I’ve always been an avid music listener, using it to escape reality and feel understood.

As a kid, I was surrounded by all different kinds of music. Rock, country, pop, blues, swing,
indie, rap, etc; You name it, and I probably listened to it growing up. Granted, I don’t listen to a
lot of that stuff now, but there’s a reason for that. Music became my escape. A quote from the
author Kamand Kojouri says, “Music is the best, and cheapest, mind-altering drug in the world.”

Growing up in a house with very little healthy communication was rough, especially with
two younger brothers around. While they both love each other, my mom and stepdad have one
of the rockiest marriages I’ve ever seen. Being the oldest kid, and feeling the need to protect
and shield my brothers from all of that, and I now realize this, was traumatizing. I grew up way
too fast, and because I basically raised my brothers, I missed out on my childhood and felt like I
was my parents’ therapist. All of this began at age 7. I am currently 15.

I’ve spent most of my childhood and adolescence helping raise and take care of my
brothers. I’m related to them through my mom, and my stepdad is their dad. My mom has
worked a full-time job since I was 7, and so has my stepdad, which meant that they weren’t
home a lot, which left me to be the stand-in mom for myself and my younger brothers. I cooked
for the family, cleaned the house, got them and myself ready for school every morning, and
helped with so many other things.

This created a pervasive challenge for my family and me when my stepdad went to jail
when I was in third grade. It gave me just that much more responsibility, and my mom did too.
She was basically a single parent for the 90 days he wasn’t around, which meant I had to step
up. I was 8, and acting as a second parent. I know this helped my mom a lot, but the toll it took
on me was…irreversible. And not having an outlet for myself in order to relieve all the pent-up
emotion from the things at home, only got more difficult to deal with as I aged and the stress
from other areas of life increased as well.

As I got older, and my brothers did too, my “mom-brain” (as I like to call it) never really
shut off. It still hasn’t, even though my brothers are now 11 and 9. And as my mom started
working a little less as I was in middle school, whenever I started parenting my brothers out of
instinct while she was home, she would always just tell me off for it by saying things like,
“Addys, you’re not the mom” or “Tone it down, you’re not their mother.” I’m not gonna lie, every
time she says this kind of stuff, it just makes me mad. I never let her, or anyone, see that it gets
to me, but it does. So I go to my room, close the door, and put on music as background noise so
I don’t just sit in silence with my thoughts.

It’s become a bad habit of mine to not show emotions very often, which isn’t healthy for
my mental, or emotional, health. A few years ago, in 8th grade, I had a doctor's appointment
that kinda gave me a bit of a realization. At every appointment, they have you take this
depression test of sorts and my score caused my doctor to pull me into a separate, smaller
room, away from my mom and brothers because she wanted to talk with me privately. We had a
conversation about it, and I talked a lot about the things that go on at home(dynamics between
my parents, tension between myself and my parents because of my mom being home more
often, my dad’s drinking, and the stress of having to deal with as my brothers got older), how
much they were affecting me, and if I had any concerns about my declining mental health.
Eventually, she asked me what I wanted her to tell my mom because she wanted to recommend
a few therapists, and we eventually came to a conclusion. “She’s a worrier.” I was a worrier, that
was it. I was a worrier and it would be best if I had a healthy outlet to talk to someone instead of
just keeping it to myself. The moral of the story is, I never went to one of those therapists. So I
kept bottling things up…that was until I turned to music.

It may sound weird, but music is the one thing that worked for me as an outlet. I never
really knew how to put my emotions into words so I used music to be able to better understand
how to put my feelings into words. Every song I listened to made it easier to explain when
someone asked if I was ok, and made me feel understood more than a person has ever made
me feel. Music became my healthy emotional outlet, one that every person should have.