Self-Discovery Through Music: How a Playlist Helped Me Heal

My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Self-Discovery Through Music: How a Playlist Helped Me Heal

By Jordan, 24 — Nashville, TN

My self-discovery through music started the way most things start in your mid-twenties — accidentally, and in the middle of something falling apart. I was sitting on the floor of my studio apartment with my laptop open to a blank thesis document, three weeks into a semester I could barely feel, when I opened Spotify instead and started dragging songs into a new playlist. I didn’t name it anything. I didn’t have a reason. I just needed to hear something that sounded like the person I was trying to become instead of the person I’d been pretending to be.

That playlist became the most honest thing I owned for the next six months.

When Everything Feels Numb at 24

I should back up. The year before, I’d ended a relationship that had lasted most of college. It wasn’t dramatic — no screaming, no betrayal. We just slowly became two people performing closeness instead of feeling it. By the time I moved to Nashville for grad school, I realized I didn’t know what I actually liked anymore. Not just in music. In anything. I’d spent four years adjusting my tastes, my schedule, my body language to fit someone else’s rhythm. And when that rhythm stopped, I was just — quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Empty quiet.

I tried the things you’re supposed to try. I went to therapy. I journaled. I went on a few dates that made me feel like I was reading from a script someone else had written. I told my friends I was fine, that the move was good for me, that I was focusing on school. And some of that was true. But at night, when the apartment got still and there was nothing left to perform, I felt like I was living inside a body I’d forgotten how to inhabit.

I remember one night in particular. October, maybe. The window was cracked and Nashville smelled like wet leaves and someone grilling somewhere down the block. I was lying on my bed doing absolutely nothing — not scrolling, not reading, just staring at the ceiling — and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt something on purpose. Not reacted. Not responded. Just chosen to feel.

That scared me more than the breakup ever did.

The Night I Started Building the Playlist

The playlist didn’t start as a project. It started as avoidance. I was supposed to be writing a paper on cognitive development in adolescents, and instead I typed “songs that make you feel alive” into the search bar like a desperate cliche. What came back was mostly workout music and EDM remixes, which wasn’t what I meant at all.

So I started from scratch. I thought about the last time I’d genuinely felt something in my body — not my head, my body — and the answer was a Joni Mitchell song my mother used to play while she cooked Sunday dinner. “A Case of You.” The way the violin comes in. I could feel it in my sternum the way you feel a church bell if you’re standing close enough.

I added that first. Then I added Bon Iver, because the layered vocals in “Holocene” always made my skin prickle. Then Solange, because “Cranes in the Sky” was the only song that year that made me cry without knowing why. Then Frank Ocean, Adrianne Lenker, Japanese Breakfast, Moses Sumney. I wasn’t building a vibe. I was building a map of every sound that had ever made me feel real.

By two in the morning I had forty-seven songs and I was sitting on the kitchen floor eating cereal out of the box, and I felt — awake. Not happy exactly. Just present. Like someone had opened a window in a room I didn’t know was sealed.

What I Learned About Reconnecting with My Body

The playlist became a ritual. Every night after class, I’d come home, change into something soft, put on the playlist, and just — be in my apartment. Sometimes I cooked. Sometimes I stretched on the living room rug. Sometimes I lit a candle and sat in the bathtub and let the music echo off the tiles. The point wasn’t to do anything productive. The point was to practice feeling things again without anyone else’s expectations in the room.

It sounds small. It was small. But when you’ve spent years outsourcing your emotional life to someone else’s moods and needs, learning to sit alone with a song and notice what it does to your breathing is actually kind of radical.

I started paying attention to my body in ways I hadn’t before. Not in a fitness way — in a sensation way. What did warm water actually feel like? What happened in my chest when a cello came in during the bridge of a song I loved? Where did I hold tension when I was anxious, and what did it feel like when it released?

One night in November, I was deep in the playlist — I think Mitski was playing, something off “Puberty 2” — and I reached for this little wellness device I’d bought on impulse a few weeks earlier. A friend had mentioned HiMoment casually, the way you mention a good moisturizer, and I’d ordered one without thinking too hard about it. It had been sitting in my nightstand drawer, still in the box. That night I just thought — why not. The music was already doing something to my nervous system. I was already in my body for the first time in months. It felt like a continuation, not a departure.

I’m not going to describe what happened next in detail, because that’s mine. But I will say this: it wasn’t what I expected. I expected physical sensation and got that, sure. But what I didn’t expect was to cry afterward — not from sadness, but from the sudden recognition that I’d been so disconnected from my own body that this ordinary act of paying attention to myself felt like coming home after a long trip. The playlist was still going. Jeff Buckley was singing “Lilac Wine.” And I just lay there and let myself feel all of it.

How Music Became My Self-Care Practice

After that night, the playlist kept growing. I added songs based on what I was going through that week. Finals stress got its own cluster — ambient stuff, Nils Frahm, Brian Eno. The week I had a panic attack in the library, I added Phoebe Bridgers and Grouper and anything that sounded like permission to fall apart. When spring came and I started feeling lighter, I added Kaytranada, Steve Lacy, Ravyn Lenae — songs with movement in them, songs that made me want to dance alone in my kitchen at seven in the morning.

The playlist became a kind of autobiography. Not of events, but of states. I could scroll through it and remember exactly who I was when I added each song — what I was afraid of, what I was starting to want, what I was letting go of. It was more honest than my journal. Music doesn’t let you perform. You either feel it or you don’t.

I started sharing songs from the playlist with people. Not the whole thing — that felt too intimate — but individual tracks. I’d text my sister a Sampha song and just say “this one.” I’d play Khruangbin for my roommate while we made dinner. I started a weekly tradition with a new friend from my cohort where we’d trade one song each Friday, no explanation needed, and try to figure out what the other person was saying with it.

Music had always been in my life, but it had been wallpaper. Background. Something I consumed passively while doing other things. This was different. This was active listening as a form of self-care. This was choosing, deliberately, to put something into my ears and body that made me feel more like myself.

The Person the Playlist Was For

It’s May now. The playlist has a hundred and eighty-three songs. I finally named it — just the letter J, which is my initial. That’s all it needed.

I don’t know exactly when I stopped feeling numb. There wasn’t a single moment. It was more like thawing — gradual, uneven, sometimes uncomfortable. But I can trace the timeline through the playlist. I can hear myself waking up in the transition from Bon Iver to SZA. I can hear myself getting brave in the jump from ambient piano to Tierra Whack. I can hear the exact week I started trusting my own desire again, because that’s when I added D’Angelo and didn’t skip the slow songs.

Last week, I used the HiMoment again — not out of loneliness this time, but out of genuine, chosen pleasure. The playlist was on. The window was open. Nashville smelled like honeysuckle. And I thought about the girl who sat on this same floor seven months ago, unable to feel anything, and I wanted to tell her: it comes back. Sensation comes back. Desire comes back. But you have to go looking for it. You have to make the playlist. You have to press play.

I’m still becoming the person those songs are for. I think that’s the whole point — you don’t arrive. You just keep adding tracks.

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