In elementary school I was constantly being bullied for a wide variety of reasons. At the time I didn't know what the reasons were, and I think most of my bullies didn't consciously know it, but now looking back I know it was because I was a queer autistic kid that had not learned how to not to annoy those around me with my neurodivergent quirks.
That's probably a heavier first sentence than you'd expect in a music blog post but I promise there's a reason.
There were so many things that I couldn't control about who I was, like my voice or my sensitivities to noise, but one of the things I could control was the music people that I told people I listened to. My music taste was, and still is, very gay so naturally I downloaded lots of "men songs" and listened to them often enough that I could fake my way through a question of who my favourite artists are without attracting more bullying.
By high school I was openly gay and had been enrolled in a special education program for several years so I wasn't necessarily trying to hide those aspects of myself but the idea of minimizing the "excessiveness" of my personality was something I'd internalized by this point. So even though I was no longer pretending to listen to Aerosmith or claiming that my sister and I shared an iTunes account (in order to explain away the Hannah Montana sound tracks) I never really allowed myself to think too much about my music taste. As a result I mostly relied on what was trending and I had a pretty shallow taste in music.
Over the years, especially since getting proper diagnoses and support for my neurodivergence, I've been revisiting many of the things that I feel I lost out on as a kid. One of these has been my music taste and listening habits. In the last year I've also been trying to disconnect from all subscription services (see my primary blog to learn more about that journey) and one of the first things I did was get rid of my Spotify account and move to a self-hosted app called "AirSonic".
All of this and more has led me to feel more confident or proud of my music taste and that is why I thought it would be nice, mainly for myself, to make this site. I'm launching this site before I normally would feel it's "ready" because I'm trying to let go of my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to my web design, especially since this is supposed to be for fun. So I hope that was an interesting introduction and I hope you enjoy the site.