I think it's a very important and special feeling when you have a song that instead of reminding you of some lost love or friend, it reminds you of who you used to be. I'm listening to Green Day's 'Jesus of Suburbia' right now and my feelings of when I used to hear this song in its intirety - because it's 9 minutes long - on the bus on the way to school as a way to reassure myself that this day would be better than yesterday was. Keep in mind that this is when I was thirteen and easily upset over bullshit and I thought I was a lot more grown up than I actually was. I used to scrawl 'to live and not to breathe is to die in tragedy' and 'they say home is where your heart is but what a shame, 'cause everybody's heart don't beat the same' on my wrists and the back of notebooks and think about how Billy Joe Armstrong understood, more than my friends or family, the despair of living in a city you wanted to get out of and being different and just the general urge to LEAVE. 'Running away from pain when you've been victimized, tales from another broken home'. And now this post on an abandoned blog is coming out pretty long, but it's just that it's weird how you grow up and sometimes you're not aware of this. With other people who you don't see on a regular basis, you notice a change in them when you see them again but that doesn't happen with yourself because every day you're faced with yourself and it feels like you've always been the same. I'm growing up and even though the 13 year old me wasn't aware of this - mainly because I was too worried about what the skinny girls with straight hair thought about me - but this pain is so useful and maybe I wouldn't have grown up without it. And I'm still growing and there's still suffering and there's still music to get me through bad days.