48/365

Right now, I’m listening to my favourite music from 2012. It’s very distinct for me, because around the end of 8th Grade was when the whole electronic music craze hit me and my friends.

Till then we listened to a lot of rock, pop and a bunch of mainstream stuff that popped up on the radio. That changed when we all fell in love with electronic music. Every single one of the initial songs we heard had something funky about it, that got us swaying. Just made people happy – which was great.

And having been in a new school for barely over a year, it became something we instantly connected about. All of us went home and sat on YouTube hunting for that new track to share with everyone.  It was fabulous.

Over the years, the sort of music I listen to has changed, but I enjoy discovering new music, so I put Spotify on discover and shuffle, and let it do the trick. That way I’m constantly in tune with different genres. The thing about music, personally, for me, is that it makes you feel emotion. The beauty of different genres is the different response it creates in your brain.

The only downfall to this is that I’m not listening to the same music over and over again. Which means that I rarely get to relive the emotion I felt the first time I heard a bit of music.

Listening to this 9th Grade mix has done just that.

Within a couple of seconds, I was back in my room from a day at school, sitting on my beanbag, with my laptop and my headphones, on YouTube, and Facebook, with an XtremePapers tab open to do some quick revision.

That flashback led me to reopen a couple of old chats with my classmates, a lot of whom I barely speak to these days. I was transported to a place where I typed out horribly, with pathetic punctuation, and extra exclamation marks. In an instant, I was taken back to these baby 9th Grade considerations: whether I’m playing my social circle right or not versus whether my parents think I’m studying hard enough.

And I had a lot of advice to give myself. I felt like I could have chilled out a bit more in 9th, because I started studying and reading a lot after 10th Grade came around. With boards in three consecutive years, and having to give multiple entrance exams, my life just became about the next set of tests, eventually.

Which was a little sad for a 9th Grader.

I regret nothing from how I used time back then, but maybe spending more time on creative pursuits would have been fun.

This train of thought lasted the whole of 15 minutes, after which I started to think about how chill the 9th Grade was, in comparison to what life became after that.It felt great.

9th Grade was beautiful.