Near the end of my junior year of high school, I started dating a boy. He was a senior who was funny, charismatic, intelligent, and well-liked, and I fell hard and fast for him. Although we didn’t end up dating for very long, we were together long enough for him to introduce me to a few things: Dungeons and Dragons, a beautiful tea room, and George Watsky.
George Watsky is a rapper from San Francisco who started out performing slam poetry. Those roots are clear in a lot of his music. He has also performed in a few Epic Rap Battles of History videos, and he contributed to The Hamilton Mixtape.
As someone who had also just recently begun listening to Twenty One Pilots, I was pretty into the whole rap/hip-hop thing. Watsky’s lyrics were both fun and thought-provoking, full of puns and witty phrases. I also discovered that I really liked (trying) to rap along.
After my boyfriend and I broke up, I stopped listening to Watsky. I was really heartbroken, and each song just evoked a memory that made me feel even worse. Even after I had gotten over the breakup, I still didn’t listen to any of Watsky’s music; I had mostly forgotten about in my growing obsession with Twenty One Pilots.
Then, about halfway through my senior year, my younger sister put on Watsky’s “Whoa Whoa Whoa” during our drive home. She was surprised that I sang/rapped along to about half of the song, considering I had never mentioned Watsky to her before then. She played another song of his that I knew, plus one or two others that I had never heard.
I realized something deeply important during that drive home. I enjoyed Watsky’s music, and the fact that someone who was no longer in my life had introduced it to me didn’t mean I couldn’t still enjoy it. I was avoiding doing or experiencing a lot of things simply because an ex-boyfriend or ex-friend had been part of my initial experience with them.
I took back my enjoyment of Watsky. I learned the rest of the words to “Whoa Whoa Whoa” (although he raps a lot of them too quickly for me to keep up), and I’ve been jamming his latest album, x Infinity, for weeks. I haven’t just taken back things from that relationship, either. I’ve taken back movie theater dates, swim meets, Swenson’s, and Star Wars. I love all of those things too much to let someone else ruin them for me.
So a word of advice to basically anyone who’s ever faced the end of a relationship with a friend, significant other, family member, or so on: don’t let that person make you unhappy by ruining the things you adore. They may no longer be in your life, but they can’t take your passions with them. We all like to talk about the life lessons that we’ve learned from failed relationships, but we tend to throw away the other things we gain from them. In a way, it gives that person power over you and your memories. Take back the things you enjoy. You deserve it.