Up, Down, Up: A Song List

J ust like everyone else on the planet, I was lucky enough to grow up during the best years of music. My adolescence began with the millenium and involved headbanging, crying and finally dancing through the decade. These are the songs that helped to make me, or perhaps helped me to survive becoming me.

It's an eclectic list, and it's not all miserable. I started out my teenage years quite happy, and emerged so again by 18 or 19- but man were there some dips in the middle. Just to be clear, I've given every song an angst rating, from 1 (theoretically 0, for no angst, but I don't think I ever experienced that during those years) to 5 (pure misery). That way, if you're too young to recognise some of these songs, you can decide quickly whether they're likely to fit your current angst level!

Just a note - this article makes considerable mention of my poor mental health during that time, especially my eating disorder. Tread carefully if you're liable to be triggered by that kind of thing.

It Wasn't Me, Shaggy (2000)

Angst rating: 2/5

Let's just clear one thing up right now; it wasn't Shaggy. I'm not being funny; the song was never about his misdeeds. It was his friend, Rikrok, who was cheating on his girlfriend. I have seen so many memes and funny ha-ha social media posts along the lines of "Shaggy finally admitted it was him!!" and OMG, why would he? It wasn't him. Listen to the song, people. Here it is:

When this song hit number one in the UK, I went straight out and bought the CD single. This was back in the day when that could set you back something like £3.99; it was a major investment for my 12-year-old self. And I made sure I got my money's worth; I had that CD on repeat for weeks. I was obsessed. This triumph of music, along with later contributions by Sean Paul, left me with a love of Jamaican dancehall that persists to this day.

In case you don't know, Shaggy is still going strong, and has produced many other epic tracks. His latest is Go Down Deh with Sean Paul and Spice, and I'm repeating history by playing it twenty times a day.

In Too Deep, Sum 41

Angst rating: 2.5/5

Here's where the angst actually starts. I still remember the certainty with which I declared that this song would be my Favourite Song Forever. I think it was my brother who invested in the CD single, but it got the Shaggy treatment too. Non-stop.

It had the bonus that unlike Shaggy, we 100% understood the lyrics. When I relistened to it for this article, I discovered that I still know the lyrics. Considering how little else I remember from that age - my brain seized the earliest opportunity to lose Geography and Chemistry - I find that quite spectacular. Clearly, my grey matter knows what's valuable.

Don't Let Me Get Me, Pink

Angst rating: 3.5/5

I was so miserable in my first secondary school. The very structure of it was another symptom of small-island syndome. It was called a rural secondary school in the government literature and letters to the papers, but what it actually was - what they were, since there was a whole network of them - was an add-on to a primary school, two years tacked on the end as an afterthought. It hadn't been my primary school, either, so I had all the insecurity of a new school without the compensatory excitment of getting lost in a crowd.

I hadn't known I was weird in primary school; in fact, I think now that maybe I wasn't. Maybe all children are weird, and some of them grow out of it. The girls I went to primary school with seemed to grow out of it within ten minutes of entering the gates, and I remained exactly the same. I just assumed we would still be friends, till one day I looked up from my book and we weren't. Being a bit geeky and reading a lot were no longer just facets of my personality; they were weirdness. At least, I assume now that that was it. When Pink brought out Don't Let Me Get Me, it became my song.

At the time, I somehow fixated on the rejection being because I was fat. I had always been fat; it was actually just classic puppy fat and I was already starting to grow taller and get thinner by the time I arrived at the conclusion that it was the source of all my problems. It had always bothered me - I was about eight when I wrote out my first diet plan - but it had never been the be-all and end-all cause of misery that it became then.

So, I stopped eating lunch. I skipped breakfast if I could, so I could feel a little thrill at the fact I hadn't eaten all day by 4pm. Nobody noticed the fact I didn't eat (they were probably quite glad not to see me in the canteen), and I lost about 20 pounds over the course of the year. Adults were tricked by the fact I was growing taller at the same time into thinking it was natural.

Needless to say, this did exactly nothing for my popularity, because it had never been the reason I was an outcast. It did feel like an achievement, and it did make me happy enough to survive until I got to a new school where I could actually make friends. Ever since, I've been firmly of the opinion that bigger places are better. Bigger schools give you a better chance of making friends; cities give you a better chance of meeting people who share your oddball interests. The countryside is for people who are naturally conformist, but that's another story.

Teenage Dirtbag, Wheatus

Angst rating: 3/5

Although it came out in 2000, Teenage Dirtbag was still going strong in 2002, when it was played at my first secondary school's final dance. It's strange how much of a hit it was; the popular kids sang along to it as heartily as anyone.

