UnlearningSilence.blog

Music has always been important to me.

I listen to almost everything: hip hop, R&B, jazz, soul, electronic music, Afrobeat, classical music, pop, folk music from countries I have never visited and songs in languages I do not speak.

Part of that comes from growing up in the post-Soviet era.

People often assume that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Western culture arrived all at once. It did not. It arrived slowly, unevenly and often by accident. We did not have streaming services, personalised playlists or algorithms deciding what we should listen to next. We listened to whatever we could get our hands on. Sometimes music arrived through a friend, sometimes through a cousin and sometimes on a cassette tape that had been copied so many times that the sound quality was questionable at best.

I remember wearing 2Pac T-shirts and listening to Changes long before I understood the full story behind the man who wrote it. We mourned his death when we finally heard about it, almost a year after it had happened. News travelled slowly. Everything travelled slowly. Looking back, I think that made music feel more precious. We did not consume it endlessly. We waited for it, shared it and held on to it.

One of my strongest childhood memories is from when I was twelve years old. A friend brought a portable Sony CD player to school and let me listen to it during a break. I put on the headphones, pressed play and heard Larger Than Life by the Backstreet Boys.

It was as though every cell in my body suddenly woke up. The world became brighter, bigger and somehow more full of possibility. I asked if I could borrow the CD player for a day and when she agreed, I felt like the richest girl in the world.

My parents were not materialistic people. They believed in education, discipline and practical things. We had a beautiful German piano at home and I took regular piano lessons, but I did not have a CD player of my own. Eventually, I saved enough money to buy my first boombox. I still remember some of the CDs I bought: Shakira, Avril Lavigne and a rap and R&B compilation. It was an eclectic collection, but it was mine.

Once I had my music, I barely wanted to leave my room. No matter what was happening elsewhere in the house, whether my parents were arguing or life felt uncertain, I could close my door, finish my homework and disappear into another world. Music became an escape, but it also became something more important than that. It became a form of freedom. It allowed me to imagine different possibilities for my life and different versions of myself.

I was a tomboy growing up and unlike many of my female cousins and friends, I could not dance. I desperately wanted to learn, but dance lessons were not really encouraged where I grew up, at least not in my family. So I found a solution.

There was a School of Choreography near my house and one day I simply walked in and asked one of the students if she would teach me. I could not afford to pay her, but during our conversation she mentioned that she wanted to improve her English. We made a deal. I taught her English and she taught me how to dance.

A few years later, during the great Shakira era that swept across much of the world, I enrolled in belly dancing classes. My mother believed I was attending Pilates after school. Technically, I was exercising. I would arrive early and watch the advanced class before the beginners’ lesson started. Then I would go home and practise everything I had seen.

Within a few months I could actually dance. Not professionally and not particularly well, but I could move. For the first time in my life, my body felt like a means of expression rather than simply something that carried me from one place to another.

Music accompanied every stage of my life. It travelled with me as I grew older, left home, moved countries, built a career and became a mother. It was there during some of my happiest moments and some of my most difficult ones. Over time it also became intertwined with another great adventure of life: people.

I have been fortunate enough to meet people from different cultures, backgrounds and countries. Some stayed in my life for years, others only briefly. Not every relationship worked out, but every meaningful relationship changed me in some way.

My first serious relationship introduced me to Turkish and Kurdish culture. I learnt to dance the Halay, a traditional dance where people stand side by side, hold hands and move together as one. What I loved about it was not the dancing itself but what it represented. Complete strangers would join the same circle. Men and women, young and old, people with different stories and different lives would all move together to the same rhythm.

Years later, whenever I hear the music, I am reminded not only of the person who introduced me to it but also of the lesson hidden inside it: that we are often far more connected to one another than we realise. What I loved most about Halay was that, once the music started, none of the usual things seemed to matter. Young or old, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, local or foreigner, everyone joined the same line, held the same hands and moved to the same rhythm.

It always reminded me of the spirit of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi’s famous invitation: “Come, come, whoever you are.” There was a generosity to it, an assumption that there was room for everyone. Looking back, I think that is one of the greatest gifts other people have given me throughout my life. Through music, friendship and love, they invited me into worlds I would never have discovered on my own.

One of my favourite music memories is from the first months after I arrived in the UK.

For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

My mother and I had moved together, but the reality was that she relied on me, not the other way around. We had left behind our home, our friends, our routines and the comforting certainty of knowing where we belonged. Everything around us was unfamiliar. The future felt exciting, but it also felt frighteningly uncertain.

We rented a room in a shared house while trying to build a new life. There were several people living there, including a quiet man who kept mostly to himself. The other tenants told me that he never really spoke to anyone. He would come home from work, disappear into his room and spend his evenings listening to music through an impressive sound system.

One night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I found myself alone in the kitchen. The house was silent. The lights were off. I had brought a portable CD player with me from home, although it was constantly breaking and had a tendency to stop working at exactly the wrong moment.

I put on my headphones and started listening to music.

Then I started dancing.

Not for anyone else. Not to impress anyone. Just for myself.

For a few minutes I forgot where I was. I forgot the uncertainty, the unfamiliar streets and the fear that often accompanies new beginnings. There was only music and movement.

Then I realised I was not alone.

The quiet neighbour was standing in the doorway, leaning against the wall and watching.

