"Music is Medicine"

Before I understood emotions, I understood music. Long before I had language for grief, loneliness, longing, joy, heartbreak, freedom, or hope… I had songs. Looking back now, I think music may have been my first friend. It wasn't a friend that asked questions, demanded explanations, or judged who I was or who I should become. Music simply sat beside me and allowed me to feel.

I did not grow up in a musical family in the traditional sense. There were no piano lessons or guitars leaning in corners waiting to be played. But music still lived with us. It drifted through old radios in kitchens and living rooms, rode alongside dusty prairie roads, hummed through chores, and softened the silence of rural mornings. The radio was the first thing turned on in the morning and the last thing turned off at night. Amid the squeals of pigs, the crow of roosters, and the rhythm of farm chores, there was always music. It played while I swept floors, washed dishes, and waited for the school bus beneath endless prairie skies.

And I sang. Not because I was talented or dreamed of stages and applause, but because music made me feel something. At the time, I did not understand what it was giving me. I only knew certain songs could change the atmosphere inside me. Some made me lighter, some made me ache, and some made me feel brave. Others carried a sadness I did not yet understand but somehow recognized anyway. For three minutes at a time, I could borrow the feelings of the artist who created the song.

Perhaps that is what I was really doing all along: learning emotional language.

As children, many of us are never taught how to name what lives inside us—especially in homes where survival matters more than self-expression. But music reaches places words cannot. Rhythm bypasses logic, and melody slips quietly past defenses. Music gave me permission to feel before I understood what feelings even were.

I think that is why certain songs can still stop us in our tracks decades later. A melody can pull us backward through time faster than memory itself. Suddenly we are sixteen again, heartbroken again, hopeful again, standing in a kitchen we thought we had forgotten.

Music carries emotional fingerprints. And maybe that is what all art truly is: one human being quietly saying to another, “This is what it felt like to be me.” Some paintings do it through colour, some writers through words, and some dancers through movement. Musicians do it through vibration and cadence.

For years I told myself I was not musical because I never learned instruments. But now I realize my body always understood rhythm. My heart understood cadence. My soul understood feeling. Perhaps that is why writing feels musical to me now; before I ever learned to write honestly, I learned to feel honestly through song.

And maybe that is why music still feels sacred to me. Not because it entertained me, but because it accompanied me. It stayed.

Even now, without fully realizing it, I still reach for music the way someone reaches for an old, trusted friend. When life feels too loud or my mind begins racing, I instinctively search for something melodic and peaceful—soft piano, slow acoustic guitar, or gentle voices carrying emotion instead of urgency. It is almost as though my nervous system recognizes the sound of safety before my mind does. The music slows me down, grounds me, and returns me to myself.

And when I feel heavy or emotionally stuck, I reach for something entirely different: something alive, fresh, rhythmic, and full of movement and possibility. Songs that make my feet tap before my thoughts can argue.

Only recently have I realized I have been using music to regulate myself my entire life without even understanding that was what I was doing. Some people meditate, some run, some talk. I do those too, but I also listen. Music has always helped me access emotional states I could not yet create on my own. Sometimes it calms the storm; sometimes it wakes me back up.

A few years ago, I attended a Carlos Santana concert, and he said something that stayed with me long after the lights dimmed: “Music is medicine.” At the time, I appreciated the beauty of the phrase. Now, I understand the truth of it.

Because music did not just entertain me—it held me. Long before I understood healing, music was quietly teaching me how to move through emotion instead of hiding from it. It gave grief somewhere to land. It softened loneliness. It carried hope when life itself felt too heavy to hold directly.

Maybe musicians really are healers in their own way. Not because they fix us, but because they help us feel. Sometimes a lyric says what a wounded heart cannot. Sometimes rhythm reminds us we are still alive. Sometimes a melody steadies a nervous system faster than words ever could.

Maybe that is why concerts can feel almost spiritual: a room full of strangers breathing, swaying, and remembering together. And perhaps peace is not the absence of feeling at all. Perhaps peace is finally learning how to move gently with our feelings instead of fighting them—sometimes through silence, sometimes through stillness, and sometimes through the medicine of music.