By 2003, people were still singing along to it. I was much happier at (a new) school and had plenty of friends, but I was still quite sure that my inadequacy could only be solved by shrinking. I spiralled - or, I would have thought at the time, ascended - into full-blown anorexia. I don't remember any music from when I really wasn't eating; I don't really recall anything except the glee of initial loss and later, the insomnia.

After I started fainting quite regularly, I compromised with my enemies, the medics, to stay out of hospital. I would add a little to my daily diet every week, but I wouldn't gain weight. When I reached enough calories to maintain my fragile frame, I refused to get any bigger. They could no longer accuse me of not eating, and I was safe to stay at basically the same weight for over a year.

Mad World, Gary Jules and Michael Andrews

Angst rating: 5/5

With the crippling realisation that I was as flawed as I had ever been, only smaller, came a deep depression. It set in with the winter, which in the north of Scotland is deep and dark. I was constantly cold - so was everyone, but I was double because of my low body fat, and developing OCD symptoms. The rest of the country was obviously suffering too, because it was in December of that year that this miserable track hit number one - at Christmas, no less. It was everywhere, and I began to think of it as my theme song.

I don't like the track that much, and never listen to it now; but in those days, you were constantly exposed to chart music and the Christmas number one was the most important song of the year. There was no escaping it, or my misery.

I was saved in early 2004 by the arrival in my life of a pretty little pill called Prozac. Having been on it much less successfully since, I'm now of the opinion that its magic was mostly placebo, but hey - it worked. Early 2004 was mostly lovely.

Fiona Apple, Paper Bag

Angst rating: 4/5

The album When the pawn... came out in 1999, but it was either not a hit in the UK, or I was just too young to really connect with music. Maybe you need a certain amount of baggage to listen to this type of music. By 2005, my eating disorder had swung, wrecking-ball like, towards binge eating and horrifying weight gain. It was only then that I started to frequent so-called 'pro-ana' websites, in a desperate attempt to regain what I by then viewed as - you guessed it! - my former perfection.

Websites that really sought to promote anorexia were few and far between - most aimed at being non-judgemental, supportive spaces for those of us who were sure we could never recover. I made some good friends there, and I also found lists of songs supposedly about anorexia. A lot of them, I realise now, were not about literal starvation at all but rather complex metaphors going over our obsessed heads. Paper Bag probably comes into that category, but oh, how I loved it.

This was before Youtube, Spotify and the like; it might even have been before Amazon. We had a little music shop in my little town, but they didn't stock Fiona Apple. In order to acquire the CD, I had to travel to the nearest city. It was worth it, and there isn't a song on the album that I don't still know the words to.

Evanescence, Everybody's Fool

Angst rating: 3/5

I could have picked any track off this album, because I listened to the whole thing endlessly. It wasn't even my CD; I borrowed it off someone and clung onto it for weeks. I probably burned a copy, eventually (that was a thing we did in those days, never mind).

The lyrics didn't fit in with anything that was actually going on in my life at the time, they were just at the right level of misery.

Several of my friends dropped out of school at this time for various reasons; I was back to feeling fairly alone. I could probably have made a go of it, but hearing a girl behind me in the corridor comment "She used to be really skinny!" was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went straight to the office for my 'leaver's form' - the document we had to fill in to officially take ourselves out of school. I was 16, which at that time was the minimum age to leave full-time education in Scotland.

I got a minimum-wage job about a week later. In fact, I got two, but I walked out of one of them pretty quickly; it was a tempestuous time. Although the financial implications of the decision to drop out of education have reverberated throughout my life, being away from my fellow teenagers was good for my mind.

I really benefitted from being in an environment where no-one had known me as 'the anorexic' or 'that skinny girl'. I didn't feel so much of a need to constantly apologise and explain my great failure, getting fat. I didn't have to see the shock on people's faces when they saw me for the first time in a while.

Then one day, rather prosaically, on the bus; I met someone.

Girlfriend, Avril Lavigne

Angst rating: 1/5

This video is just the worst. I had no idea until I played it just to remember for this article. I think I was fooled by the peppy, fun delivery. Just to be clear, I wasn't actually stealing anyone's partner. I was, however, head over heels in love and completely happy. The weight of misery fell off me, my eating disorder symptoms were controllable for the first time in years, and I could finally see a future. Loudly singing along to this song was a big part of that.

If you are struggling with an eating disorder, there are many places where you can find support. In the UK, BEAT offers information and online support: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/

In the USA, there's the National Eating Disorders Association: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/.

There is an international list of eating disorder advocacy organisations here, which has a list of resources in dozens of other countries: https://www.feast-ed.org/worldwide-list-of-ed-advocacy-organizations/

If you have appreciated this list, you may like some of my other writing about mental health.

On Vocal

Grey - a poem about my teenage years

On Fearlessness and Terror - about my experience of being mugged

My Blog

The Spinstress - this link will take you to posts tagged 'Mental Health', but you can also stay for the snacks. :D