i know you're tortured within

As the year comes to an end, I look back and think about how much I’ve changed and how many moments I’ve experienced throughout it. It feels like I’ve lived 3 different lives just this past year alone. There’s been ups, there’s been downs, but most importantly, there’s been growth.

Something that really scares me but at the same time also kind of excites me is time. Nothing can stop the inevitable passage of time. It scares me because sometimes I feel like I’ll eventually run out of time to do everything I love. I’m not afraid of death, just afraid of what happens (or fails to happen) before it eventually reaches me. Time also excites me because there’s so much you can accomplish just by waiting. I’m still pretty much a kid right now, and I’m excited to grow up and have just a liiiiitle more freedom. Of course, everything comes with a price, and I’m well aware that there are many struggles that follow adulthood. But the funny thing about time is that, well, I don’t have to worry about any of that right now.

Going back on what I said about ups and downs and growth, I want to bring up something that recently made me come to a realization. Last week, Spotify Wrapped and a few other yearly recaps released for most streaming platforms. As I looked at my recap, I saw some songs and even albums on it that I knew weren’t exactly accurate. Now, the data itself was correct, but the songs I was being shown were not true to what I really enjoyed this year.

For pretty much the entirety of the earlier half of this year, I made the stupid mistake to do something known as sleep scrobbling. For those who don’t know what the hell that is, it’s when you loop a song (typically on mute) while you’re sleeping with the goal of achieving more counted streams–known as scrobbles on last.fm. The only reason I ever did this was so I could show people my last.fm data and flex my high amount of scrobbles for certain tracks. It was really stupid. A lot of times I would even sleep scrobble songs that I didn’t even really like just because I wanted to impress somebody. It took me a while for me to realize this was a really dumb thing to do. If I could go back, I’d tell myself to just listen to my music like normal and not worry about my stats not being high enough. It makes me feel a lot prouder when I know all of my scrobbles for a song are 100% natural.

On another note, while I was a little performative loser this year, I have noticed that my confidence and self acceptance have boosted at least a little bit since last year. My social anxiety has definitely started getting better and I’m not really scared to defend myself or speak up about things I’m passionate about. I’m also really good at shutting out unnecessary opinions from other people. I’m really big on being yourself and not letting others dictate who you should be. I think one good example of something that would challenge this is ironically prevalent in the alternative community.

I like to describe myself as an alt person, I listen to alternative music and dress alternatively compared to most people. Of course, I only started really expressing myself this way very recently. I’ve always had the mindset and beliefs but never really expressed it through my fashion. Anyway, a lot of people trying to get into this community, and even I was guilty of this, search up “how to be emo 101” on Google and follow whatever tutorials come up. A lot of people in the alt community like to be picky on what they “allow” to be alt. I feel like listening to this is an easy way to lock yourself inside a very small box and not be totally happy or comfortable. The whole point of being alternative is expressing yourself, not fitting whatever “rules” being alternative is defined as. You’re supposed to give yourself labels that you think align with you, not try to align with labels because you feel like you have to, if that makes sense. I think that you should just be yourself and figure out what you like and what makes you happy, and then think about what labels might describe you, after the fact.

I hope everybody is having a wonderful December and I’m grateful I was able to share my thoughts with you all this year. Thank you to everybody who visited my website (30,000 views as of writing, holy shit!), and thank you to everybody who surfs on websites similar to mine. I would wish everybody a happy new year and X-mas as well, but I think I’ll be making another post closer to the end of the year. Much love :)