Somewhere Between Voice Notes and Survival

“I don’t know how to explain it, but I guess Taylor Swift said it best:

It’s getting dark and it’s all too quiet
And I can’t trust anything now.”

I sent Michaela a voice note one frigid, lonely evening several years ago after one of those days when it felt like the universe had been slowly, deliberately beating my spirit black and blue.

Within moments, she sent one back.

“Oh, teenage Darby has entered the chat, I see. Do you think we can get curious about what this younger part is protecting? What would help you feel resourced right now?”

This was only the beginning of her response, but it captured something essential about the way Taylor Swift’s lyricism had quietly woven itself into the fabric of our friendship. Somewhere along the way, her words became a shared language between us. A shorthand for what felt too big, too tender, or too complex to articulate on our own.

It felt like we had been handed a private vocabulary. A language that allowed us to stay curious with each other. A language that kept us connected in moments that could have easily pulled us apart. Most importantly, it gave us a way to feel authentically seen, while also feeling protected.

There have been seasons of our lives when her lyrics were not background music, but stitches holding us together. Individually and collectively.

Michaela and I met at a pivotal point in our lives. We were barely adults, yet already entrenched in habitual wretchedness, the kind that hides beneath achievement and ambition. We were drowning in a deep-seated need to be perfect, convinced that if we could just get it right enough, we might finally feel safe.

Beneath that perfectionism were relational wounds we did not yet have language for. They shaped how we interpreted everything. Silence. Affection. Disappointment. Praise. They shaped the way we saw ourselves. The way we saw each other. The way we moved through the world.

There was still so much we did not understand about life. About love. About trauma. About ourselves.

But one thing we recognized immediately was this: we both felt, and we felt deeply. And we still do.

Somewhere between voice notes, the depth of our feeling, and our desperate attempts to survive it, something began to form.

Not just friendship. Something quieter. More cellular. Something that settled into our nervous systems.

Because loneliness is not the absence of people. It is the absence of resonance. It is speaking and watching your words land flat. It is feeling everything at a volume ten and being told the appropriate setting is three. It is editing yourself mid-sentence. It is translating your grief into something palatable. It is trying to convince yourself that you are somebody worth knowing.

We had been fluent in that kind of loneliness.

The high-functioning kind. The one that performs competence. The one that earns praise for resilience while privately disintegrating. The one that shrinks so everyone else feels comfortable, while we were barely fitting into our own skin. The kind that says I’m fine and almost believes it.

And then there was this: voice notes that lasted seven minutes too long. Tangents that did not require trimming. Confessions that arrived unfiltered. The kind of depth that would silence most rooms, and instead here was met with, “I know. Me too.”

Brené Brown writes that true belonging does not require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are. What we learned in real time is that when someone recognizes you at that level, loneliness does not explode. It dissolves.

Gradually. Almost suspiciously.

The ambition and the shame braided together. The parts of us that were too intense, too analytical, too emotional, too much. We did not sand them down for each other. We studied them. We held them up to the light. We said, “That makes sense.” We nurtured them. We taught them that they belonged and that they had always been deserving of love. They simply had not yet found the right people.

That is where healing began. Not in fixing. Not in advice. Not in performance. In recognition.

To be understood in your full psychological architecture is radical. It reorganizes your nervous system. It teaches your body that depth is not danger. That intensity is not exile. That you can exist at full volume and not be abandoned.

Somewhere between voice notes and survival, we stopped bracing.

Years later, and still to this day, Taylor Swift lyrics still permeate our voice notes and text messages. We have had the privilege of watching each other learn the language of our parts, especially the ones that only dared to speak through borrowed poetry. Over time, we stopped mistaking depth for dysfunction. We began to understand it as intelligence.

Eventually, in the middle of an ordinary exchange, we realized something profound: not everyone has this.

Not everyone has someone who will pause and ask, “What is this younger part protecting?”

Not everyone has someone who can hear a lyric and understand the wound underneath it.

Not everyone has a witness who understands that sometimes the thing we say is only the doorway to the thing we mean.

Not everyone has been taught how to meet themselves with curiosity instead of criticism.

And that realization became the beginning of something bigger.

This is how our journal was born.

Long Story Short, You Survive came from the world Michaela and I had been building together for years: a world of voice notes, lyric references, parts work, reflection, curiosity, and the belief that healing does not always begin with having the perfect words. Sometimes healing begins with borrowing language until your own feels safe enough to use.

We did not create the journal because we had all the answers. We created it because we knew what it felt like to process the world through music and lyricism, and because sometimes we need an outside voice to ask better questions of our parts.

Questions that did not shame the feeling.

Questions that did not rush the process.

Questions that did not demand a neat resolution.

Questions that made space for the parts of us that had been performing, protecting, grieving, longing, surviving, and trying so hard to be good.

We wanted to make that kind of curiosity more accessible.

Not by telling people what to feel, but by helping them notice who inside of them might be speaking. Not by offering a formula for healing, but by creating a place where people could begin to listen inward with more compassion. Not by turning pain into something pretty, but by honoring the truth that sometimes what survives in us deserves language, tenderness, and room.

Because sometimes you borrow language until your own becomes safer to use.

Michaela and I have seen each other through heartbreak, reinvention, success, collapse, grief, growth, and seasons when survival itself felt like the assignment. We have loved each other’s parts through all of it. We have witnessed each other becoming more whole, not because we became less complicated, but because we stopped treating our complexity like a problem.

Somewhere between voice notes and survival, loneliness began to loosen its grip.

Not because life became easier.

But because we were no longer unseen.

And when you are no longer unseen, something in you finally exhales.

written by: Darby Pistilli, LPC