Music my Saviour; or An album that got me through a hard time

This is my entry into this month's Bear Blog Carnival, which I am hosting! Go check out the main post to read submissions from others. When I had just turned 19, I moved to Tokyo to begin my year of study abroad. Not two months before then, I had just become a parent. My life was fundamentally changed in a way that I now realise I was not at all equipped to handle. In the midst of a long mental health crisis that had begun earlier that year, I had concluded that the best thing for my baby's future was to continue with University education in the hopes that it would lead to a better job, providing a better future. That decision to move to the other side of the planet before she was even two months old still sometimes haunts me. I arrived in Tokyo jet-lagged but with a reasonable grasp on the language thanks to six years of study, first in high school, and then at University. I was proficient in reading and writing, but my ability to listen and produce the language verbally were…