The same applies to music in rare circumstances. When a song hits the right mark, I can find myself listening to it repeatedly, as if creasing a piece of paper so it can more easily fit in a place I can hold it close. These songs come at unforeseen times, and they have come more infrequently as time has gone on. When one's situation becomes more unique, finding a shared ethos will obviously become more difficult.
The best thing about 2025 was discovering the music of Taylor Acorn. Her album "Poster Child" was my Album Of The Year, but the gift extended further, as her two previous releases combined with it to be the most exciting revelation I have had in several years. For as much as "Poster Child" and "People Pleaser" won me over for touching on pieces of my psychology, the eerie silence of the holiday season revealed which song of Taylor's was echoing in my head, and it was neither of those.
"Birds Still Sing" is the closing track off her "Survival In Motion" release, and I find it all too fitting that I did not hear the impact it would have upon my first listen. Adding a new song to my list of all-time favorites has become increasingly rare, but as the song replayed again and again, I began to realize what was happening. Last year might not have been the greatest year for music, but it led me to a song that can sit comfortably among those I have relied on for decades. That's the highest praise I can offer.
"My arms feel so heavy holding onto the hope/And I could sink into silence/I could blame anybody else/For this battle I'm fighting."
Hope is indeed a heavy burden to bear when there is little evidence of its success in your fossil record. When you have "bones in the closet", as Taylor calls her regrets and fears, finding the faith to believe they will ever be ground into a fine enough powder to blow away on the breath of a prayer can feel like an impossible task. Positive reinforcement is a very real thing, but so is the negative side, and when life has trained you to expect nothing good to come your way, mere thought is not going to be able to re-wire the practiced path.
In these recent times, I have found myself becoming more silent. As I have questioned the nature of friendship, and how tenuous many of the connections I have are, I have been pulling back. Whether that is a conscious experiment or an unconscious acknowledgment, the battle I'm fighting is one of my own expectations. Maybe my perception of friendship asks too much of people, or maybe I have overestimated the social score of everyone else that I observe. In my mind, we are celestial objects drifting further away as does the entropy of the universe. That is, of course, unless we make the effort to hold on to one another. But a rope grasped at only one end does not hold people together, it holds one person back.
"Birds still sing on bad days/Flowers grow around graves/Not everyone stays but the real ones do."
I have grown angry with people when they give the 'advice' to merely act happy, or 'manifest' happiness, and everything will improve. They don't realize the implication of saying such things is to blame the depressed for not wanting to be happy. Maybe we don't know how to be happy, or maybe there are aspects of life that are beyond our control. Not everything can be solved by contorting your face into a smile to trick your body into releasing dopamine. Especially when things pertain to other people and the ways we interact, we cannot control what they do or think.
Could I have done more to stay in contact with the friends who have faded from my life? Of course I could, but I cannot force what they don't want. I was never the one to cut ties, I was never the one to walk away without a warning or goodbye. There is a unique pain that comes from sending your hope to someone you cared about, only to have it marked 'return to sender' when they refuse to acknowledge you anymore. 'Just smile' isn't going to help.
"Give yourself a little grace/And if you look close where the cracks meet/We're still blooming in concrete."
That line was the only resolution I made for this year. I am attempting to give myself grace for not holding onto the people who have already let me go, for not spending my energy on people who are black holes of attention. I have been facetiously theorizing about the Laws Of Interpersonal Thermodynamics, the first of which is that energy between people cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one to another. That means when you care about someone who returns none of the favor, your energy is then given to people you don't even know, who are blessed with more love than you ever had within you to begin with.
What that leaves some of us are 'energy deficits', where every instance of caring takes more and more from us, even when there is almost nothing left. We have to choose whether to risk what little remains, or use that fuel to keep ourselves going long enough for fortune to find us.
It isn't that I don't believe blooming to be possible, despite what I said about The Wallflowers' song "Some Flowers Bloom Dead" being a perfect metaphor for me, but rather that such blooming will not be what I might expect. Taylor's song is the rare encouragement that remembers dark times are not merely inventions of our minds, and happiness might not come from the place other people tell us to look. It's ok for us to feel what we feel until that day comes.
I'm not saying any of that is intended in the song, but it is the meaning and feeling I have taken from it, which has been essential. I've lost count of how many times I've listened to that song over these last couple of months, but I know I won't stop anytime soon.
Let's call it a mantra.
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