Joni Mitchell taught me how to fall in love.

Or rather, Joni Mitchell taught me what love might be like. I discovered the Canadian songstress the summer I turned 16 in a small Cape Cod movie theater that was playing "The Kids Are All Right." In the film, Annette Bening's character, Nic, exclaims over dinner that Blue is her favorite Mitchell album.

"Listen," she explains to her dinner companions, "I spent half of high school in my room crying to that album. That record, it kills me."

In the days that followed, I took it upon myself to listen to Blue, and it killed me, too. I adored it instantly. To me, Mitchell's songs weren't songs so much as poems set to music. As I listened and relistened, I was struck by the soprano voice that trilled along each track with birdlike ease, the voice that belonged to the same woman who wrote the verses that rattled around in my head for days at a time.

In "A Case of You," Mitchell sings, "Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine/ You taste so bitter and so sweet/ Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling/ And I would still be on my feet."

That metaphor - a lover as holy wine, love as bittersweet - might be a familiar one, but it stunned me when I, never having been in love, never having even come close, first heard it at 16.

It's funny, because according to academics, it was Sappho herself - a favorite female writer of mine and one of the greatest lyric poets of the Western canon - who first described love as bittersweet. In one of the fragments that remains of her work, she writes, "Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me/ sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up"

Sappho is a lyricist in the truest sense of the word: Her poems are lyric because they were written to be accompanied by a lyre. Today, most songs and poems are written in the lyric voice. They use pronouns such as "I," "me" and "my" or else are written from a place of personal, individual experience.

Today, we take the the lyric "I" for granted, but Sappho was its forebear, and contemporary female writers and musicians continue the lyric work that she began 2,600 years ago. Mitchell's songs, like Sappho's poems, record life's most sacred - and most painful - emotional terrain. Together, their words provided me with an emotional education - a survey of love, of longing and of loss.

As it turns out, I had more in common with Sappho than I realized. I expected that I would eventually fall in love, and years later, I did - only, I fell in love with a woman. I fell in love with a woman, and the world bloomed in technicolor.

Before I knew I was gay, love was something that happened to other people. I was an emotional voyeur, grasping at genuine feeling through Mitchell's songs and Sappho's verse. After I fell in love, the words were no more potent than before - they just made a different sort of sense. It was as if I could always hear what they said, but now, I could feel what they meant.

It wasn't always easy. At first, the mere act of acknowledging, of coming to apprehend my own love terrified me. Women - especially queer women, women of color and women who are otherwise marginalized - have always been forced to do a sort of emotional stifling. We must maintain a certain armor against the outside world or else be penalized for revealing the depth of our love or our hurt. We cannot speak to the depths of our hearts.

Leslie Jamison explores this idea in her essay "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain." There, Jamison writes of "post-wounded" women, the women who are "wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don't cry too loud, don't play victim, don't act the old role all over again."

But for me, Mitchell's power, and the power of female artists like her, is just that: She acts the old role - Sappho's role - all over again, and the result is revolutionary.

There is still something radical about women voicing their pain in a society that first wounds them and then teaches them to be ashamed of that wound. There is still something radical about queer women celebrating their love in a world that works to suppress it. In a world that punishes me first for being a woman and next for loving other women, emotional honesty is a radical act, and emotionally honest art is a means of survival.

In "Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell," queer poet Marty McConnell writes, "and here you stand .../ heart leaking something so strong/ they can smell it in the street."

It's been five years since the summer I found Joni Mitchell, and I've chosen to live with my heart leaking, my hurt ungirded. I live honestly. Love is finally a lyric I can sing.

It is so sweet.

"Off the Beat" columns are written by Daily Cal staff members until the fall opinion writers have been selected. Contact the Opinion Desk at opinion@dailycal.org and follow us on Twitter at @dailycalopinion.