music

January 6, 2026 5 mins


i really love music lately, i have all of these emotions that i can’t describe or understand or put into words, but when i listen to music it feels like a way for me to get closer to what i really feel. i close my eyes and i shut out the world a lot of the time, but when i need it to, music holds a mirror to my face and doesn’t let me look away. at the same time when i need a distraction, music is there for me too. i’ve made decisions - not big decisions, just the minor day-to-day ones that, added together, make up a small piece of my life - based on what song is playing at the time; i’ve spent money, run my heart out, tried to changed the way i look, tried to remember or forget all thanks to it.

i try to imitate the singers and artists i like, it’s somewhat futile. sometimes a song pops into my head, and i don’t know where it comes from, but it sounds familiar. i assume it’s an “original idea” and i think to myself oh hey maybe today is the time i try my hand at songwriting. my hands on the piano, and then it all goes to shit. it sounds familiar because… i didn’t write it. what im playing is just musical sentences, pieces of songs that i’ve heard that week, barely reformulated or changed before i unconsciously spit it out here at the piano bench. i play chord after chord, but they’re not mine. all i can play is snippets of things other people have written. i have heard this before. im just reheating somebody else’s nachos, so to speak.

this is what happened yesterday when i wrote a waltz, and then later realized that it was just some kind of frankensteinian blend between the “we three kings” christmas carol and the fontaine theme from genshin impact. you can superimpose the three pieces (if you can count mine as a piece) onto each other, without having lost anything major. it’s discouraging honestly. i feel the same when it comes to poetry and writing. i can only repackage other people’s quotes so many times before the pile of leftovers starts to smell like plagiarism.

“i feel, i feel.” i preface my sentences, both publicly and privately, with this phrase incessantly. “i feel like…” whether it’s an opinion or a fact, they all end up in the same rhetorical bucket of what im feeling. i had an english teacher in high school who despised this phrase. often we’d have to speak up in discussion to explain a story’s metaphor, prattle about authorial intent, or say any of those phrases that high school english teachers want you to say. “i feel like Romeo in this passage is saying…” and he’d interrupt you. “you what?” he’d say. “you feel like it or you really know it?” and he wouldn’t let you go on until you just said what you were thinking, without a mention of your feeling. looking back it is a certain kind of facts-over-feelings attitude that seems to be deployed a lot politically, for some reason. and it is strange to forego any kind of feeling, instinct, or emotion in a class that is purportedly about storytelling - writing, that common language trying to connect humans together, share in human emotion. but i do admire how he taught us to be more courageous and precise with our interpretations. he wanted us to give our thoughts the same level of authority as facts and figures. if something’s just a feeling, then it doesn’t have to cough up any evidence, it demeans itself for fear of interrogation or criticism. but a claim of fact requires you to defend its truth; it takes an implicit, prerequisite courage to say it in the first place. (i wonder how this teacher would feel (whoops) about the modern penchant for vague hand-wavy arguments such as “the vibe im getting from this paragraph” or “Romeo in this passage is really giving…”)

despite his best efforts i was never able - and still find myself unable - to forego that prefix. “i think i might be feeling sad…” vs “i am sad.” why this habit? why is it instinctual, automatic, reflexive? i think it keeps me safe. if it’s “just a feeling” then it can be discarded. a feeling is temporary, passes by like a wind; a fact is fixed in time, anchored. i don’t need to ascribe responsibility or give evidence if it’s just a feeling. it can go out into the wind, dissipate, pass through and out of me. “i feel like i might’ve had a crush on her,” “i feel like she shouldn’t have said that to me,” “i feel like my life should have been different,” “something feels so wrong with me,” “i feel like im a bad person.” it is safe. i am safe. i am afraid of these feelings becoming facts because then they will stand on their own, like trees standing in the field, like a monument you can’t look away from. “i feel like the song i wrote is just plagiarism” is safe and more cushioned than finally outright saying “the song i wrote is plagiarism”; there’s an instinctive refusal to admit the truth, to acknowledge the fact, to swallow the evidence. i try to hide it, but even my small linguistic gestures reveal some deep-held insecurity rooted in me. it’s the weed i can never really pull out, the one giving rise to every gesture of self-effacement, self-flagellation i succumb to. when i accept things the way they are it feels like it all goes to shit. but if all im doing is feeling then i can pretend, misinterpret, dream for just another precious minute more… which is why music is so loving to me.

Anyway i should get up now but before that here are more of my unsubstantiated feelings.


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