I’ve been obsessed with music for as long as I can remember. As soon as I got my first phone—which, fun fact, I won from solving a Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper (yes, really)—I started building a music library like it was my life’s mission. But even before that, I would sit by my dad’s old stereo, flipping through his cassette collection and listening to Led Zeppelin, Whitesnake, and The Alan Parsons Project, probably way too young to understand what any of the lyrics meant but feeling very cool nonetheless.

Growing up, I was a pretty solitary kid, the kind who could spend hours lost in his own world. And in that world, music was always playing. Whether it was the radio in the background or a cassette tape on loop, there was never silence. I remember building Legos for what felt like entire weekends, all while pop music played softly from the radio—probably some early 2000s bangers that I’d later pretend I never liked.

One of my strongest quirks, which I later realized is a classic ADHD trait, is getting a song stuck in my head—sometimes just a tiny fragment of a melody, looping endlessly, refusing to let me live in peace until I identified it. This led to some borderline obsessive detective work. I’d spend hours (sometimes even days) scouring the internet, listening to random songs, desperately trying to track down that one melody playing in my brain.

One time, it was just a few piano notes echoing in my head, and I had to find out where they were from. I searched. I scrolled. I listened to a ridiculous number of songs before finally—finally—realizing it was the opening keys from Rihanna’s We Found Love. The moment of discovery? Pure euphoria. I can’t explain it, but my brain just works better with music. It’s like everything else—thoughts, emotions, even focus—aligns when there’s a rhythm to follow.

It’s not just entertainment; it’s like a mental operating system upgrade.