From the time I was able to form words, I have been singing. I can vividly remember the first choir I was ever a part of, and the impact it had on a lifelong passion I have developed. Likewise, I have a distinct tactile memory that I associate with the first time I ever played the piano, picked a guitar, or grooved along with someone on the drums. Music, in general, has had a profound effect on my life that I would not limit to just a passion, however. Rather, music has become a coping mechanism for me, like many, who seek validation outside of the written word.

In my experience, life has a way of exposing you to circumstances that steadily challenge your ability to articulate, even comprehend, your own emotions. The easiest thing to do with these new, complex, and multi-faceted emotions is to bottle them. This begins early for most, often in childhood, as we experience things we have no control over. These experiences, like heartbreak, loneliness, and untimely deaths of friends and family among other challenges are too often shoved inside, with the assumption that they will be dealt with later. The problem with this is "later" often means "when we must," and that is seldom dealt with on our own terms.

I experienced this personally after the death of a close family member who had passed away after a long and tiring battle with Leukemia. I turned to music to sort through my raging emotions, which spanned anger, grief, and hopelessness all at once. For the first time, no song acutely described my own emotions for me. No combination of chords, verses, and choruses could explain to me what I was feeling. In a moment of weakness, I began to feel like music had betrayed me. There had always been songs up until that moment that could articulate my emotions to me. It was as if I needed someone else to understand my emotions for me. Without this, I resulted to bottling these emotions for fear that I would become consumed by my own inability to understand their depth.

However, life did not see fit to stop throwing me curveballs. Over the next several years, I experienced things I could not rationalize- the suicide of a friend and role model, the tragic death of a classmate, the near-destruction of my hometown due to severe flooding. These experiences, among others, inspired emotions that no songs I had ever heard could spoon-feed me. I had fallen into an extremely depressed state and was receiving psychological therapy and a strict medicinal regime of SSRI's and antidepressants. I still enjoyed listening to and playing music, but my heart was not in it like it had been years ago. Unfortunately, my heart was not in a lot of the things I did for some time.

It wasn't until my senior year of high school when I elected to take music theory and creative writing simultaneously that I learned something profound about music. That is, music is as much of an individual experience as it is something that people share. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "you don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say." This isn't exclusive to prose. It only then dawned on me that the songs I had been using my whole life to tell me how to feel were never intended to think for me. They were merely an echo of what another individual had expressed about themselves. In my creative writing class, I was learning how to take experiences and turn them into articulations of the emotions they inspire. In my music theory class, I was learning the structure of music and what emotions it often emulates. Alone, neither one of these would have provided me the tools I needed. Together, however, I was able to use music to bring out the complexities of the emotions I felt in words that by themselves could not.

So in a black leather bound journal, I began to tackle all of the bottled emotions I had put off until "later." I found that in writing songs, I was able to reflect much more consciously on emotions that had previously been impossible for me to comprehend. I began to associate my feelings with sounds in a way that allowed me to sort through them more easily. By the summer following my senior year, I was completely un-medicated and felt as if I had a veil lifted from my whole world. I didn't realize it at the time, but what I had done was called lyric convergence. This is a tactic, often used by music therapists, which employs songwriting as an alternative method of processing emotions. Music therapy, itself, is a growing area of study which continues to prove the usefulness of music in the realms of psychology and health.

I keep my black leather bound journal with me almost everywhere I go now. It continues to be a sounding board for the all the emotions that used to burden me, and all the new ones I will experience. So perhaps next time you find yourself feeling overcome by multiple emotions, or are carrying something that's emotionally exhausting, write a song. You may never get around to putting music to it, or crumple it up and throw it away, but just writing it and hearing the emotions in your head is worth it.