On Quirky Cures to Bad Feelings

Anyone else feeling a wee bit of summer malaise?

Today's dispatch is an endorsement of hyperspecific playlists and, more generally, a note in favor of whatever peculiar balms you mix up to soothe your psyche.

I’ve been feeling a little crazy lately. Too many things to do and versions of me to become, and nowhere good to start. It used to be that my moods — the really big, juicy ones — were more predictably seasonable. My S.A.D. has been a comically madcap seasonal tradition for most of my adult life.

Apparently though, climate change comes for us all. I was in oddly GREAT spirits last winter. I met my own optimism with frank suspicion and mistrust, but we sailed through the Danger Months without incident. However: here we are now, in high summer, swamped with seasonally-inappropriate malaise. Frazzlement knows no season?

lol @ this embodiment of the :/ emoji

This week I was thumbing through some of my old summer playlists, glumly trying to beef up my anemic Summer ‘24 list, when I came upon a curious artifact: “a block of songs to reduce morning rage.” I was instantly transported to October 2018: I was commuting on the subway daily for multiple jobs, in peak “hustle culture” mode. For New Yorkers, this time marked a nadir in recent history for public transit – delays, overcrowding, breakdowns, and disasters, stemming from a period of time dubbed “The Summer of Hell.¹” The transit issues merely compounded whatever other issues I had going on, because I remember acutely having this feeling, every morning, that I would fly off the handle. Not just a little – I mean, truly, dramatically.

After engaging in the quotidian routines to ready myself for the baseline futility of being a capitalist cog in the wheel, just to get stuck on a humid, crowded train moving slower than walking pace…I began getting this vivid daily image that all it would take was one tiny mental push, and I would just start SCREAMING wordlessly, full-throated, in the middle of the stalled subway train. (A business-suited woman actually went viral around this time for doing precisely this, and the public reaction to the video was basically: ‘yeah, that tracks’). 

All this to say: I somehow developed this extremely specific list of songs, disparate in genre and tone that, when put together, performed some kind of neurological alchemy. I began listening to this list IN ORDER, every single morning during my commute (no shuffles, no skips), and could feel my rage dissipate as the list ticked by. I still remember this sensation, almost tangibly. I look at the playlist now, and it makes no sense to me. They aren’t even all particularly good songs. It’s not a coherent mixtape by any measure! All I can recall is: it worked, at a time when I was clearly in a worse place mentally than I find myself today.

Still excavating my way out of my current funk, but here’s to doing what works, even if it’s weird and unknowable to others. Allow your relaxation to take a form that’s incomprehensible to other people. And moreover, I hope, incomprehensible to your future, better self.

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Our radio show from this past Sunday had a similarly inexplicable, genre-free theme, and I LOVED it. Here’s the list, and you can listen live on Sunday nights 6-8pm ET.

1. Unfortunately….it may be making a comeback!