What my teenage mixtape still reveals about my healing
Some songs act like keys. You hear the first three notes and a whole decade cracks open, dust and all. The other night I was making tea on a slow Tuesday, headphones tangled around my neck, when a song I had not thought about since I was fifteen slid through the algorithm. Within four bars I was back in the back seat of my mum's Corolla on the M1, staring out at the sugarcane fields between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, clutching a burnt CD-R with Sharpie scribbles on the front.
That song had nothing to do with the person I am now. Or so I thought. I let it play. By the end I was crying over the kitchen sink, because somewhere between the second chorus and the bridge, I realised the song had been quietly holding a piece of me I had not yet been ready to look at.
I have been writing about healing for a while now, mostly through words. Lately I have started noticing how much of the work was actually done first by music, years before I had the vocabulary for it. Returning to those teenage tracks has become its own kind of therapy session, the kind without a clipboard, just a pair of headphones and a long walk.
The songs I loved at sixteen were not background noise. They were the first place I heard feelings named that I did not yet know how to say. Revisiting them now feels less like nostalgia and more like reading old journal entries written in a language I have since learned. You can read more about how I ended up here, and a few unrelated truths about me, on my random facts about me page.
The songs that built my escape hatch
As a teenager I treated my earbuds like a passport. School was loud, home was heavier, and my own head was the loudest place of all. Music was the only door I could close without anyone asking why. Triple J's Hottest 100 countdown every Australia Day was a national event in our loungeroom, and my friends and I would text each other our predictions like we were trading lottery numbers.
I filled my playlists with songs that gave me somewhere else to be. Powderfinger's "These Days" was my anchor when friendships cracked and reformed. The Veronicas' "Untouched" made me feel brave in a body I was still learning to trust. Tame Impala's "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" soundtracked every late bus ride from the city back to the suburbs. None of these were healing songs, exactly. They were exit songs. They let me leave the room without moving my feet.
Looking back, I can see how the escape mattered. Healing requires you to survive first. Sometimes survival looks like a song on repeat until your chest unclenches enough to fall asleep. Sometimes it looks like crying on the Esplanade at Surfers, headphones in, while the salt wind tries to dry your face for you.
Lyrics I sang without understanding
Half of what I loved as a teen, I did not actually understand. I sang along to lyrics that sounded beautiful without catching their weight. Missy Higgins' "Scar" was on every high school playlist, and we all mouthed the words without realising they were about something far heavier than a bad relationship. Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" felt like a breakup song, and I treated it as such, until years later when it became obvious it was about grief, identity, the slow erosion of self.
That gap between sound and meaning has turned out to be useful. Songs can carry truths we are not yet old enough to metabolise. They sit in us, waiting. I think the body hears them even when the mind does not. Years later, when life finally brings us close enough to the subject, the song rises again like it had been patiently waiting on a shelf.
I used to feel embarrassed that I had been so oblivious. Now I think those half-heard lines were doing their own quiet work, softening the ground so the real meaning could land when I was ready.
When the music named what I couldn't
There is a particular kind of relief that comes from hearing someone else say the thing you have been too afraid to shape into words. As a queer kid growing up in regional Queensland, I did not have many mirrors. I had a handful of albums, and that was it.
Sia's "Breathe Me" cracked something open in me the year I turned seventeen. It felt like a film score for the inside of my chest. Holly Throsby's "Somewhere Between the Wires" soundtracked the months I first allowed myself to consider that I might be something other than what I had been told. Savage Garden's "I Knew I Loved You" was on every mixtape I made for girls I was too scared to call my crushes. I do not think I am the only Australian woman of a certain generation who can attribute at least one slow-dance memory to Darren Hayes.
These songs did not fix anything. They did something quieter and more lasting. They proved, over and over, that the things I felt had been felt by other people first. That I was not inventing my own loneliness. That it was survivable, because someone else had survived it enough to put it to music.
The compass hidden in the chorus
Healing has stages, and so does a song. Verse, chorus, bridge, return. I have started thinking of my own recovery in those terms. The verse is the slow build of awareness, the things you begin to notice about yourself. The chorus is the moment you actually feel it. The bridge is where the song breaks form, goes somewhere unexpected. The return is the part where you come back to the melody, but you are a different person singing it now.
That structure has become a small comfort. When I am in the middle of something hard, I try to remember that I might just be in the bridge. The melody is going to come back. I will hear it again, changed.
I have leaned on Australian venues for that return. Seeing Angie McMahon play at The Troubadour in Brisbane after a long stretch of grief work felt like the second chorus of a song I had been living in for years. The audience sang the words back to her like a single, ragged choir. It was a reminder that healing is rarely a solo performance.
Hearing my teenage self with kindness
Re-listening to old favourites has also been a practice in self-forgiveness. There are songs I used to love that I now find embarrassing. There are songs I once wrote off as too soft that I now recognise as some of the most honest music I have ever heard.
Emma Donovan's voice did that for me recently. Angus and Julia Stone too. I used to dismiss the gentler side of Australian music as background. It turns out I was just not ready for it. Softness was not safe in my house growing up. Of course it sounded like background. Of course I skipped past it. Coming back to those quieter records, in my thirties, has felt like gently retrieving a part of myself I left behind in a shopping centre bathroom at fourteen.
The teenage self who made those mixtapes was doing her best. She was working with the tools she had, which were mostly a borrowed iPod and a flimsy sense of self. I am trying to listen to her the way I would listen to a friend who had clearly been through it.
Returning to the stage that raised me
This year I went back to Splendour in the Grass for the first time in a decade. The site has changed, the lineup has changed, the version of me walking around in thongs and sunscreen has definitely changed. But the feeling of standing in a crowd with arms full of strangers, all of us singing the same song at the top of our lungs, felt exactly the same.
It made me want to build something that honours that feeling. A space where the music of who we were meets the people we are becoming. That is, mostly, what this corner of the internet is for. If you have not already, you can poke around the Life Starts With Coffee site and see what else lives here.
Ways to re-listen with fresh ears
- Pick three songs you loved at fifteen and play them in order, with no skipping.
- Write down one lyric that lands differently now, and one that still means the same thing.
- Search for the album that introduced you to a feeling you did not have a name for yet.
- Listen to one song you dismissed as soft back then, and notice what your body does now.
- Look up an Australian artist from your teen years and see what they are making today.
- Make a new playlist called Bridge and fill it with tracks from every era of your life.
- If you can, see a song you loved live, even if you go alone.
My next step tonight is small and concrete. I am going to dig out one of my old burnt CD-Rs from the box under the bed, find a CD player that still works, and let the whole thing play from start to finish, no skipping, no commentary. I am curious to meet the girl who made it.
