**NOTE:** Not looking for advice. Just a word-splurge, inviting empathy. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

One of the things I've ended up doing whilst in this particular long term relationship is failing to ever listen to my own damned music.

That's right, folks - I never use the sound system. My boyfriend's sound system. And maybe that's the issue, maybe it's just that I see it as his and I don't want to mess with it, but I've realised that I truly, 99% of the time, never play the music I love. Sure, I've come to love his vast array of tunes, love listening to things I've never heard, getting addicted to music which I didn't choose, but there's something... unsettling about it. Really unsettling.

And it's my choice. Sorta. He has nothing to do with it. It's an identity thing, or lack thereof. It's a theme I'm becoming far too accustomed to. 

He encourages me to, says I can use it pretty much whenever. It's not like I don't have the option. It's just something which has happened slowly, something I haven't noticed, and then suddenly - BAM - I'm realising that this core part of my identity, of anyone's identity (the act of listening to music that YOU choose, that YOU have an emotional relationship with) has just fizzled. Gone. Barely exists.

I have moments, bursts of realisation that I've let that part of myself falter and fade, and so I go on a reunion tour with the songs I used to obsessively listen to at different stages of my life (again, rarely on the sound system, usually in the privacy of a bedroom upstairs) and I'll tell you something: it makes me feel powerful as FUCK. It makes me feel like I've reconnected with this part of myself that I let lay dormant, this part that I let die. I throw on that Jimmy Eat World, that Blink, that Bob Seger, that damned song by John Farnham, and I'm suddenly feeling more like myself than I have in months.

And that's music for you. We all connect to it. The lack of it, of listening to your own music, it can depersonalise you so damned quickly without even knowing it's happening that when you have that sudden burst of 'oh, shit' and make the reconnect... it's one of the most intense, amazing feelings to experience.

It's a little messed up, really. To feel so good about just reconnecting with a piece of yourself you let become stagnant.

Then again, it's not a conscious choice - not for me. I just find it far too easy to stop doing the things I used to like, stop listening to the music which has been a weird, eclectic mash-up of a soundtrack to the years of my life already gone. I lack identifying factors. I lack unique parts of my personality. I become some odd, flat, generalised human being.

Listening to my music? It stops me from feeling like that for a little while. It makes me feel like a whole person, with previous experiences, with a personality.

Today's going to be one of those days.