From musicals and movies, I’m told the best place to sing is the shower. Problematically, I’m too busy Breaking Bad with my multi-step hair care process in the shower to really have time to hum a melody. With the shower unequivocally off the table as a place to sing, I’ve always leaned heavily toward singing in the car. When I first started student teaching, I spent a lot of time in my car driving to the high school I was placed at and back to grad school where I had night classes four days a week. I can still tell you what songs were popular that year: One Republic’s “Apologize,” Colbie Caillat’s “Bubbly,” Estelle ft. Kanye West’s “American Boy,” Britney Spears’ “Womanizer.” I didn’t even need to look up who sang any of these songs despite not hearing from several of them in a few years. I used to try to guess if my day would be good or bad based on the songs that I heard during my drive. Now, I plug my phone into my car to assure that I’m giving every day the opportunity to be good.
More recently, I realized that going to the gym was a necessary evil. If I was paying for a very bougie gym membership for outdoor lap lanes, I had to use the gym membership. In general, gym equipment scares me since I don’t know how to use most of it, and the people who go to gyms scare me because they tend to be serious about fitness. Up until the past few years, I did not care about working out in the slightest. My dad had a whole comedy spiel about me looking far more athletic and into sports than I actually was. He wasn’t wrong. Even now, if it wasn’t for my pesky blood sugar, I could get away without exercising, so I feel fraudulent when I enter a place full of people who love to work out and have been doing it diligently for years. Becoming a member of a bougie gym did not help my imposter syndrome. My fellow gym goers wore matching yoga or fitness sets, always seemed to shine with sweat, and carried water bottles with some impeccably placed motivational quotations. This rare species also had hair in ponytails that never seemed on the brink of collapsing or needing to be fixed as my ponytails do within minutes.
Initially, it just so happened by absolute “coincidence” that the song I wanted to hear would come on my shuffle just as I was ready to get out of the car and go to the gym. When a good song comes on, you have to listen to it, right? It didn’t hurt that it gave me a few more minutes away from the gym. I don’t know if my ability to retain lyrics comes my Lit degree and being able to predict what should follow, all of the rote memorization I did over the course of my education, or that I absolutely refused to count notes during my years of piano lessons when I could just sing the song in my head, but I can memorize the majority of a song’s lyrics within hearing it once or twice.
The first time I recorded myself singing in the car, I did it as a joke and sent into a friend. In general, I don’t sing in front of my people because I don’t want to subject them to my voice with a few notable exceptions. For instance, I lost a bet once and got the joy of singing Sisqo’s “Thong Song” which had surprisingly more words than I thought. I know I can’t sing. Why put the audience through the assault on their ears? Why put me through the embarrassment of doing something I’m objectively bad at publicly?
One of the few perks of being in my 30s is that I truly do not care what anyone thinks of me, my singing, or other shortcomings on my behalf. I don’t post every song I sing in the car to Instagram nor do I take a video of me singing at all times, just enough to remind me how much more confident I am now as a person. I assure you my singing hasn’t gotten better. I just care significantly less about what people think of it because it makes me happy. And in the 90s, Sheryl Crow sang, “It It makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.”
Level of Happiness Sing in the Car Brings Me: 9/10
Cost: Zero