I did not realize how much I missed music with lyrics until I went on academic leave.

I couldn't listen to music with lyrics when I was going to school¹ because it interfered with my ability to read and write. I'm one of those people blessed/cursed with an inner narrator who constantly talks, so if I want to remember anything or write effectively, I have to shut everything else out and just let that inner narrator jabber on or read out loud while I dutifully record. Because of that, I listened to a lot of music without lyrics or music with lyrics in languages I couldn't understand. It helped block out all the other sounds happening around me but didn't interfere with that internal monologue. I'm not really mad about it to be honest; the inner narrator can be annoying sometimes but I credit a lot of my scholarly success to his indefatigable yammering. And this need for music sans words pushed me to look for lots of different genres of music that enriches my life in so many beautiful ways.

But a few weeks after I went on leave, I realized I could listen to music with lyrics again. So I started putting together a playlist titled "for teen me"; it's for a little bit of inner child work I picked up from therapy. On the days I have to hang out with my teenage inner child (more often than I originally thought), we'll sit together in my room and put on the headphones and input an old song I used to like into the spotify algorithm and just let it run for a bit. We'll sit together and evaluate music and add the ones we like to the playlist, and now the playlist itself has grown large enough for us to hang out for hours and listen to music. It's really nice and therapeutic.

Over the years of being a student I've trained myself Pavlov-style to start writing whenever I listen to, say, vocaloid music. It's actually a useful skill (writing coach influencers hate this one weird trick to break through writer's block!). But the music my teen inner child favours almost exclusively has lyrics. And the nice thing about this playlist is that when I listen to that music, it reminds me that I don't have to think. I don't have to read. I don't have to write. I don't have to do anything, and it is blissful.

The very strange and wonderful thing about inner child work is that over time, it's almost like I have an imaginary friend. Sometimes, I will get a craving for some music with lyrics and I realize it's because teen me just wants to hang out and get a little attention. It's because he notices I haven't had a lot of "me time" lately but I haven't realized it yet. So we spin up the playlist and sometimes I'm doing chores and sometimes we just sit in my room and sometimes we even sing along. But most of all, we don't have to write, we don't have to read, we don't have to think.

We can just be.

¹ How long did I not listen to music with lyrics? Well, I started going back to college after flunking out in 2012. I earned my bachelors in 2014, went back to grad school in 2016, got my masters in 2018 and started my PhD later that fall. I hadn't listened to music with lyrics for so long that when I started to again, my eleven year old son was shocked because he assumed I just hated "English songs" because I never listened to them.