my media and me

Please charge.

Please charge.

Please charge.

The heaving sigh I breathed out, as I finally tore my purple headphones off my head, was enough to let my up and downstairs neighbors know that I had just about had it for the night. As if my headphones dying wasn’t enough, there were five different thirty-something-page articles open on my newly stickered laptop, all unread and uninteresting to me.

In an attempt to relieve myself of a full course load during my last semester of college, I decided that taking 18 units in the fall would be a great idea. In theory, it still is a good idea.

My exasperated sighs when my headphones die during an unproductive homework session say otherwise, however. 

It quickly became clear to me that sighs, cries, and walks around my new neighborhood would define this second-to-last semester of school. The transition from late summer humidity and late night sweats to early fall winds and early sunsets reminded me that the Earth turned; and with it, I turned back into a student, one last (official) time.

This fall term was almost like a reintroduction to New York for me. I spent the previous spring semester at NYU’s Los Angeles campus, living in their heart-of-gentrified-LA housing during the school week, then drove home every weekend to do laundry, steal groceries from my parents, and sleep in my own bed. By the time August rolled back around, I’d been away from New York for almost a year. How was I supposed to go back?

Not only would I have to get used to the time difference again, I would have to get used to being away from everything all over again. 

I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to deal with one of the greatest horrors ever known to man: apartment hunting in Manhattan. My roommate and her partner were living in Queens over the summer– they did all of the on-the-ground work in finding a suitable place to live, all I did was sign some papers over email.

I was also lucky enough that my best friend traveled with me to New York that August to relieve me of the all-consuming stress of moving across the country, buying furniture, and getting it into a pre-war walk-up. All of the joys I felt of New York in those two weeks– meals at our favorite Italian restaurant, day trips to my favorite upstate town, and IKEA runs in a rented U-HAUL truck– quickly became memories of a near past; the second my best friend got into the Uber to Newark Liberty Airport, I felt the all familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach: I really had to do all of this again.

Cue the sighs, cries, and walks around the neighborhood.

My headphones would keep dying because I rarely, if ever, took them off while I was in my apartment.

Most of my days were spent commuting to and from campus, doing homework, cooking, showering, brushing my teeth, sleeping, and repeating all of it. I had the occasional FaceTime with my best friend back home, or a hang out with a New York best friend or two that I, of course, cherished. But for the most part, I was alone.

Alone with my purple headphones.

And alone with my favorite musicians whose voices were singing in my ears, or whose soft instrumental pieces soothed me as I read about Foucault and the Panopticon for the eleventh time.

Or alone with my favorite characters in my favorite television shows and movies. Characters like Chandler Bing from Friends, Kathy Seldon from Singin’ in the Rain, or Angel Dumott Schunard from RENT.

When I felt like I needed to sigh or needed to cry, for whatever reason, I’ve always turned to media to help me process what I’m feeling.

I’d say I was in a transitional period of my life: moving back to New York, thinking about school, thinking seriously about life after graduation. But I alone couldn’t put a finger on exactly how any of it made me feel.

So I listened to Kacey Musgraves.

“Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight? Happy and sad at the same time.”

Happy and sad at the same time. That’s about right.

The simultaneous joy and sorrow I felt somehow led me to, almost compelled me to, revisit all of my favorite songs and shows and movies from both my childhood and adolescence.

8 hours in the Spirit Airlines terminal in early October. A combined 4 of them included two High School Musical movies, 1 and 2. Every music cue, every lyric, every mannerism, every intonation of every word spoken… if it's from any of those movies, I know it.

I waited for a rainy day to watch High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Homework was piling up, tests were around the corner, and I felt lonely. My friends were busy with work, with school, and I couldn’t do anything else but be by myself.

Ever since starting college, I’ve always said to my best friend that I get Gabriella. I understood now why she was reluctant to go back to East High after already struggling to become accustomed to Stanford University out west.

“It’s taking me two weeks to get used to being away from you. From East High and all my friends.”

“I know. I know.”

“So what, I come back, go to prom and leave again? And then it’s graduation and leave again?”

“That was our plan.”

“I don’t think I can do it, Troy. I’ve run out of goodbyes.”

“Why do you keep saying goodbye?”

“I love you, Wildcat. But I need to stay right where I am.”

When I can’t get the words out, Gabriella does it for me.

There's a tension that penetrates the air of my life. It’s cold, and it creeps through the crack in my window. It follows me out the door and slams it behind me.

It's push and pull. Happy and sad. Between two places, New York and California, yes. But between two versions of myself, too. Who I am in New York is 100% completely me, but who I am in California is also 100% me. But they don’t feel the same. So... which am I?

It's difficult to say. It’s also difficult when you feel like life is a constant transitional period. Constantly getting used to something. You can’t completely leave everything behind, so can you really move forward? How do you figure out what to take, and what to leave? And how do you make it not hurt so much?

You make it hurt less by putting your headphones on and pressing play.

A freshly thirteen year-old me had been in her new room, in the new house that her parents just bought. It was the first time I’d ever had a space for myself, so like all excited, HGTV-obsessed teen girls in the 2010s, I littered the walls with polaroid photos of myself and my middle school friends, posters of One Direction, and mediocre paintings I’d made myself.

The soundtrack to my life was the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Spring Awakening, the 2006 musical about emotionally and sexually repressed teens in 18th century Germany who tragically suffered at the hands of unwilling adults. And it was all rock music.

It was probably the first Broadway musical– that I discovered myself– that I was properly obsessed with. I watched all of the backstage interviews, late night and daytime television appearances, read about its production, and of course– listened to it religiously.

The main character, Melchior Gabor, played by a young Jonathan Groff, was strong headed, free thinking, and anti-everything. He felt trapped by expectations and by a seemingly blind trust in what is written. He wanted to learn and wonder and find and know.

“But I know there’s so much more to find just in looking through myself and not at them. Still, I know to trust my own true mind, and to say, ‘there’s a way through this.’

“On I go to wonder and to learning, name the stars and know their dark returning. I’m calling to know the world’s true yearning– the hunger that a child feels for everything they’re shown.”

Hunger. A hunger to know. That’s what I felt.

I also remember listening to, arguably, the saddest song from the musical while on a charter bus in Virginia, where I was on my school’s eighth grade Washington D.C. trip.

Sung by Melchior, “Left Behind” was a solemn lament to his best friend, Moritz Stiefel, who (spoiler) committed suicide. More than a lament, it was a damnation to the adults in Moritz’s life, specifically his father, who didn’t care to know his son, and instead ridiculed and punished him for every small mistake on things as trivial as school tests.

“Were you really so blind and unkind to him?”

In particular tumultuous times, also known as being a teenager, I felt particularly connected to Moritz and Melchior. I mixed their plights together to make sense of my mind. I was so terrified that a bad grade or questioning thought would mean I’d disappoint my parents, and I’d rather just step away from it all than ever be a disappointment. But I couldn’t ever say that to them. I barely let myself think it.

So Jonathan Groff sang it for me.

At the time, I listened with wired Apple earbuds on the YouTube app that was downloaded on my iPhone 4.

Now, I listen to the same songs on my purple headphones using my Spotify Premium student subscription.

When life has become a transitional period… when you’re happy and sad at the same time… what is it about growing up that leads you back to who you were at 6 years old, 13 years old, 17 years old, or even 20 years old?

I don’t know.

So I’ll go on searching for the answers. I’ll press play on a movie I’ve seen upwards of a hundred times, or I’ll listen to my favorite album at five in the morning. When I can’t find the words, someone else will.

It’s just me and my headphone charger against the world.