My Anthem: Invincible

I find that some of my hardest and happiest times are unequivocally linked with a song.

I mean, every time I hear Macy Grey’s “I Try” I am immediately transported back to seventh grade when I wore brightly striped knee socks and thought it made me the coolest kid in school.

Fall Out Boy’s “Suga, We’re Goin Down” makes me think of the exciting and scary summer before college when I was free from high school, about to embark on a new life adventure in Illinois, and falling in love for the first time.

And now, I have found my anthem for this past year and a half in my life and leading into my new phase in Roanoke. No one will be surprised that it is my girl Kelly Clarkson’s song “Invincible”.

This song. When I heard it I stopped. I got shivers up and down my spine. It made me feel all the girl power in the universe. It made me cry. It made me pump my fist in the air.

I play it when I wake up. I play it before I go to bed. Sometimes I even play it at work.

It is my anthem.

I believe everyone needs an anthem when they are going through a particularly sticky time – or a particularly happy time.

• An anthem can pick you up when you are feeling particularly down.
• An anthem makes you feel like someone gets you.
• An anthem lets you be free to feel however you need to at that moment.
• An anthem lets you sing at the top of your lungs to release some of that pent-up [insert emotion you are feeling at the moment].

An anthem is also a reminder that you are amazing, you can do this, you are strong, and you will survive.

One day that anthem will just be a memory too. It will be that song that comes on many years from now and you smile, remembering that time in your life when it was hard but you survived. That’s right, you survived.

I would love to know, have you ever had an anthem for your life for a particularly happy or sad time? What was it?