HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
I.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
Read MoreThe first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.
Read MoreIn the 1980s, I kept a blank cassette inside the tape deck of my radio, so if a song I loved came on, I could run over and simultaneously hit the “record” and “play” buttons, and add that song to the mix tape developing in its boom-box womb. The beginnings of the songs are cut off, and the DJ often started speaking before the fade-out was complete. But my collection of homemade tapes was priceless to me. And I thought I would be able to listen to them forever.
Read MoreI was thirteen years old when problems with my family escalated and I was forced into a shell only music could pull me out of. Every time my mother raised a hand to me, I raced back to let my violin release the notes that I wished I could say to her.
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