While the title is a half fib — perhaps daringly a metaphor for how everyone views the glass as either half full or half empty — the sentiment remains true. The title is about me! That’s me! I spontaneously bought a ticket from a friend for the Maggie Rogers concert in San Francisco last minute, allowing a gust of whim to purchase the ticket without any second thought. The half-fib, if you’re still wondering, is that I did listen to her album, “Surrender,” for the very first time a week before, but other than that, her music was relatively unfamiliar to me. 

At the beginning of the semester, I told myself that I would do more things for my own benefit and well-being. The mere act of pitching this piece was my way of holding myself accountable for this resolution. 

So, at 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday night, my Sunday scaries included standing amid a hoard of people, feeling like I was melting and mixing in a batter of luminescent blue hues and millennials with their comically large seltzer cans. It’s obvious to everyone who knows me that this is a bit of a shift from my normal Sunday night laying in my bed, scrolling mindlessly through my feed as if nothing in the world exists beyond this blue screen. Instead, I was blessed with feeling the most alive I had felt in a while, despite my legs going numb from the standing still and the inconvenience of crowd movement surrounding me. 

I walked into the venue head-so-empty that it could’ve been in the clouds and I just existed listening to Maggie Rogers’s angelic voice harmonizing not only with the music, but the lovely aura she had created within. The anonymity of the crowd was something I feel as though my soul had been craving in being able to sing along (to preface this, I only knew the lyrics to like three songs if I have to be honest — I’m awful at knowing the lyrics to songs) and scream and dance without the weight of others’ perceptions on my shoulders. 

My favorite song she sang was “I’ve Got a Friend,” particularly because I was also there with my best friend who had sent me the song months before and demanded that it would be our song. That’s as sentimental as I will choose to be about that, but let’s just say that my heart felt a little bit warmer. 

So, the moral of the story is that the next time the universe throws you an opportunity, this is your sign, whatever the opportunity may be — buying concert tickets last-minute, talking to your campus crush or, honestly, doing anything for yourself and not for others. Take it from me, a girl who went to a concert for an artist she didn’t really know, that sometimes, life’s a little too short to always say “no.”