When I was 15, I spent many days without talking. Except for maybe on Wednesdays and every other weekend, because I was still under 16 and custody rules forced to me be around my douchebag father and we’d scream at each other at the top our lungs until I ran away or jumped out of the passenger seat of his flashy, 6-CD-playing, post-divorce, self-inflicted-mid-life-crisis Corolla—with a spoiler.

I grew up in the humble, Midwestern Twin Cities in the thick of Saint Paul’s perfect private Catholic school system, where the most scandalous parts of your day was empathizing with the criminal “Desperate Housewives” characters with a glass of wine before bed. Everyone was white, believed in Jesus, hosted Boy Scouts. Fourth of July’s were spent at your cabin; you fought to get a spot on the best country club waiting list; and your husband didn’t actually bang the hot new math teacher behind your back. Try as they might’ve, the Ornberg family—complete with a verbally abusive father, broke irresponsible mother and retarded son—weren’t so good at fitting into the expected perfect-family façade.

On top of dealing with my dad’s unfaithful antics creating a stir among the neighborhood’s Sunday afternoon brunch conversations, I was exiled from my volleyball team, fell in love with a gay man, was cast as an understudy or ensemble character in a third of the plays I auditioned for—the rest I didn’t even make the cut—and sprained my ankle publicly. Twice. And this was just the beginning of my sophomore year. The rest of my time in high school I spent lurking in the background, ditching dances and football games out of angst and maybe a smidge of insecurity.

My passion for writing, music and drawing have always been more important to me than my social stature, because any Holden Caulfield character or Paramore song was more comforting and relatable than my vicious UGG-toting peers. I found great solace in the contents of my 16GB hot pink iPod mini I blackmailed my dad into buying me. I spent hours on MySpace discovering new artists that moved and inspired me, from Weezer to Wu-Tang to the Wombats. Some of this music served as simply my shower sing-alongs, while others became my safety net; specifically the angsty alternative-pop album “Move Along” by the All-American Rejects, daring, twee Brit-pop tunes of “Made of Bricks” by Kate Nash and aggressive mindfuck hip-hop album “God Loves Ugly” by Atmosphere played on repeat for months at a time, shaping my high school years moreso than the cliques that defined the lunch tables or Christian nuns who enforced the uniform codes.

Whenever I revisit some of these albums, I am instantly brought back in the mindset of the adolescent introverted Emily, reopening some of the scars left behind from my exhausting life as an eccentricly lame Catholic school girl.

Before he was Nativity of Our Lord’s public enemy No. 1, my dad was the hip father who drove a Herbie-replica BMW and hung out with Bono every now and then. He was the school’s very own big-shot record-company dude who almost got P-Diddy fired, spent a year and five of her MTV reality episodes with Ashlee Simpson (until the SNL incident). He spent 3 weeks out of every month living in various hotel rooms, but he worked for the largest major label in the country and was the first person to get Lady Gaga on Top 40 radio. He was cool, and he was proud of it.

Being his daughter, pop music was cherished in our household. Whenever he wasn’t out of town at various meet-and-greets or radio stations across the country, he often organized my tween birthday parties with an A*Teens backstage -hangout hour or front-row Maroon 5 tickets. I loved pop music. Not just the sound, all that it represented—sugary melodies, beautiful popstars and just the right amount innocence. J-14 magazine posters of my dad’s coworkers hung next to their autographs and drumsticks he collected for me during the months he spent away on tour.

When my mom decoded his altered MapQuests and hotel room reservation records and it was discovered that during most of those months away he was living a second life with his girlfriend and her kids in Memphis, Tenn., I was fucking furious. Unlike my older sister who was afraid to talk back to my dad’s family-ruining psycho abusiveness, I loved to get under his skin. I loved to tear him down from his high horse he paraded around on. I’d snoop his mail, read his texts and called him out in the middle of Target, and he’d scream back.

Because most of my basic peers didn’t really understand how to compute a fucked up family situation, I found music that had a little sharper edge to it to match my aggressive pain. I then came across the All-American Rejects album “Move Along.” Their wiry, restless rock album carried the familiar catchy pop hooks that I loved, but they were definitely daringly alternative—they proudly labeled themselves as rejects, for fucks sake. And I couldn’t be peeled away from the boisterous album; four sexy mop-head in skinny jeans harmonized in that recognizably emo, whiny yelp above ear-blasting fuzzed electric guitars and loud, obnoxious drum kicks. My friends and I instantly became stalker-fangirls of the group—before they were mainstream, of course—because their thundering electric-punk was everything our moms hated and conformist classmates were afraid of, and we played it on full volume.

My absolute favorite off the album was “I’m Waiting,” because its iconoclastic approach of painting dark emo-alternative stokes over traditional pop hooks matched my desire to purposefully fuck with everything traditional. It begins with two short, lurid power chords echoing back and forth into a full rumble of double-time ax strumming. The frontman—ex-Gap model Tyson Ritter—whimpers one plunky note at a time in a bubbly, sugar-coated pop melody, which if you turn down some of the reverb could’ve easily been an Avril Lavigne B-side. Not only was it a fun tune to sing along to, but the steel-blown power chords could really impale out of those tiny iPod earbuds, numbing my ears to the point where I was forcibly taken out of my shitty reality and into a bed of thick, dangerous music.

