Because I need another challenge to distract me from complement my Forty-Two Things, I added one to my Bullet Journal: An annual music challenge – 52 Albums in 52 weeks. I saw this on Instagram from a user called @lazyluluplanner. It’s just a list of descriptions of albums/artists to listen to – one for each week of the year.

That’s my list. I’m going to go through it completely at random, picking one each week. I’ll listen to at least one complete album that meets that criteria. I started this week with 50s music and I listened to albums by Chuck Berry and Billie Holiday.

I love music but my devotion to finding new and interesting bands has waned over the last five years. I find myself listening to the same few records over and over. Lots of fun indie pop music, which is great but I’m in a big rut and I have no idea what the cool kids are listening to these days. So I need to get back into exploring music and listening to all sorts of stuff. This will help me with that and I think it will just be fun to listen to things outside my comfort zone, as well as some that are well in my comfort zone.

Adam decided that he’s going to participate with me. He’s using my list and whatever criterion I have picked for the week. We enjoy discussing music so this will be a fun thing for us to do together.

I figure this is also a tool in my fight against depression. Music is one of the things that makes me happy and gets me out of my head, or at least takes me to a better place in my head. (Music can also help me wallow real hard, but we’re not going to focus on that.) One of my “little-g” goals for myself at this time is to find *healthy* things that help me when I’m depressed and gather a little arsenal of tools that I can reach for when I need them.

If this looks like a fun idea to you, you should do it too! And tell me about it! Most of the prompts I used were ones I saw on the original list but probably a third of them were ones that Adam and I came up with together. Use my list or make your own. The most important thing is to listen to music and have fun.