In a Music Rut?

I didn’t make this playlist, the comments section did. Let me explain.

I’m generally off social media. It gets messy in that world. Social media seemed to get especially messy last year.

This is really a shame because social media has the potential to be so connective and healing; I want to live in the world where connectivity is the incentive of social media companies.

But alas, your attention is the incentive. And you know what gets attention?

Drama, drama, and more drama.

Still, I thought it was worth a try to engage with social media in a way that might be curative, for myself and anyone who encounters my feed. If not curative, at least not ruinous?

On Instagram, my effort looked like inviting people to join me in “31 Days of Connection.” During each day in December, I’d post something designed to be connective.

On day three, I shared that I was in a music rut. A bad one.

Music matters bigtime to me. When I can’t connect to music, I feel off in a way that’s more serious than it sounds.

I asked the community of people engaged with my account for some help.

“Could you please add a song to the comments section so that I could semi-magically have a playlist with all new songs, which would hopefully pull me out of my music rut?” I asked.

Ask and ye shall recieve, or something like that.

So many people offered a song; I can’t explain how much this helped me.

The “comments section” playlist is full of songs I would never have chosen on my own. Listening to it as I ran errands across New York City, took baths, cleaned my apartment, hopped on and off of subway platforms, took the holiday decorations down - no words.

I’m still listening to that playlist.

I’ll hear a song and wonder about the person who sent it. I wonder about weird things - where they part their hair, whether they’re a good driver. Of course, I also wonder whether they feel what I feel when I listen to the song. I wonder if the song has a totally different meaning for them. I wonder if they know how much they helped me.

I wanted to share the playlist here. So, here it is! If you contributed to it, thank you. You helped me so much. X

Katherine Morgan Schafler is an NYC-based psychotherapist, author and speaker. For more of her work, get her book, visit her website, and follow her on Instagram.