Although the rest of the pop-punk album is god-awfully cheesy, it served as the soundtrack to my nightly ritual of drawing or writing locked away in my room trying to shove away my emotions. “Straightjacket Feeling” was the album’s only acoustic ballad, and as the title suggests, it was almost sarcastically emo. But my dorky, misfit 15-year-old self shook every time the poignantly honest lyrics hit my ears: “Etched with marks but I can deal, you’re the problem and you can’t feel/ Try this on straightjacket feel-in’, so maybe I wont be alooone/ Take back now my life your steal-in/ Yesterday was hell, but today I’m fine, without you/ Runaway this time, without you/ and all I ever thought you’d be, that face is staring holes in me again.” Hearing the vivid, jarring chords paired with lyrics that validated my authentic pissed-off thoughts that lingered in the back of my mind was a monumental moment in my adolescence.  To use this powerful, angsty, misfit-championing punk album in place of a child counselor or unwelcome aunt helped console the anger and hurt left behind from my broken family. My anger and depression bottled up, and “Move Along” could immediately diffuse it.

As I grew older and my punk friends transferred to public school, my interests shifted to maintain my image as ‘that cool artistic chick. ‘A bad injury exiled me from returning to my volleyball team, so I started wearing converse and and began my obsession with acting, writing and learning guitar, piano and ukulele simultaneously. I was the all-around fearless second-born, but even though I waned to be different, it pained me to be alone. That was when I came across Kate Nash’s “Merry Happy.” Recorded on her Mac, 4/4 staccato piano chords serve as the punchy tapping beat behind her fluttering British accent that sings: “Watching me like you’ve never watched no one, don’t tell me that you didn’t try and check out my bum/ ‘cuz I know that you did, ‘cuz your friend told me that you liked it.”  Nash, a coy British girl who wears cute dresses, was unable to follow her dream at acting school because of a similar ankle injury, and turned to singing her beautiful bedroom-written poems about being a clumsy 20-something, fitting in and the troubles of getting over “Dickheads” instead. This album, full of Nash’s signature strength, vulnerability and cleverness and atypical songwriting snuck into my head and served as the supportive backbone to my search of my own artistic individuality and self-confidence.

I listened to “Made of Bricks” every day, savoring every clever line and juicy piano chord pretending someday, as soon as I graduated, I’d move to the U.K. where I thought my artistic ventures could only be appreciated. Through her bitter humor and symbolic short stories, Nash comes across as the girl next door with her head in the clouds, a dreamer who sees the world in an honest frame of mind. Her tales about going for the wrong guy (among other problems faced by a 20-year-old woman) are universal, even if she's singing about trainers, tarts and discos. On the thumping “Shit Song,” above a glossy ‘60s girl group ditty, she sings, “Darlin’ don’t give me shit, cuz I know that you’re full of it.” On the jaunty “Foundations,” she taunts her man with the line, “Yeah, I'd rather be with your friends mate, because they're all much fitter.” And she shows her affection to a crush on the adorable “Birds” chorus: “Birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head/ and they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel so scared/ But when you look at them, and you see that they're beautiful/ That's how I feel about you.” The way she translated her emotions through witty, daringly simple writing inspired me to express myself, not conforming to what everyone else was doing.

But I mainly fell in love with “Made of Bricks” because “Nicest Thing” voiced the deepest pains of my teenage years. The song’s cascading strings are gorgeous, and her lyrics are simple, poignant and honest beyond belief. The plucking of an acoustic bass reverberates and haunts into a meteoric rise—the opening ten seconds was enough to haunt a genuine ache. “I wish I was your favorite girl/ I wish you thought I was the reason you are in the world/ I wish my smile was your favorite kind of smile/ I wish the way that I dressed was your favorite kind of style/ I wish you couldn't figure me out but you'd always wanna know what I was about/ Basically, I wish that you loved me/ I wish that you needed me/ I wish that you knew when I said two sugars, actually I meant three/ I wish that without me your heart would break/ Yeah, I wish that without me you'd be spending the rest of your nights awake.” As simple as they were, the words pierced my gut. Images flooded my brain as I realized that I truly had no one who thought I was the reason they were in the world. Somehow I could listen to that song three times every night and it never lost its heavy gravity.  Nash could speak the depths of my misunderstood teenage years, which validated my lonely thoughts and kept me from getting in my own path.

As I grew older, I knew I wanted to pursue my dream of writing. Words were everything to me. I loved learning about their prefixes, suffixes and Latin roots. I never felt like I was fully expressing myself until I could tirelessly type my true thoughts and emotions on a keyboard. This undying love for words is what made me fall in love with an emcee named Slug.

The kingpin of Minneapolis hip-hop, Slug set the standards for Midwestern underground rap. Like Nash, I loved how he wrote bleak honesty tinged with humor, but his lyrics were far more advanced. Although it wasn’t acceptable for a white, middle-class Midwestern girl to become a hip-hop fan, there was something about Slug that I related to. I was struck by his bouncy piano-driven track “You,” which he dedicated to his father. “A whole house full of dreams and steps/ I think you'd be impressed with the pieces I kept/ You disappeared but the history is still here/ That’s why I try not to cry over spilt beer/ I can't even get mad that you're gone, leavin' me was probably the best thing you ever taught me/ I'm sorry, it's official, I was a fist-full, I didn't keep it simple/ Chip on the shoulder, anger in my veins, had so much hatred, now it brings me shame/ Never thought about the world without you and I promise that I'll never say another bad word about you/ I thought I saw you yesterday, but I knew it wasn't you, 'cause you passed away, dad.”

Listening to Slug own up to his mistakes in his rocky relationship with his father was eye-opening, but the way he posed his regretful past in a way that not only challenged hip-hop’s standards but stood alone as beautiful prose changed the way I listened to hip-hop.

Ultimately, without constantly shoving these albums in my ear during the years that shaped me the most, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. It might’ve taken years of depression, but having that time to let myself sink deep into the sounds of Tyson Ritter, Kate Nash or Sean Daley allowed me to get to know these artists to the point of memorizing every word that came out of their mouth, every chord they played on the piano, allowing me to have someone else to look up to outside of my fucked up family and monochromatic Minnesotan community.