Against all odds I bought a house this last year. The road to this goal was paved with the dead-end jobs, sexism, discrimination complaints, and devaluation of my work that consumed most of my 20s. There are many lessons bound up in there I hope no one else ever has to learn, and I have come out of it a harder, sharper, and more wary person because of it.

Against all odds I ended up in a stable, relatively well-paying position in an organization where I feel more genuinely supported in my professional goals than I ever have in my life. These experiences frame what I want to tell you about. 

I got tired of podcasts last week because I could not take one more voice in my head, at least not besides my own. So I dug up the last music that made me feel good, that gave me a genuine feeling of happiness – which was Florence and the Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.

In June 2019 Florence came to Merriweather Post in Columbia, which fell right between my exiting the bad job and starting the good one. I wore a long batik-print dress and danced barefoot on the lawn with my friends on a summer afternoon. It was a brief moment of absolutely no obligations to the universe, just sound and people and warm sunlight.

There is a song on that album I had almost forgotten about, but like most forgotten things it crept up on me while I was re-listening to the album in the car. It’s one of maybe two songs that will turn me to tears on contact. It is “South London Forever.”

“South London Forever” has a lot and absolutely nothing to do with South London, so much as it has to do with the fresh feeling of freedom in your early 20s curdling in the heat of crisis. The assumptions that I grew up with – going to college, getting a good job, getting married, buying a house – I began to realize were unattainable about the same time I began to realize I was an adult. Also about the time I realized winters were getting warmer and everything we thought we could have was just someone else’s memory.

This might not be the intention behind the song, but there are lines in “South London Forever” that were ripped right out of my own heart. I will not go through them all because to examine them would be to destroy them. This is just to say, I really love “South London Forever,” and I think you might too.