2019 Wrapped

*Denotes a name changed for that person's privacy.

Spotify releases a personalized playlist every year of the 100 songs a member listened to the most. I keep mine saved and travel back in time with anthems that summarized weeks, months, and even full years at a time. Moving through 2019, each song had purpose. The music I've listened to truly does define my year and the mindset I've carried with me.

I have always said that no one truly knows me until they understand my mood based on the music I'm playing in any given moment. That is the ultimate point of reading me. If I play The Score, I need energy. I use their music to fuel my personal battles that require confidence and strength. If I play Taylor Swift, something is very wrong. If I play Of Mice & Men, my anxiety is bad and I'm trying to regain control.

Those yearly Spotify playlists say so much more than what songs got stuck in my head or worked their way onto my saved songs from the radio. You can hear my depression, my happiness and my anger. There is a story behind every piece of music on that list.

At the top of the playlist is "My Thoughts on You" by The Band CAMINO. This band takes a large portion of the playlist and became my most-played artist for 2019. It screams of Logan Daniels* and the complicated "friendship" that claimed five months of my year and all of my emotional energy.

I showed him this band and this song, but I don't know if he ever realized the reason why. Now, toward the end of the year and after a month and a half of essentially no contact, the lyrics double their effect. There are a lot of times I still need him, and I genuinely hope he was not the one for me. I really have listened to this song a lot.

"Daphne Blue" and "Less Than I Do" follow in slots two and three. The same band describes the same situation in different ways. The majority of this playlist might as well be a tribute to gaslighting. Black dad hats and brown leather jackets replace the song's black jeans and Daphne blue when placed into the context of my life, but I do hope he feels blue less than I do.

Valley takes over with "A Phone Call in Amsterdam" at slot number four. They opened for The Band CAMINO in Columbus in mid-September. My ex-boyfriend, Ben, joined to take my second ticket to that concert, and Logan told me at 4 a.m. two days later that he regrets not taking the offer to go with me instead.

I never showed him Valley. The songs make me think of him, but these are mine. I kept them hidden and untainted by his opinions; although, I know he would have added this song to his "Chill Vibes" playlist. It made it onto several of mine, including the ones tailored to my heartbreak over him (my breakup songs, if you will).

I listened to "Honest" a lot after he kissed me in October. That whole night was perfect and torturous at the same time, but The Band CAMINO described things perfectly: Now we're caught between the real thing and nothing at all, so we should be honest.

He wasn't honest, and it became nothing at all quickly. He still isn't entirely honest, and his lies get back to me, trigger relentless anxiety attacks, and keep me in my room doubting my own memories when I should be in class. Struggling with depression and anxiety is like being an unreliable narrator in your own life, and he worsened that effect with each memory he twisted out of reality.

Logan came with me to see Bad Suns in September at the House of Blues. He wears the black hat I helped him pick out around campus sometimes, and I play "Maybe We're Meant To Be Alone" to convince myself it's true. Maybe I'm better off now that I'm out of that situation, but it doesn't hurt any less that I miss him. I miss him a lot.

Over time, it became a little easier to get through the day without him being a part of it. The Band CAMINO's "Heaven," at slot number seven, became an anthem for staying away. No amount of additions to his Snapchat story about stress or sadness could change that I needed to keep myself from trying to take care of him. Maybe it was what he wanted (that, I'll never know), but I couldn't let myself keep trying to save him. He made his decisions, and I need to find peace.

"Bailey" pushed into the past and described pieces of my present. Was my calendar just a book of poems? Basically. But Valley's description fit Ben as he continued to try to be in my life and I continued to push him away. He didn't fit there anymore, and no matter how funny he thinks he is, he's not.

I walked to class listening to "Push for Yellow (Shelter)" every day I could build the courage to go. It made the constant possibility of running into Logan feel a little less terrifying. We were always in between the black and white, and I could put every ounce of my emotions behind the question "Why is something dead not killing me?" with the volume all the way up.

"Park Bench" provided a similar feeling. It was comforting to hear metaphors that fit what I was going through in more than one way.

I listened to "See Through" more in late September, early October. I picked it back up again in early November. I couldn't word it better than CAMINO does: How do I address this tension, how you're looking through me every time?

Now, it seems more like I'm the one who looks through Logan. The guy I started seeing after everything comments that Logan looks jealous. I don't make eye contact. I don't ask questions. I can't. I should have learned by now, and maybe I have. It surprised me that this song didn't make it higher on the list.

Valley made it onto my anxiety playlist with "You" as well as hitting spot number 12 for 2019. There are some songs that make me feel like I can breathe. I've walked loops of Cleveland at 2 a.m. with this song on repeat trying to reclaim my own thoughts. It's hard when my mind is everywhere but where it needs to be.

