Still Learn and Grow

When I was a child, I would make up little tunes in my head. I played outside in the creek by my neighbors house or climbed the tree in our front yard. I sang all of the time (prompted or unprompted) but these little tunes were very private. I rarely let anyone hear them because, like many of my thoughts as young autistic child, I didn't think anyone would understand them.  To be fair, my child self had a point. The songs I wrote didn't make any sense. They were about the stupid things I wanted, like finally declaring my love for my second grade boyfriend after my parents told me I was too young to be dating anyone. Or working in the concession stand at a baseball game instead of watching it (this is while my dad coached baseball; I got bored pretty easily). I thought I was going to be the next Hannah Montana or Billy Joel's hype man. It was a dream that was my own and no one else's to crush. The TLDR: the worse I got bullied in elementary and middle school for things o...

I love genius lyricism, and as a child of the aughts, I find myself going back to music I would hear on the radio or on my mom's iPod. Moreover, I'm amazed at how often the lyrics become proverbs of my daily life. Recently, a lyric from "Hey Ya!" by OutKast has been trending on social media: "Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance." Andre 3000 (the genius that he is) uses it to back away from his heavy lyrics about people in unfruitful, unhappy relationships and jump back into the contagious joy felt in the rest of the song. It's beautiful and heartbreaking how self aware the Andre 3000 is. He knows that millions of people were not going to download this song and dance to it at weddings for the next two decades for depressing lyrics in a seemingly peppy song. I never read into this interjection at the beginning of the second chorus, but people are artfully inserting it into their conversations about justice and inclusivity. It resona...