In Which We Become Our Own Witness

And you wondered why my love songs are always the grieving kind
Why I wander off to search for my reflection in the crowd
― Laura Gibson, “Empire Builder”
 
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.
― James Baldwin
 
I confuse music with happiness.
― Alan Mills

My head hurts and I feel like shit. I should turn off my computer, but I keep staring at the screen, listening to music and compulsively rating each song. While making lists is often thought of as taking control, in my case it feels like losing it.
 
Even as a child, I was obsessed with lists. Movies were my first love, and I would check off as many Oscar-nominated movies as I could, whatever few VHS tapes I could find at my small-town video store that appeared on whoever’s top ten list. Then books and music… I would print out every list I would find online and keep them in a binder.
 
Of course, I also made my own. Sometimes, I would become overwhelmed by the amount of time lost on these never-ending lists and delete them; only to build them back up again a few months later. Eventually, I decided that, instead of wasting even more time repeatedly making and deleting lists, I would just accept that it was part of who I am.
 
I currently sit at #197 on the list “RYM Buttnumbathon 2.0: The Top 200 Film Raters on RateYourMusic” thanks to my 4,954 ratings. When I found out, I commented “It's always a great shame to be on a list like this. Thank you for keeping me humble!”
 
There are also my 24,238 album ratings and my 44,485 track ratings – no wonder captcha keeps popping up to ask me to prove I’m not a robot – not to mention my 113 lists; my 963 book ratings on Goodreads; my 16,524 liked songs and 74 playlists on Spotify.
 
The funny thing is that I never use my playlists, most of which are by genre. I usually listen to music on shuffle, no matter how jarring the juxtaposition between one track and the next. So, if my playlists aren’t for me, who are they for?
 
While visiting my parents recently, I came across the mixtapes my friend Ann Marie had made for me in cegep, complete with their own titles and collaged covers. I no longer have anything to play cassettes on, so I made a Spotify playlist with all the songs to archive them.
 
I used to make fun of my mom for re-renting movies she’d already seen. “You’ve rented this one before,” I’d tell her. “No, I haven’t,” she would inevitably reply but, after watching the first few minutes, she had to admit, “You’re right, I have seen this before.” I recently had to apologize to her. I’ve now reached the point where I watched all of Pride & Prejudice and only when came the time to rate it did I realize I’d seen it before. I’ve even reread all of La traduction est une histoire d’amour and just assumed it felt familiar because Jacques Poulin keeps revisiting the same themes. I go through the list of shows I’ve attended like one walks through a cemetery, reading names and dates on tombstones. I’ve seen Methyl Ethel, Florist, and Playboi Carti? Really? Archiving is a way of highlighting; sometimes, I remember my review of a dance show more than I remember the show itself.
 
Part of my compulsion to rate anything and everything is to feed the algorithms, hoping that their recommendations will become more and more accurate, even though my eclectic tastes seem to make me too unpredictable for artificial intelligence to figure out. I fear never getting to hear the song that might save my life, just as songs have done before. As a teenager, the first thing I would do every day was to listen to music for an hour to give me the energy to make it through the day.

Sometimes, other people’s lists have their own highlight colour. My first love had a list of random favourites on his blog. As a result, there are things that will forever make me think of him: Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut, Josie and the Pussycats, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Fiona Apple’s “Never Is a Promise”, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth…
 
I haven’t had anybody to share the things I love with. It makes me sad whenever I think about how I’ve experienced the best moments of my life alone. When you lead a solitary life, you have to become your own witness.
 
Whenever I attend a show, usually alone, I look for myself in photos and videos people share on social media, even though I tend to stand in the back with my arms crossed. It’s not narcissism. It’s as if I’m looking for proof that I was really there, sort of like how I would sometimes look at myself in the mirror while crying to make sure my emotions were visible and not just a figment of my imagination.
 
So I connect the dots, drawing a self-portrait by archiving the things that are important to me, put it in a bottle and throw it at sea, hoping that someday someone may find me.