If it weren’t for my iPod I struggle to see how I would exist at all.

My entire life, I have searched for the perfect playlist: the soundtrack to my life. I search constantly, ceaselessly excavating the bowels of iTunes for songs that pinpoint a moment in my life that I want to retain. I listen intently to the songs that ‘play out’ television programmes and I add and add and add them. It’s an addiction – I’m always after my next fix. But it isn’t a purposeless addiction. I need music and lyrics to protect and envelop me. I can identify a person or band, a song or a theme, from a fraction of the first bar. So deeply entrenched is the music it has been absorbing into my pores. This subcutaneous manifestation of my mood shifts and changes and so too do my preferences, but I still believe that the soundtrack to my life will save me.

These past weeks I have become more desperate to find the perfect list, the distinctive collection of tracks and pieces that can connect with my state of mind. I am terrified that if I cannot isolate this anthology of emotions then I am truly dead. But perhaps I’m doing this to myself so that I can fit together the disparate pieces of my mind into a jigsaw that doesn’t save me. I dread to think what the word cloud would be for the tracks I have chosen for my current playlist, imaginatively titled, ‘Autumn/Winter 2014’. It really is a list of songs to facilitate oblivion. At least it is for me, even if some of the songs appear on the surface as innocent enough: I challenge you to translate You Can Call Me Al into a song to slit your wrists to. But to me it is terribly sad, the synthesisers and trumpets sing a solitary tune, complimenting the otherwise impermeable membrane of what is a celebration of the major key. It’s the search for himself that troubles me, and the fear that he doesn’t “want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” I fixate on this lyric and convince myself I am in that “cartoon graveyard” already and that I have lost my identity, reduced to an etching on a gravestone.

Or perhaps you would like the further challenge of explaining the melancholia I feel when I hear Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s superficially jolly, but I find it creepy (and not because I find Gene Wilder unutterably terrifying). Because if you did live in a world where you could wish yourself into “a world of pure imagination”, what would you really find? I am convinced that I would fall through the rabbit hole and never come back. For me pure imagination is petrifying. So I listen to it again and again and believe its appearance to be more frequent than other tracks even when the playlist is set to shuffle. It isn’t.

But depression loves company and so to the addition of the rest of the music included in my list. I have a title list of keywords which I am conscious of now, but not so when adding them ravenously and desperately to the collection:

Lose

Need

Now

Always

Down

Dream

Bad

But this is not special behaviour for depressives. This is entirely prescriptive. And this upsets me the most because even my depressive behaviour is prosaic. My retreat into a universe of confusion, melancholia and destruction is plain boring. It is not atypical to sit and categorise one’s life into genres and themes. It isn’t unusual to want to hear externalised the pain that corrodes your insides. I want to hear the corrosion, but I ask it to confirm the suspicions I have about myself. I want it to drag me way down where only I feel the vocabulary of sadness; down further than any other soul. I want it to want to drag me down because I deserve it. I deserve to let the chords and words and twangs bleed out of my skin like liquid fire.

This is an indulgence. I should simply unplug the headphones and expose myself to the natural noises of daily existence. But I cannot cope without the poison I so adeptly pour into my own ears. Whilst travelling my twitter feed I saw a meme that said ‘music makes the pain fade away’ – whoever said this is an idiot, because for me, pain needs to be rode like a loyal steed. It does not fade away, it stays and stays. It is the motor that revs my engine. It’s not that I’m preoccupied with the morbid or the painful, it’s that I’ve set up the architecture of my life upon the foundation that I am not going to get better. That this ebb and flow of my moods is systemic and cannot be soothed.

I’m not alone in looking into the future and seeing a life ridden with untamable moods and excruciating depressions; an existence with an intense dread that dare not speak its name. I fear I may give up, give in. But if I keep my universe small, a universe of notes and voices, I may stave off what feels like the inevitable. Keep my headphones in, keep the playlists evolving. Music and lyrics can’t save my life, but might just hold some of my pieces together in a familiar bubble. Don’t let my bubble burst.

This blog post has been sponsored by the following:

You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon

Pure Imagination by Gene Wilder

Berlin by RY X

Lose You by Pete Yorn

Where Did You Go? by Jets Overhead

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson by David Bowie

Youth by Daughter

Explosions by Ellie Goulding

On loop, from a playlist of 586 ‘songs to contain the morbid mind’.