I went alone to see a DJ last Saturday night. This isn’t where I thought I would be in my mid-thirties. In my adolescence and early adulthood, my go to music was either vintage pop or navel-gazing indie. Modern dance music and EDM for the most part wasn’t really on my radar.

I did have a friend a couple of cities over who got invested in the scene when we were in our mid-20s. He invited me to join him for an EDM festival, which I did and enjoyed mostly as a life experience. But the friend I had was toxic to the core and we had an exhausting push pull dynamic together. We went to the festival twice, the first of which was mostly a positive experience. But in hindsight it was still laced with weirdness. For example, after the first day of the festival we met up with a group of his friends at a club. His friends couldn’t have been nicer and more welcoming and in hindsight I wish I would have gotten their numbers and contact info away from my ex-friend’s gaze when I had had the chance. However, I did not have the foresight to do so, and I was sucked into my friend’s weird power games. He would push me to interact with his friends, then push me away to talk to them privately, keeping me at arm’s length. It was confusing and frustrating and painful to me, but I was socially naïve and didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why his actions hurt me.

The second time we went to the festival was even messier. He ran away from me, got lost and drunk and was wandering around in just his underwear. When I finally found him, he laughed at and mocked my concern. A couple of times he snapped at me publicly, lashing out and screaming at me in a grocery store when I tried to assert my preferences over what wine we were buying.

In the first year of my thirties, we had our last fight and stopped speaking to each other. The details of the fight are fuzzy to me now. He didn’t leave peacefully. In his wake he left me with a broken laptop and a smashed in front door to my apartment. He also destroyed all of the correspondence we had had over the years that he had access to.

The relationship with this friend was like a stab in the gut. It hurt coming into my life, and I emotionally bled out for a bit when it left my life.

Though I had had fun at the festivals in my youth, they were tainted by these darker memories. Because of this, I think I just assumed that I would never be at an event like that again. But life in all its weirdness had other plans and somehow a ticket to a famous DJ’s show came into my inbox. I secured the tickets last minute so I decided to just go alone. If I was uncomfortable, I figured I could just bounce.

But far from being uncomfortable, I had the best time. I met another solo concert-goer before the show. She was a young, enthusiastic fan who complimented my “vibe”. When we got to the stage, she grabbed my hand and ushered me through the crowd to the front. Standing there, on a 90-degree day outdoors, crammed in with friendly strangers, I felt warm, at peace and accepted. It was something that my friend never made me feel and it was healing.