We Don’t Grow Up, We Just Change Playlists

A love letter to the songs that never left, and the versions of me that still live inside them.

There’s a playlist I never outgrew.
Not by choice. Not by accident.
Just a few stubborn tracks I carry like old bruises under a black T-shirt.
Chili Peppers. Green Day. Cage.
They live in the scars on my body—tucked behind the knuckles, the collarbone, the ribs.
Songs that didn’t just play for me, they formed me.
Locked in deep. Below logic. Below language.
They knew me before I did.

And I keep going back.
Not because they’re masterpieces.
But because they knew.
Knew the chaos. The ache. The way adolescence howls and softens you at the same time.

So yeah, I listen to them weekly. Sometimes daily.
Like I’m trying to climb back into a skin I lost along the way.
Or maybe I’m just trying to feel anything that isn’t a damn push notification.
Maybe this is nostalgia.
Or maybe it’s grief in disguise—grieving a version of me that only existed in the margins between verses.

And isn’t that what we all do?

We don’t grow up, we just relocate.
We pack the essentials—trauma, sarcasm, three albums we swear no one understands like we do—and call it growth.
We try to build a life out of leftovers.
And when the silence gets too loud, we throw on a rerun.
The O.C..
Freaks and Geeks.
Something with a soundtrack and a well-lit sadness.

Hollywood gave us our emotional vocabulary.
A team of writers scripting the breakdowns we weren’t brave enough to have in real life.
We learned to cry on cue. To monologue to the mirror.
To kiss in the rain like the apocalypse was coming.
And we bought the lie that memory was better than reality.
Because it had a better soundtrack.

But here’s the truth, wrapped in distortion and a chorus I still know by heart:

Reliving never delivers.
You can press play, but it won’t hit the same.
Because the moment isn’t the song—it’s the person you were when it first shattered you.

So yeah, maybe I’m clinging to ghosts.
Maybe I’m romanticizing a past that never fully held me.
But fuck it.
Some ghosts deserve company.

And some songs?
They don’t age.
They haunt.

So tonight it’s “Otherside” again.
Or maybe “No Rest for the Wicked.”
Something that sounds like the part of me I refuse to outgrow.

Because maybe this isn’t regression.
Maybe it’s resurrection.
A slow dance with who I used to be—
before the world told me to forget.

// Scorpio Veil

If your breath just hitched—you just met yourself again.
If your skin remembered something—don’t flinch. That was you, still alive.
Don’t call it nostalgia. Call it recognition.
Welcome back.