A doorway through time_ Chapter 1: Childhood

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As a child, I was the quiet kid, the one who was suffering in silence, a child who was full of pain and yet perfectly fine when you looked at my face.  I struggled with social anxiety a lot as a child, I felt invisible and forgotten this impacted my friendships and the way I interacted with the world. I would always put up a facade, that I was perfectly fine that there is no problem but in reality I was broken and afraid and just really needed help. I felt like a disappointment, a failure, a burden, a ghost. This playlist represents all those emotions I felt when I would be crying inside but pretending i'm fine when I would look out the window and ponder that maybe my parent's life would be better without me, that I'd always be alone never understood, that me living and breathing is doing more harm than good.

 

The 1st song: Know that you are loved by Cleo Sol is a song that wasn't part of my soundtrack when I was younger but a recent addition but after listening to it, the song truly resonated with my younger self due to it's meaning to know that you are loved and so it serves as a olive branch a light amidst the darkness for my younger self. As a child, I often felt that I wasn't loved, that I was of no value to anyone that being on earth I was here for no reason I was a mistake and a burden. So this song represents an antithesis to those emotions, that despite how I may have felt I have always been loved. It is the song I needed back then and so it acts as a bridge of self-compassion that reaches back through time to tell my younger self that I always was enough.

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The next song I wish you were here by Starshine Singers. This song marks the beginning of my depression and anxiety. Despite being the strongest candidate for the male lead in my primary school play, the role was given away for the sake of 'fairness' to someone who didn't even want it. That rejection, coupled with the mockery of a classmate during my audition, taught me that my voice was a liability. The lyrics—"I feel scared and so alone at night... I wish you were here"—became a secret anthem for my nightmares and loneliness. Watching someone else perform the lead was a daily dagger; I had to maintain a 'good classmate' facade while the song I truly resonated with was being sung by someone else, leaving me to suffer my own truth in silence.

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The next song  Flashlight by Jessie J, was also an anthem of mine but different to the previous song, this was an anthem that I used whenever I wanted to relieve myself of all the negative feelings when I needed a light to pierce the darkness in my heart and mind. This song would help me keep going when I felt like giving up when I felt that there is no reason to go on it was my anchor, my lifeline, a breath of fresh air.

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The Next song Read All About It, Part III by Emeli Sande, this song was my way of expressing the negativity inside the feelings of pain loneliness sadness misery despair isolation worthlessness. Especially because during my time in school there was a period where most people in my year thought I was actually mute because I barely spoke because of my anxiety​. So this was kind of saying, i'm not mute I have a voice I matter as well. It was the only way I could vocalize the years of bottled-up misery, despair, and isolation to shout it to the universe the anger, the anxiety, the feeling of being overwhelmed, overlooked, invisible, forgotten, devalued an outsider the black sheep at school in my family, the burden the waste of space, the malfunctioning cog within the machine, the weirdo, mute child. Through this song, I was countering the labels people had put on me, I was deciding that my voice mattered I was reclaiming my existence with my own hands through the only way I could sound.

 

While I only wrote about four of the songs, each song in my playlist has a special meaning behind it, they are not there for show, as placeholder song or just filler text but all have a powerful significance in my life and a relation to the turbulence which was my childhood.