I love concerts. Like, really really love them. I love the crisp tickets that arrive in neat brown packages. I love the countdown app on my phone that ticks down the days slowly, steadily, until a uniform row of plump zeros settles firmly into place like little soldiers reporting for duty. I love the ride to the venue, blasting an artist’s album on repeat and the chills of knowing, soon, there will be no speaker system to interfere with the crash and pulse of the music. I love the wait in line, the complete lack of personal space, the mob mentality of “we love the same artist and now we’re all here together to forget about regular life and dance like, before, we have only danced in the cozy solitude of our own bedrooms.” There’s nothing like it.

I guess that’s where the addiction came from. My friends have, on multiple occasions, staged “interventions” to stop me from buying concert tickets. The fact is, though, I will continue to pull out a laptop in the middle of class to nab pre-sale tickets, and I don’t regret shelling out (sometimes ridiculous) amounts of money to lock down amazing seats. The way I see it, the memories I make and people I meet are things that I could never attempt to put a price tag on. So ask me if I would buy $500 front row One Direction tickets again (usually accompanied by a panicky “Is this seriously an event that happened in real life…” facial expression), and my answer is a resounding yes every single time.

No one really questions a love of pizza or Netflix, which are also, for the record, costly habits. (I once spent upwards of $200 on pizza during a 10-day summer program at Yale. Domino’s is just that good, and I realize now that this lack of self control makes me concerned for my rapidly approaching collegiate lifestyle.) Why then is a love of concerts so questionable? Some doubters have never been to one. (That sentence makes me cry.) Others simply don’t understand the appeal of being smushed into a smallish room, unable to sit for hours on end, subject to heat exhaustion and dehydration, just to see some artist perform that they could listen to over the radio or watch online, all from the cushy comforts of home.

I don’t really remember when it all started. I went to several concerts when I was much younger, mostly for various Christian artists, that were more relaxed, family events. Before I knew that one day I’d be “that girl who goes to every single concert,” I was the kid who would refuse to sit down, even when we were seated way in the back and I hadn’t yet discovered the magical insanity of The Pit.

Concert addiction can’t be genetic; my brother panics in crowds (even though he’s 6’4″ and has the advantage of actually being able to see/breathe freely) and my mom, the sole time I convinced her to come to a concert with me, was snoring in her seat before the main act (Lenny freakin’ Kravitz, by the way) came onstage. How she slept through that much electric guitar is still a mystery to me. But somewhere along the way, a snowball effect started. I would hear about an exciting concert, search for tickets, and then that cursed little notification would pop up. “Check out other concerts in your area!” And so it began.