Does music help you feel less alone?

Below is the beginning of an essay for Curator Magazine about ways music helps me belong. It's an honor to have my work published by such a beautiful online publication. I think most people will connect with this piece that explores ways music decreases our isolation. See profile to read the full essay.⁣
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⁣Whenever I hear Peter Cetera belt out “Waiting for the break of day” in the song “25 or 6 to 4,” I’m carried back to the brick house on Hunting Creek Road in Montgomery, Alabama, where I lived as a child. I’m four years old. I’m on the rust-colored shag carpet and can smell the drywall and new paint in our den that had doubled in size from its recent renovation. I see my dad hanging his new Bose 901 speakers and setting up his sound system, including a Philips turntable. My Barbie dolls are not far from my reach, and I’d bet I ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast. That song is my earliest music memory. ⁣⁣
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Music helps us inhabit time in ways that open us up to mystery, nuance, and new perspectives. Recent measurements of brain activity depict an experience most of us have had: being transported back in time by a song. Armed with those images, scientists explain that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is located right behind the eyes, collects music, memory, and emotion and braids them together as we listen and respond to songs from long ago. While we listen to old, familiar songs, our past combines with the present and we are in two places at the same time.⁣⁣
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*Read the rest of this essay adapted from a chapter from The Great Belonging at The Curator.

*Image and words originally posted by Charlotte Donlon on Instagram.