Diary On Repeat

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The secret diary you didn’t know you were keeping.

Not the one with dates and paragraphs. The one that sits quietly in the background, giving you away.

It knows when you’re flat, when you’re fine, when you’re trying to hold it together. It sits in your pocket or your car, pretending to be nothing special, and somehow it always knows what kind of day you’re having before you’ve admitted it to yourself.

It cheers you up, lets you sulk, keeps you company when you’re driving home in the dark with the dash lights low and the volume higher than is strictly reasonable.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been writing in it for years without realising.

In the car.


Out with your friends.


At work. On the sofa.


Headphones in at the supermarket.


Head on the pillow, staring at the ceiling at 1:47am.

Here’s how you find mine: my Liked Songs.

On paper, it’s nothing. Just every track I’ve ever tapped a little heart on. A long, slightly chaotic list that would give a proper music critic a migraine.

In reality, it’s a full history of me.


An unedited run of school corridors, bad haircuts, late buses, first cars, breakups, stupid nights out, quiet Sundays and a few flights I still think about.

I can scroll it like a timeline:


There’s the song that makes me smell Lynx Africa and school canteen chips.


There’s the one that sounds like revising for exams I didn’t really revise for.


There’s the track that will always feel like the first time I reversed into a parking space without messing it up.

It starts the way most things do:

“Remember this one?”


“This was a classic.”


“What was that song we used to scream in the car?”

You add them. Easy. You’re just gathering the ones you don’t want to lose.

Then more creep in.

A song that sounds like standing at a cold bus stop before school.


A song from learning to drive, grinding the same route round town until it felt less terrifying.


A song from your first job sweeping a shop floor, watching the clock, pretending you didn’t care what the manager thought.


A song that instantly drops you back into college, cheap vodka, and someone you thought you’d never get over.

You don’t write any of that down. You just tap the heart. One tiny click, and the moment’s filed.

And then the heavier cluster.

The tracks you hammered when your chest hurt and you didn’t have language for it yet.


The ones you played on repeat when someone left, or when someone didn’t make it.


The ones that kept you upright on the drive home when you were pretending you were “fine”, windows fogged, jaw clenched, volume doing the crying for you.

The late-night French songs that sound like pacing around the kitchen with the lights off, not understanding half the lyrics but recognising the ache. The tracks where the first three seconds are enough to make your throat go tight because they belong to one particular winter, one particular argument, one particular goodbye.

We almost never delete them.

We’ll skip them now, maybe. Thumb down, quick, before the first line lands.


But we don’t take them off the list.

They just move further down, swallowed by newer noise, still wired to whoever or whatever they belonged to. Like old birthday cards stuffed in a drawer: technically hidden, practically radioactive.

Not every song is a confession, though. Some are tools.

The aggressive, relentless rap that shows up all over my history? That mostly lives on the gym floor. That’s not heartbreak, that’s deadlifts. Pre-set fuel. It belongs to chalk, plates and bad lighting more than to any person.

There are tracks that only exist for night drives, songs that exist purely to drown out a bad day at work, songs for scrubbing the kitchen, songs for walking through departures pretending I’ve got somewhere important to be.

The diary sits more in what I choose when there’s no barbell in sight, no task to power through.


When there’s nothing to do except be alone with my own head and whatever I quietly queue up next.

Every so often, one track drifts out of the “tool” pile and becomes something else.

There’s a Vance Joy song quietly reserved for one person in particular. One of those almost-stories where life and timing never quite lined up: long shifts, family matters, a dog I’d only met through photos, a coffee we kept nearly arranging and never quite managed.

I haven’t closed the book on it, so I don’t play that song often. Not because it hurts, but because some things feel better left on the windowsill for now — not promised, not pushed, just an honest little “maybe one day” if the world ever calms down.

It sits there like a saved draft I’m not ready to send. Knowing it’s there is its own kind of comfort.

A little while back I pulled a slice of my own listening history: just over 4,000 plays in roughly a month.

No context, no captions, just titles and counts.

It was stupidly clear.

A spine of French heartbreak and overthinking.


A streak of rappers built for lifting.


The same handful of tracks hammered again and again like I was trying to wear a groove in my own brain.

I could see where my head dipped, where I got stubborn, and where I was just driving and letting things be.

The week I couldn’t sleep? Same three songs on loop after midnight.


The day I finally made a decision I’d been dodging? Sudden left turn into louder, braver stuff on the drive home.

No dramatic conclusions, just proof: even when I think I’m not saying anything, the patterns are talking.

Scroll through my Liked Songs and you can see where things cracked and where they stitched back together:

A run of sad, then louder, then calmer.


A block of nostalgia, then a sharp left into something braver.


Little pockets of songs that clearly belonged to one person, one job, one version of me I’m not anymore.

The brief era where I was clearly trying to be more upbeat, throwing in a bit of sunnier pop.


The phase that looks, from the outside, like I fell in love with a language — when actually I was just looking for a voice that matched the shape of my thoughts that month.

No captions. No explanations. Just a trail.

That’s why I think this kind of playlist is the only honest diary most of us keep.

Photos are filtered. Posts are edited. Stories disappear. Even the “vulnerable” stuff online ends up half-performed, cleaned up, cropped.

But you don’t fake playing the same track 40 times in a week. You don’t keep skipping the same intro for three years by accident.

You don’t have to share it.


You don’t have to turn it into a project, or a playlist with a clever title, or anything designed for other people.

But next time you find yourself hammering one song every day, or quietly avoiding one you used to love, notice it.

That’s an entry.


A line you didn’t write down, but definitely felt.

And if the loop finally eases and something inside settles — if you realise you can hear that old song again without bracing, or you notice your thumb stopped hovering over the skip button — that’s the Quiet Click.