Windows Down

Lately, I've been driving and listening to music as loud as I can possibly stand it.

I'd recommend it to anyone. When you're living a life where you feel like you've lost some sense of who you are — get in the car. Drive. Put on the music you adored ten, fifteen, thirty years ago. Windows down, whatever the weather. Sing your heart out.

You'll be transported somewhere. Not necessarily back to who you were, but somehow closer to all the people you've been.

It's become a ritual of mine now. Whenever I get the chance to be in the car alone, I take it. Twenty minutes of a song that used to mean everything, played louder than is strictly reasonable, and something in me loosens.

The other day it was Elbow. A band I hadn't properly revisited in decades. And suddenly there they were again, with those extraordinary lyrics, and there I was too.

There's a line in one of their songs about "the truest love" being the love we have for ourselves. Listening to it now, all these years later, it landed differently. Because perhaps self-love isn't only about learning to love the person you are today. Perhaps it's also about remembering, with enormous tenderness, all the people you've already been. The girl who first listened to that song. The things she worried about. The life she had absolutely no idea was waiting for her.

For a few minutes, driving along with the windows down, I felt an enormous rush of love and gratitude for all of them. Every version of me that had somehow carried me here.

That's what music can do. A song begins and, without warning, you are reunited with yourself. Not because you've gone backwards — you're still here, in your current body, driving your current car, living your current life. But another version of you has climbed into the passenger seat. And you remember her.

There's something about being alone in the car that gives this room to happen. You're moving, but you're also completely still — sealed off, unreachable, nobody watching, nobody needing anything from you for those twenty minutes. The music fills the space usually occupied by all the small, sensible thoughts. And underneath them, it turns out, you were still there the whole time.

Maybe that's the thing about who we are. We don't lose ourselves so much as bury ourselves under years of being needed, being responsible, being fine. And sometimes it doesn't take very much to find our way back. A song. A steering wheel. A road with nowhere urgent to be.

It's the most cathartic thing I do. No conversation. No explaining myself. No fixing anything. Just me, the volume turned all the way up, remembering — a flurry of deep love and gratitude for the person you are, the person you were, and all the versions in between.

So if you ever find yourself unsure where you went, perhaps you don't need a big answer.

You might just need your windows down.