April in Five Songs
& what it might feel like to give a monstrous part of myself the rest it deserves
Here’s something I’ve been chewing on this month.
Much of my personal exploration (then and now) has circled endlessly around self-criticism. It started out as a monster I wanted to quell—where if I had enough strength, I could sweep in and reclaim the true me it was holding hostage. But the longer I couldn’t win against it, it morphed into a sadness that maybe this destructive part of me is inseparably Me.
Bit by bit, I only recently came to terms that maybe it’s not the Big Bad I’d always imagined it to be, that it’s acted this way for so long because it thought it was helping me (and probably did, to some degree). It was a dragon I trained to guard the part of me that’s afraid of what would actually happen if I slipped up, becoming so powerful because what it was protecting was so much more fragile.
My therapist recently asked me what I wanted to tell this part of myself: do I want it to pack its bags and leave? And I told them that, for some reason, that didn’t feel right. My reason was, “It’s been working so hard my whole life. It feels weird to suddenly say it’s not needed. I think I just want it to work a little… less hard?” They replied, “Yeah, it’s been working nonstop all this time, hasn’t it? Maybe so hard that it deserves a vacation.”
I was struck by how beautiful that sentiment was.
The perspectives aren’t that different; in essence, I want this self-critical part of me to not be the default setting, to not be the first lens I wear. But as I mentioned in my last post, there’s something really lovely about viewing it more as an expression of gratitude rather than a confrontation to the bitter end, wrestling it out the door and trying to forget it was ever an important (and vital) part of me.
I also couldn’t get the image out of my head of this caricatured beast sitting on a beach with a piña colada being like, “Hey, if you need me, I’ll be here reading this trashy mag. Luv u bitch.”
And for me, that’s one step closer to acceptance.
01. 🎵 Cinderella by Remi Wolf
I like how odd this song is. I feel like it tracks the course of both good and bad times with an earnestness and lightheartedness I can totally get behind. I can’t really wrap my head around the lyrics, but it’s just plain fun. The “me and the boys in the hotel lobby” part ended up being stuck in my head for days.
02. 🎵 Shotput by Still Woozy
I may have burned myself out on deep lyrical analyses over the last few posts, so this is simply a song that I’ve had on repeat a lot lately. It’s one of those songs that got me within the first opening seconds, and I really love when music does that.
03. 🎵 Every Second (Japanese Version) by Mina Okabe
As with a few picks that have made it onto these lists, I’m such a sucker for a lovely bilingual song. This singer’s voice is so clean and beautiful, and I love the rhymes that she weaves in both English and Japanese. If I’m thinking about vacation vibes, this one has it. (There’s also an English version, too.)
04. 🎵 Too Sweet by Hozier
This song’s message made me laugh. It’s about being around a person who’s super cautious, hellbent on being good, and does all the “right” things, but the singer just thinks, “Nah, I’m good. I’m gonna enjoy life in my own way.” I think about this a lot in the context of myself, that I spend a lot of time correcting my behavior so nobody can say shit to me and I can live “freely,” but in actuality, am I really free to live the way I want at all?
05. 🎵 brutal by Olivia Rodrigo
While we’re on the topic of different parts of myself, I’ll admit that the teeny bopper in me really likes Olivia Rodrigo’s music. Even though the lyrics are things only a teen might say, I can’t help but find some way to relate—that at any point in your life, your own experience can be ill-fitting with what you were told it “should” or “would” be like, and that mismatch can create a lot of unwanted noise. I think about the cheeky way she sings, “GOD, it’s brutal out here!” all the damn time. I couldn’t have said it better.