I Don’t Know How to Feel

Illustration by Valerie Letts

Immediately after a breakup, almost all advice points to ruminating on really sad music. Your friends tell you to let it out to “Liability” by Lorde, movies depict girls sulking in their bedroom to “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, your mom promises that “Chiquitita” by ABBA will heal your wounds. The overwhelming consensus is that the only way you can heal is with the help of gloomy tracks; you’re supposed to save happy music for your carefree day-to-day activities. When you wake up in the morning, walk to class, or when you’re in the kitchen making dinner, happy music should be what's playing through your headphones. Although these guidelines may intuitively make sense, my own listening habits tend to violate them. But what if you want to listen to an upbeat Sabrina Carpenter album after a breakup? Will it ruin the heart-wrenching experience? And what if you want to start your day with “Moon Song” by Phoebe Bridgers? Is your day now destined to be sad? For me, the answer to these questions has always been no.

Listening to music that perfectly fits my mood has never been my taste. In fact, I often find that the music I choose to listen to completely opposes the way I’m feeling. Contrary to widely advertised breakup advice, after heartbreak, I always make an upbeat playlist. I’ve found that music can be both a healing and hurting presence. While listening to sad music may help some in overcoming their emotional turmoil, I find it often allows me to drown in my own despair for far too long. To me, making a playlist to cry to after a breakup is like searching through your camera roll for photos of you and your recent ex – it’s tempting, but severely depressing. Instead, making a playlist that leans more upbeat than sad forces me to ditch my depressive schema and distracts me from the grief I'm feeling. The optimism that races throughout my post-breakup playlists has proven itself to be a valuable cure for the gut-wrenching feeling that accompanies loss. Instead of lingering in the sadness of my life, an upbeat playlist gives me room to appreciate the small things in the face of big losses that I fear I’ll never get over.

Despite my carefully hand-picked post-break-up playlists, the majority of the music that fills my typical everyday playlists is overwhelmingly sad. The lyrical complexity of a heart-wrenching song is what I crave in music. My playlists are full of songs that Spotify would add to their Sad Crying Mix, songs that are only meant to be listened to when you need a messy cry. I fear the day that I get stopped on the street for one of those “what are you listening to” TikToks, as I’m almost sure the video’s comment section will be overflowing with concern for my well-being. But I really am almost always okay, I simply love sad music. A song about the tumultuous end of a relationship is not locked away with no access, only to be released when you can relate to it. A good song is a good song no matter what mood you’re in, and a song’s relatability is not the only key to musical enjoyment. So what if you want to run on the treadmill while listening to “All Too Well” or get ready for a night with “Landslide” blasting through your bedroom speaker? You alone know what you feel like listening to despite emotional guidelines.

With that being said, the dichotomy between the music I listen to and the way I feel doesn’t mean that songs don’t ever affect my mood. I often don’t know how I feel about a situation until I hear a song that organizes my thoughts and feelings for me. I often shuffle my whole music library while I’m walking or driving and can’t quite decide what I feel like listening to. All of a sudden, a song I’ve long forgotten will come on, and, just like that, I’ll be transported into a feeling I thought I had lost to time.

Although I recommend shuffling your music library, I must pair this suggestion with an asterisk of warning. By playing roulette and giving every song you’ve ever even slightly liked a chance to play, you’re inevitably going to stir up emotions you’ve been desperately trying to suppress. When the emotions reappear, you’re faced with the choice of either skipping the song and going on with your day, attempting to forget the emotions that have bubbled to the surface, or sticking it out and timidly re-living the memories strung to the music. I often choose the latter, which is a dangerous but informed choice – it gifts you with intel on how you actually feel. You’ll never know if the risk of a shuffle will result in therapeutic off-key singing or a spiralling moment where tears are shed, but regardless of the outcome, the experience is a testament to music’s ability to surface emotions you didn’t even know were brewing. The sequence of emotion-based listening involves recognizing how you feel, using one word to label the emotion, and then choosing songs based on this watered-down representation of your feelings. But when a song has the ability to randomly uncover a complex emotion you felt on a Tuesday in the fall of grade 11, it's hard to structure listening around such unpredictable feelings.

The emotional boundaries placed on music consumption through traditional listening habits should not influence the songs you press play for. Yes, most music conveys a specific emotion, but you are not absolutely bound to it. I don’t even know how I’m feeling half the time, so it would be impossible to match a song to the jumble of emotions coursing through my head at any given moment. There’s no wrong way to listen to music, and consuming songs outside of the moods in which they are typically enjoyed can uncover new perspectives on a song you’ve heard a million times. Listening to music is a personal experience and should not be confined to outside opinions or emotional guidelines. When hitting play, you don’t need to know how you feel, just what you feel like listening to.