would go to shows and scream loudly before throwing ourselves into the mosh pits.

I remember feeling so special when, sitting in the cage of the staircase in some building downtown the lead singer of Emmure locked eyes with me as he belted out one of his songs.

Otep

She was like a raging eloquent goddess that only helped further my writing.

I like to think that a little piece of all of these songs made their way into me and out in words.

My friend Britney and I would try to scream like her and always failed, but it was so fun to try.

To scream loudly and violently.

We would switch to Paramore, and other more mainstream bands as well.

We were nothing if not eclectic in our tastes.

We would drive to the all ages club and dance to Soulja Boy, staying up until the wee hours of morning.

A haze of beer bottles, blunts, and bands filled our days.

We would wake up hung over and wash our faces and head downtown to see more music.

Consume vitamin water, and monster energy drinks to come alive again.

We were such beautifully broken things.

There is nothing like the narcissism that comes with adolescence.

The Devil Wears Prada, On Broken Wings, August Burns Red, A Day To Remember, Norma Jean.

So many bands it's hard to name them all.

They became my new comfort.

We were so complex, and selfish.

The world revolved around us.

We would fly down back roads and the interstate at 100mph.

We thought ourselves invincible, immortal.

Until we weren't anymore.

Then I met who I thought was the love of my life. That all-consuming love you can only feel in your youth.

Every action is framed in grand filigree.

Like a movie.

Sometimes I still dream of him and Lower Definition's Miami Nights is the background noise.

He played guitar and his brother played drums.

They had a band of their own and friends who played instruments and knew better music than us.

I wish I could go back and tell myself not to care. Not to spend so much time trying to make a boy think she was cool.

To be as different as she wanted to be.

To play Jewel, Hole, Sarah Mclaughlin, Nina Simone, Green Day, Billie Holiday and Tool all in rapid succession and not give a f*ck what anyone else had to say.

Because in reality she was more punk rock than they would ever be.

No Doubt's- I'm Just a Girl made its comeback in my ever-evolving playlist then.

As I wrestled with what it meant to be a female in a male dominated world.

I remember laying on the hood of another friends car watching the stars as we smoked.

My heart was breaking for the millionth time, but this time was different, it mattered more.

My first Real love.

It ended to the lyrics of

Konstantine by Something Corporate

And I felt each word was just the perfect encapsulation of my relationship as my friend played it through the car speakers.

I could feel each word and beat through my body that's how loud it was.

Echoing through the open forest.

I fade back into my grown body now.

This skin I have somewhat come to love.

I shake my head and sigh.

That was a difficult journey.

Teenage angst is so raw and real it still stings when you think of each memory.

I still wish I could go back and never grow up. Even with all the pain, there was so much promise.

These songs, each and every one of them stick with me even now.

I'm sure there are some I missed and won't remember until I can't fall asleep one night and I hear it on the soundtrack of my past.

And remember what it was like to be a teenager again.