I am an extremely introverted person. This has a lot of little effects on how I live my life, and in particular, I think it has a lot to do with how much I love music.

I only like to open up to a select few people about, well anything, but especially my emotions and what is going on inside. Partly because I don’t feel like sharing that kind of information with everyone I talk to, but also because I assume others aren’t interested—they have their own problems, they don’t need to hear about mine.

What this ends up meaning, since two of my closest friends live hours away, is that I bottle it all up sometimes and just don’t talk about it, unless I REALLY feel the need to (yeah yeah, unhealthy, blah blah). One of my solutions to dealing with whatever feelings I’m feeling is music.

Music helps when you’re lonely because it’s comforting to hear another person’s voice. It helps when you’re anxious and you listen to something familiar or calming. It helps when you’re feeling down because anything you’re feeling has probably been felt before by many talented musicians who have a gift at articulating this feeling. Of course, if you’re sad, it is a little paradoxical to listen to sad music, but sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not the only one. There’s also happy music you can listen to, too, if you’re not in the mood to wallow (I’m mostly joking) and it can definitely raise your spirits. I would venture to say that it can almost be guaranteed that music has the potential to make you feel better in any situation.

Music is also there when you’re feeling happy, and it can augment your happiness. Again, there’s something about the shared emotion that can be found in music, and in this case, it enhances it.

And it’s funny, I’ve thought many times about how sometimes it’s the sounds that articulate or echo exactly what I’m feeling more so than the words themselves. It is so crazy to me that it can work that way, that some chunk of organized sound can resonate with some complex feeling that sometimes I don’t even know how to articulate.

Ever since high school, though, I have been addicted to music. I listen to it in the car, I listen to it when walking down the street, I listen to it in the mornings when I wake up, I listen to it when I do homework. I’ve always been appalled whenever I run into someone who doesn’t care for music. It’s fine if your tastes don’t align with mine, but no interest in music?! Have you no soul?!