If you're anything like me, you've perused YouTube for music playlists enough that you've seen some of those videos titled with some derivative of “This Playlist Found You.” If you truly are like me, then curiosity–and a desire to find meaning and significance in the mundane–may have once compelled you to click on one of these videos. But the few times I have clicked on them, they haven't really spoken to me. There was no magic in the YouTube algorithm, no secret formula to bring this random video to my feed. It was just a fancy name and a vague incantation of something spiritual or transcendent. It would be silly to expect otherwise.
Sometimes, however, things do find you. A song, a movie, a person, an image, anything. Something that speaks to the deepest recesses of your soul, offering you something you didn't know you hungered for. Something full of meaning, if only you are open to hear it. Or, perhaps even better, it offers you exactly what you've been looking for, when you are on your knees with nowhere left to look. I do not know the mechanism through which these beautiful guides wander their way from transcendence into the ever-longing voids of our humanity, but maybe these things are better left undiscovered. All we can do is wait for them to find us, or stop waiting and find them anyway.
I am speaking from recent experience here, because not too long ago, I was found in this way by a song: “Valentine's Day” by Bruce Springsteen. I don't know anything about Bruce Springsteen, other than Jeremy Allen White playing him in a biopic recently. Does anyone even listen to him anymore? “Valentine's Day,” in a sort of retrospect, sounds to me like the song some suburban mother would play with moony-eyed nostalgia to the eye-rolling of her teenage daughter. Despite that, however, this song spoke to me in the perfect way I desired. I realized this fact when I slogged through an early morning at school, eyes weighed down by nightmarish sandbags, in a haze of some unexplainable and unshakable despair. I had listened to “Valentine's Day” on the drive over, off of a random playlist that entered my rotation a month prior. Then, hunched over a seemingly-impossible calculus problem in my miserable state, I found a familiar familiar song entering my head. I'll let you guess which one.
This first encounter was particularly dark, as it came alongside some sort of anxiety-induced episode that made my heart speed ten times faster than it should have. It was my first time experiencing this sort of thing, and I did not enjoy it in the slightest. It was like I was falling apart, trying to grip onto the reality of the pencil and notebook in front of me but slipping into a chasm as my heart beat a million indentations into my chest. I stole into the hallway to try and compose myself, and all I could think of was Springsteen’s voice, scoring the scene as I became a mere spectator to my own body.
The next week, it happened again. Some terrible dread in my chest flipped a switch somewhere in this strange body of mine and summoned “Valentine’s Day” to let me wallow. Then again, this time with another anxiety episode. Then once more, walking to my car to eat lunch under a shadow of loneliness and the threat of tears. And probably a few more times, sometimes popping into my head spontaneously, sometimes finding me from my playlist.
You might be wondering how a song could have such an effect on me. For one, it had excellent timing. But more importantly, something about its style and words stuck out to me. Springsteen sings “Valentine's Day” with this incredible sincerity that gives it the rawness I needed to feel. It is yearning and romantic, of course, but not in the cheesy way so many love songs are. Instead, it has a rugged honesty that seems exceptionally American (his imagery of North American wilderness and driving his truck on the highway is enough to make me break out the fireworks). It's more conversational than lyrical, woven with a cry and a whisper and a shout rather than a melodic, refined form.
And what is this rugged yearning all about? Loneliness. Fundamentally, this is probably why I resonate with the song so much. He's singing to his lover, wishing he could be with her, not only because they're separated, but because he thinks he might lose her. He describes the setting of a dark drive, surrounded by rivers, moonlight, leaves, and a “spooky highway,” but what scares him is losing his lover, because the scariest thing is to be alone. To be alone is to be miserable with no one to tell about it. The pain has nowhere to go, so it goes inside; Springsteen has “one hand trembling over [his] heart, and it's pounding.” I suppose those lyrics were prescient to my experience with the song too. My heart was trembling too.
I've been writing this post for a while now, and the “magic” has sort of faded. Now “Valentine's Day” shows up whenever it wants. Sometimes I'm on the verge of tears, sometimes I'm not feeling much of all, and sometimes I'm feeling fine. It even had the audacity to show up when I was happy, one night when driving home after spending some time with my girlfriend. But that time, it felt like an old friend more than anything, like a sign I could still be happy. I didn't have to be lonely. If all else failed, I had Springsteen.
It's actually been so long since I started writing this that I forgot what really inspired me to write it. I encountered something else that felt perfect for me, most likely a movie, and it had some effect on me; that I have already forgotten it perhaps points to how fleeting happiness is, or how neurotic and forgetful I am. But it did get me thinking about other perfect things that found me, like “Valentine's Day.” When I worked at Marshall's, I also found quite a few people who were perfect. Oftentimes it was just a stranger being nice at the right time. Once it was a coworker saying I gave main character energy, right when I was thinking about how I felt like a side character watching everyone's lives go by. The most fascinating instance of it was when a woman recognized me from seeing me the previous night, when we sat next to each other at a restaurant while waiting to pick up orders. That night, sitting alone at that restaurant, I felt so alone, like if I never made it home no one would have noticed, but then she saw me the next day and made me feel seen. I was ashamed, too, because I was so wrapped up in my own head that I didn't remember her face enough to recognize it.
The point is: you are not alone. Even when your heart is breaking in the middle of Calculus and you have no clue why, or when you are feeling depressed at the Indian restaurant, things you don't think anyone else understands or can relate to. Someone or something can find you, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or a kind woman. But I do think you have to be looking for it, in a way. To be listening for the little moments that give you reprieve. Life isn't perfect for me right now; in fact, it feels like it is bottoming out (for perhaps the millionth time). However, these things are a big part of why and how I can keep going. They remind me that there is life beyond my misery, and that others care enough to be kind and make connections. They remind me that hope exists, if only we let it find us.
You will be found.