Nightly released several new songs this year that unsurprisingly talk about breakups and missing people and made my playlist. I've wondered along with "this time last year" whether or not it was too late to talk things out, and I've talked myself out of trying to figure it out. I worry that I'll still feel like this next year if I stay in Cleveland. I'm planning to move.

My favorite band takes a while to appear, but Marianas Trench summarized May through November better than I wish they did with "Only The Lonely Survive." Josh Ramsay sings that "love like this will end in tragedy," and I long to hear it live again, surrounded by others who feel those words in their core like I was on May 19th. It's complicated, but we both know each other so well. We picked up pieces of each other and morphed them into our own personalities. I guess I lost more of myself than he did.

If a single song were to summarize my semester, it would be the next one: "Break Me" by The Band CAMINO. Every night Logan stressed over studying or homework and needed encouragement, the night I left a bar when he asked me to come sit with him at midnight while he drank and cried over lying to his mother, the lost sleep of letting him vent about his roommates, ex-girlfriends, and our coworkers -- it fits into the lines "I make it too easy. When you pretend that you need me, I'm right there," far too well. I was barely taking care of myself, but I was there for him.

People say that you can't love someone else until you love yourself, but it's so far off. It's entirely possible to love someone even when you don't really know who you are. It would be easier if those people were right, but things don't become true just because we say them.

It's like the concept of pouring from an empty cup. People can never really reach that level of emptiness. I can be too drained to take care of myself and my responsibilities, but I can always find the energy to take care of the people I love regardless of my struggles. People do that all the time.

When I offered Logan an olive branch after our arguments became excessive, "There's Still A Light In The House" signified the bit of hope that our friendship was salvageable in the aftermath of everything. I thought about calling on the way home so many times.

We first started spending time together over coffee after work, so Nightly's "Black Coffee" was one of the first songs I directly suggested for him to listened to. I actually played it for him as we drank Joe Maxx in the Student Center. He added it to one of his playlists right there in front of me, and I've heard it come up when he played music around me later on.

It fit the relationship we had at first. We texted constantly, he stayed after work to hang out, and we didn't go a single day without communicating for two and a half months straight. He encouraged it.

As things went downhill, "We Move Like The Ocean" highlighted my exhaustion in the situation. I couldn't swim anymore. It's fitting that this falls on the playlist right before "Fool of Myself," Logan's favorite song by The Band CAMINO and one of the two that describe my situation with him as close to perfectly as a song can apply to a listener.

It does make me sick that he knows more than my friends know about me. He is a much better liar than anyone I've met before. Really, how did I let him make me make a fool of myself?

It feels like there are a lot of nights when I'm just a drink away from honesty, like Marianas Trench's "Don't Miss Me?" says in the chorus. I'm constantly wondering if he misses me too. Maybe I'm trying to raise the dead here, and Logan's the one trying to live instead. As much as I love that line, I hate the way it applies to my life now.

Even this whole album's title is appropriate though. Phantoms applies so well. I feel haunted.

The night I left the bar to see him when he said he needed me, abandoning another friend in doing so, we watched a Netflix rom-com in his living room. "Better Off Without" by Armon Jay plays during the montage of the main characters' lives apart after their big argument. This is before they realize they're in love. I listened to this a lot during our first hiatus and imagined our lives as a parallel. Did we meet up unexpectedly and talk about our conflict after some time? Yes. Did he kiss me? Yes.

We had our "and yet" moment, but life isn't a movie. It doesn't stop when the credits roll. Perfect moments don't last, and this song is right: I can't change what already happened. I can only control how I react.

Too much fits here. There are days I can't listen to this one, regardless of how much I already have, or I'll cry. I don't like crying.

Much like Nightly's "Miss You Like Hell," he's been stuck in my head. I've sang those words over and over again in my bedroom, in the shower, in the car. Nothing else seems to get it quite like this. Every day, I do feel like I'm just stuck on repeat. Does he ever think about it? Does he get cold sweats at three in the morning? I miss him like hell, and I don't know what to do about it.

I could keep going, and every song would come back to a different piece of the same story. Half of my year was consumed with this person, as is most of my 2019 playlist. I put together tracks that I thought fit my situation as I lived it, but Spotify compiled it all based on what I listened to and felt the most.

These songs played as I walked to counseling sessions and sat in my mom's car on the way to figure out new medications with our family physician. These artists comforted me as I struggled to breathe and to keep food down as the extra anxiety of a professor harassing me because the academic accommodations I took too long to ask for were "unfair to the other students and the class."

I count time in my life with a personal soundtrack and look back at moments in a different light. The music keeps memories alive. I am no longer a part of Logan's life by his own choice, but he is still a part of mine in every song that plays in my headphones as I look back at 2019.