One of the ways I mark the years passing is by collecting songs that sound like the seasons. Songs that sound haunting and nostalgic go on a playlist I roll out every year on September first. It gets longer every year, and only more tenuously connected to any underlying theme. But I’m hardly the first to have a seasonal playlist.
In the beginning, the songs all had a very similar theme—lovers separated by time and space, memories of a childhood that wasn’t yet behind me. September to me meant sentimentality, and it usually sounded like lyrical undying devotion to an imaginary soulmate. It was a month dedicated to love against all odds, immortalized in the mournful melodies I couldn’t have related less to.
In college, September’s shape changed. It became instead about returning to school, and settling back in to independence—and its counterpart, loneliness. The most recent act of the playlist rings of striking out on one’s own, for better or for worse. And always a consoling message permeates. The phases of my life haven’t yet managed to remove the anxiety endemic to changing seasons.
This year, though, it was the playlist’s first act that struck me, songs that now would have been added eight or nine years ago. And I remembered for a moment a girl whose every conviction had once been about star-crossed love. The idea of who the love would be was immaterial. He would materialize when the time was right. But the ever-present notion of fighting for a secret love affair that no one else could understand was often what moved me from one moment into the next. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t come true. It would.
In college, I can remember watching my friends fall in love and lose their minds over their mediocre men. I remember watching their priorities change and feeling the lack. To live a life means making choices that create limits. To choose one thing means to let another go. I watched in real time what it means to make choices for another person, to make space for them in a life that had always accommodated just one. I felt like I was the only one mourning the dreams that got compromised away, and the best way I could think of to do this was to hold tight to my independence with both hands.
At the time, my heart broke over the things I saw them leave behind. I cried on my bedroom floor because I knew they wouldn’t. I swore I would never be like that. I would never forget who I was. For a man, or anyone else. If he wanted me, he needed to want every last part.
I made my life about my motivations and my passions. I sought out beauty, joy, and ambition. I sought to make my life one that I could fall in love with, I—the person I spent by far the most time with.
So imagine, for a moment, my surprise, when my carefully curated collection of September songs reminded me briefly of a young woman for whom romantic love used to mean that world. She was naïve and ridiculous, but she took pride in it, and that was the beauty.
I had cried over my friends’ compromises, but what did I leave behind? What did I become? For my fifteen-year-old self would surely display a similarly mournful reaction at all the dreams I’ve pushed aside. When did I become the girl known for logical and measured responses, rather than passionate conviction? When did I choose ambition over love? And was I ever really asked?
One of these days, we will stop siphoning women’s choices into categories and types. We will value the ambitious, romantic woman, and we will structure our society in a way that doesn’t force her into extinction. We will stop lowering our expectations—in work, in life, in love—and we will feel confidence in our reckless, unwieldy choices.
Wake me up then.
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