The Playlist That Spoke

I was stuck in my head about a situation with someone from my past—a woman I was romantically interested in for a very large chunk of my life. Analyzing, ruminating, second-guessing myself in that familiar loop where thinking harder feels like it should produce clarity but never does.

Then I did something different. I stopped trying to think my way through it and turned on Bon Jovi's "It's My Life."

I wasn't looking for answers. I just needed to feel something else. To get out of my head and into my body. To remember that I have agency and forward momentum even when I'm confused.

But then something happened that I can only describe as synchronicity.

It's My Life - Bon Jovi

The song hit exactly right. The defiance of it. The refusal to live on someone else's timeline or according to someone else's expectations. That insistence that this life is now or never.

The lyric that made me pause was the Sinatra reference—about doing it my way. I'd never really paid attention to it before. So I looked up "My Way" and listened to it for maybe the first time with actual attention.

My Way - Frank Sinatra

The last verse stopped me cold. Sinatra sings about what a man truly has if not himself. About saying what you actually feel rather than performing deference. About taking the blows and doing it on your own terms.

To say the things he truly feels / And not the words of one who kneels.

That's what I've been learning to do. To stop softening everything, stop performing deference, stop subordinating my actual thoughts and feelings to make other people comfortable.

I've taken blows for it. The loneliness that comes with leaving a faith community. The family relationships that shifted when I stopped pretending. The isolation of living as an atheist in Northern Utah. But I did it my way. I chose integrity over belonging, even when it hurt.

Time to Say Goodbye - Sara Brightman

Then Spotify's algorithm served up Sara Brightman, and I had to laugh. The timing was almost too perfect. A song literally about leaving, about moving on to new horizons, about the bittersweet beauty of letting something go.

The situation I was processing involved a relationship pattern I've been stuck in for twenty-five years. Someone I keep circling back to, always getting close but never quite closing the distance. The seas that exist no longer—possibilities that seemed real but were always just out of reach.

We Are the Champions - Queen

I found myself singing along to lyrics I'd heard a hundred times but never really felt before. Lines about paying dues, doing your sentence despite committing no crime. About bad mistakes, sand kicked in your face—but coming through it all.

The faith transition alone—thirty-plus years in Mormonism, then the slow withdrawal, then going full atheist. That's not a casual shift. That's rebuilding your entire worldview, your community, your identity.

I didn't do anything wrong. But I'm still paying a price for authenticity. The loneliness isn't punishment I deserve—it's just the cost of being honest about who I am.

And I have come through. I'm in therapy. I'm writing. I'm self-aware enough to catch myself in old patterns. I'm not stuck—I'm processing, choosing, moving forward.

The Chain - Fleetwood Mac

Then Fleetwood Mac started playing, and something shifted. The shadows. The damning of love and lies. And that line—if you don't love me now, you will never love me again—carrying a finality I needed to hear.

The pattern itself—the twenty-five years of almosts, the back-and-forth, the pursuer-withdrawer dance. The chain feels unbreakable because we've been in it so long.

But if this isn't happening now—after all this time, after proximity removed the main obstacle, after reaching out—it's never going to happen.

And maybe the chain breaking isn't defeat. Maybe it's freedom.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John

And then Elton John arrived, and the metaphor was almost too perfect.

The yellow brick road was supposed to lead somewhere. It was the path you follow when you want to reach the Emerald City, when you believe in the wizard, when you trust that staying on the prescribed route will get you where you're meant to be.

But what happens when you realize the wizard is a fraud? When the yellow bricks just lead you further from who you actually are?

The song's narrator refuses to be planted in someone else's penthouse—and I felt that. I can't be contained in someone else's vision of what my life should look like. Not the church's penthouse vision of eternal families and temple marriages. Not the relationship pattern that keeps wanting me to fit into a shape I've outgrown.

There's something honest about going back to simpler, rawer territory. Not the glittering promises of what could be, but the actual ground under your feet. The solitary work. The woods where things are wild and real rather than polished and prescribed.

My future isn't on the yellow brick road. It's not in Oz. It's in the woods, with the owls and the toads and the honest dirt under my fingernails.

The Feeling I Used to Call the Holy Ghost

Here's the thing that struck me most: as I was listening to these songs, one after the other in succession, feeling them work through me, I felt that familiar shiver that ran down my spine and radiated into my chest. The resonance.

Mormons would call it the Holy Ghost. The burning in the bosom. Spiritual confirmation that something true is being revealed.

I felt it many times as a believer. In testimony meetings. Reading scriptures. Praying. That warm, full feeling in my chest that seemed to say this is right, this is true, pay attention to this.

But I was feeling it now. Over a Spotify playlist. Songs that aren't in the Hymn book. While processing whether to let go of a relationship pattern that's been running for a quarter century.

The feeling wasn't divine. It was never divine.

It was my body recognizing truth. My nervous system responding to alignment. My deeper knowing clicking something into place that my conscious mind was still trying to analyze.

The resonance was real. The awe was real. The sense of being met by something larger than my individual confusion—that was real.

What changed wasn't the feeling. What changed was my understanding of where it comes from.

It comes from me. From my own capacity for wisdom. From my body's ability to know things my thinking mind hasn't quite articulated yet. From the human experience of meaning-making and pattern-recognition and the gorgeous, complex way our brains process emotion through art.

I don't need the Holy Ghost for that feeling to be sacred. I don't need divine orchestration for synchronicity to feel meaningful. The universe doesn't have to be speaking for me to feel spoken to.

The songs arrived at the exact right moment because I was ready to hear them. Because my brain was primed to find significance. Because music is one of the ways humans process what words can't quite capture.

And that's enough. That's more than enough.

That's wonder without a God who orchestrated it. Enchantment without theology. The sacred without the Sacred.

What the Playlist Taught Me

Autonomy matters. Living according to my own compass even when it's messy or unconventional. Not kneeling, not performing, not softening my truth to make others comfortable.

Some goodbyes are necessary. Not because anyone is bad or wrong, but because patterns themselves can be the problem. If it's not happening now, it's not happening.

I've survived. I've come through. The blows were real but they didn't break me. The mistakes were real but they were part of learning. The isolation is painful but it's not punishment—it's the current cost of integrity.

And chains can break. Even ones that have held for twenty-five years. Even ones I've returned to again and again. The driving bass line at the end of "The Chain" isn't defeated—it's defiant. It's moving forward.

I didn't plan any of this. I just turned on some music because I needed to stop overthinking.

But my pursuer self—the part that keeps reaching for connection and meaning even when my avoidant conscious mind pulls back—found what it needed. Used the algorithm's randomness to deliver exactly what I was ready to hear.

Young soul, learning to navigate without maps. Finding awe in Spotify playlists and sourdough starters and therapy metaphors about art on walls.

It's strange and hard and occasionally wonderful.

And it's remarkable to just...feel.