I stopped, embarrassed for a moment, but smiled and said hello.

Instead of walking away, he smiled back.

We started talking.

That conversation turned into many others. He introduced me to music I had never heard before. We spent evenings listening to albums, discussing culture, life, our hopes for the future and the places we had come from. Through him I discovered artists and genres that would stay with me for years.

A few months later he moved into his own place before I did.

On the day he left, he gave me a gift.

It was a new CD player and a blue zip-up CD wallet filled with CDs he had burned for me himself. Inside was a carefully chosen collection of rap, R&B, jazz and music from across the African and Caribbean diaspora.

At the time, it was one of the most valuable things I owned.

Not because of the CD player.

Not because of the music.

But because of what it represented.

When you arrive in a new country, there are people who help you with practical things. They explain forms, directions, transport systems and official procedures.

Then there are the people who help you feel that you belong.

Without ever saying it directly, that gift told me that there was a place for me here too.

More than twenty years later, I still remember it. I do not know if he ever realised the impact that simple act of kindness had on me. But whenever I think about the role music has played in my life, I think about that blue CD wallet and the quiet man who, through a simple act of kindness, helped transform a foreign country into a place that felt a little more like home.

Other relationships brought other gifts.

Some introduced me to jazz clubs hidden in basements and tiny live music venues. Others introduced me to soul music, Afrobeat, UK Garage, electronic music, warehouse raves and dance floors that carried on until sunrise. Through friends and partners, I found myself in places I would never have discovered on my own: intimate jazz nights, LGBTQ+ venues, drag performances, underground club nights, live music events and crowded rooms filled with strangers united by a shared love of music.

Each world had its own soundtrack and its own rhythm. What fascinated me was not only the music itself but the people gathered around it. A jazz club in Soho, a drag performance in East London, an Afrobeat dance floor packed until three in the morning or an electronic music event in a converted warehouse all attracted entirely different crowds. Yet underneath it all, people seemed to be searching for the same things: connection, self-expression, joy and, for a few hours at least, the freedom to simply be themselves.

One person introduced me to the simple pleasure of sitting in a park with good music and good company and allowing the moment to be enough.

One of my exes loved music more than almost anyone I have ever met. He had an incredible sound system and seemed to have a soundtrack for every occasion. He would carry a portable speaker with him wherever we went. We would sit in Hampstead Heath with food, conversation and music drifting through the summer air.

At the time I thought he was introducing me to songs. What I eventually understood was that he was teaching me how to listen.

He taught me that music is not simply background noise. It can be part of an experience, part of a memory, part of a particular place and time that remains with you long after everything else has changed.

We eventually had to let each other go, but I kept the lesson.

In fact, I bought my own portable speaker.

These days, whether I am walking through London, travelling somewhere new or simply cooking dinner, there is usually music nearby. Sometimes it is a song somebody introduced me to years ago. Sometimes it is something entirely new. Either way, it reminds me that not everything valuable has to last forever to matter.

For a long time I viewed endings as failures. I think many of us do. We are taught to measure relationships by whether they lasted rather than by what they gave us. As I have grown older, I have come to see things differently.

One of the themes I have explored in previous blogs is the importance of making peace with our past. Not romanticising it and not pretending painful things were acceptable, but also not carrying bitterness. Simply taking what was good, learning from what was not and moving forward.

What began as an observation about relationships gradually became a philosophy for living.

We do not become wiser by rejecting our past. We become wiser by integrating it.

We carry forward the lessons, the memories, the friendships, the music and the experiences that helped shape us. We leave behind what no longer serves us, but we do not need to erase entire chapters simply because they ended.

When I look back now, I do not see failed relationships. I see people who taught me something. Some taught me courage. Some taught me boundaries. Some taught me what love looks like and others taught me what it does not. Many introduced me to music that still forms part of my life today.

Perhaps maturity is understanding that gratitude and loss can exist together. I can be thankful for what someone gave me without wishing they were still beside me. I can cherish a memory without wanting to return to it. I can appreciate what a chapter contributed to my life while accepting that it has ended.

When I look back on my life, I do not see a collection of mistakes, failed relationships or roads not taken. I see a soundtrack.

Every chapter added something to it. Every person contributed a note, a verse or a melody. Some songs were joyful, others painful, but together they created something richer than any one song could have achieved on its own.

Music has been the one companion that never left. It was there when I was a little girl trying to escape the noise of home. It was there when I crossed continents and built a new life. It was there through friendship, love, loss, hope and reinvention.

A song can transport you across decades in a matter of seconds. One melody and suddenly you are twelve years old again, standing in a school corridor with a borrowed Sony CD player, hearing the Backstreet Boys for the first time and feeling every cell in your body come alive.

And perhaps that is the real gift of music. It reminds us that while life moves relentlessly forward, nothing that truly shaped us is ever completely lost.

We carry it with us. A lesson, a memory, a dance, a friendship, a piece of ourselves.

We take the best of what came before and use it to build something better. Not because the past was perfect, but because it helped make us who we are.

The soundtrack continues. New people arrive. New songs appear. New chapters begin. Some will stay longer than others. Some will leave behind only a melody, a memory or a lesson.

And that is enough.

Because life, much like music, was never meant to be measured by its endings.

It is measured by what remains long after the song is over.