Growing up, music was always around me. It played in the car on the way to school, in the background of family parties and in the soundtracks of my favorite shows. Ambient music played throughout my childhood, but it happened to me — not because of me.

I would like songs, replay them for a week, and then forget them. Time passed without much documentation of my music taste beyond an Instagram post or a fleeting inside joke. I was unarchived.

That changed when I started collecting music. Not just listening, building playlists with intention: titling them carefully, choosing cover images, obsessing over sequencing. What began as a hobby became an effort to deliberately curate a version of myself.

At first, it felt excessive. Then, someone told me they admired my passion for music. I remember feeling startled. Passion felt like a word reserved for other people — people with obvious talents and visible ambitions. To have someone identify that in me through something as simple as playlists made it real. After that, I leaned in.

Out of millions of songs, I choose these ones. It isn’t digital clutter — it’s archival instinct. This feeling, for this moment. Each playlist holds a version of me that no longer exists because I keep growing.

There’s a playlist from when I first met Arts & Entertainment editor Aden Max Juarez after he and I curated the music at a backyard party. 

I asked him to share some of what he’d been playing, and he showed me “Coming Home Song” by Sammy Rae & The Friends. I realized music could feel like both an introduction and an invitation.

However, not every playlist marks a beginning. There’s a shared playlist with friends I no longer speak to. It hasn’t been updated in years. The last added track sits there like a timestamp on a friendship that quietly dissolved. I’ve never deleted it. It feels like erasing evidence that we once existed in the same emotional space. 

There’s a studying playlist I built the night Associate Managing editor Julia Ho spontaneously asked me to go study with her at a cafe. On the surface, it was productivity music. In reality, it was a way to casually say, “I’m listening to ‘Blue’ by Billie Eilish.” 

I’ve always gravitated toward Eilish’s music because her lyrics gave shape to feelings I couldn’t articulate, which made it the perfect conversation starter.

Spanish music has always been my most direct access to emotion, especially love. “Nunca Es Suficiente” by Natalia Lafourcade is featured in more than one of my playlists. “Eres Tú” by Carla Morrison — the song my aunt danced to at her wedding and the first wedding I ever attended — lives in a playlist labeled something embarrassingly earnest. Hearing it that day shifted something in me — I didn’t just want to observe love anymore; I wanted to participate in it.

There’s another playlist for a friend I couldn’t yet understand that I loved. At the time, I thought I was just curating “good songs.” In retrospect, the tenderness is obvious. The longing is obvious. The playlists knew before I did.

If someone wanted to study my growth, they wouldn’t need interviews. They would just need access to my personal Library of Alexandria — also known as Spotify. Playlists function as emotional archives. They preserve not only what I was listening to, but who I was trying to be: someone in love, someone grieving, someone impressive, someone understood. 

Existentialist philosophy argues that we create ourselves through our choices. Identity is not discovered; it is constructed. If that’s true, then my playlists are some of my earliest deliberate constructions.

I’ve come to accept a difficult truth: I will never fully know who I am. The depth of my existence exceeds the limits of my own understanding. I can’t step outside myself and see the whole shape of my life. Memory distorts. Self-perception shifts. Even passion evolves. 

But playlists externalize fragments of me. They are pieces of identity I’ve set outside myself, where they can’t be entirely rewritten by nostalgia or regret.

Someday, I’ll press shuffle on my high school graduation playlist and meet a younger version of myself — not abstractly, but sonically. I’ll hear the optimism, the fear, the bravado. I’ll scroll to the playlist I made to impress someone and smile at the effort. I’ll revisit the one dedicated to a love I didn’t yet understand and recognize how far I’ve come. 

They feel like proof — proof that I was paying attention, that something moved me enough to preserve it. And if identity is built through choice, then each playlist becomes a quiet declaration that this feeling mattered.

Collecting music didn’t make me love music more. It made me aware of how deeply I already did. More importantly, it made me an active participant in my own becoming. 

“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment, commenting on the music most important to them. Andrew Cardenas is DEIA director and Talkin’ Troy editor at the Daily Trojan.