I Beg You
Change the World
Change the World
You could say that I come from something of a broken home, or at least a perpetually fractured home (you can decide which is worse for yourself). My parents marriage was tumultuous, my father had substance abuse problems, my mother was consistently suicidal, they would fight, sometimes end up in jail, prison and house arrest once. But they always came back together. Ironically when my mother and father were going to get a divorce, they decided to do a MARVEL team-up just to harass me, because they decided I needed guidance when I had actually exactly met their demands. My friends were loser drug addicts. I was a slacker in school, though academically unchallenged. I wasn't lazy, I just saw no point to giving the American education system everything I had. And I never quite had the money or social status to be treated with the respect of my peers.
I wanted to kill myself so bad.
Actually let me amend that. I loved to say "I want to kill myself", but in actuality it was my fondest wish that I be murdered or killed in a tragic accident. I recognized I had the ability to do great things, even since the time I was nine years old. All the tests said I was really smart and a natural leader and stuff. But it's really hard to see anything valuable in yourself through the lens of melancholy. I never cut myself or stuff like that. Always seemed like a waste of effort. I mean, I already suffered emotionally. Why add the sting of self-inflicted lacerations to it?
I love emo, but in the 2000s, all I saw in the commercially generated subculture of emo kids was a trademark brand of whiny poseurism. Like the world really needed another self-indulgent brat to scream for attention with eyeliner and black make-up. I may have always had a flair for the dramatic, but I was never up for pretending to be something I'm not. Nonetheless, I had my influences.
Let's talk about heroes. I liked superheroes like nothing else. As a child I liked superheroes so much that it was one of those things that made my peers rally against me. But in the end, their persecution just gave me something to Rise Against. You know the principle of leverage, right? You can move an otherwise stable object by using an extended bar to generate torque. In this case I was the otherwise stable object, cemented in self-pity, spurred to personal growth by hatred for the world. I knew I was becoming something unusual. I wasn't quite headed on a path for self-destruction, so much as a path for destroying the world that offered ostracism as a reward for attempting to understand it's customs.
I wanted revenge. I took notes from Batman, the Green Lanterns (particularly Kyle Rayner), and Daredevil. Batman learned to overcome his fears by absorbing them into what he was. I was horrified of my dad, but one day after being manhandled and condescended to a few too many times, I just ran out of eventualities to be afraid of. The Green Lanterns learn to overcome fear and empower themselves through shear willpower. I had no possessions of value, so I fought the world's idiocy with weaponized creativity and ideologies so powerful I could not be trifled with. Or so I had hoped. When that didn't pan out, I learned from Daredevil and dared to be so bold as to defy every expectation that I would fail to perform and that with the right combination of brainpower, courage and intimidation I could overcome any odds. In my mind I was an anarchist. I was an architect. And I was an artist.
I'm three years older. Those strategies were each met with varying degrees of success/failure. I've learned that not every problem can be solved by scaring people. But I do admit that I was onto something with my discipleship under superheroes. As a human being you cannot afford to simply accept that you are weaker or less important than those around you. I fight the fight against projected normalcy with art, relentless self-expression in song, drawing, and prose. Look for what inspires you. Channel something you like into something else you like. Don't worry if it's normal. If everything was normal, nothing would be special. I hope one day to see more personal creativity in the art that people consume.
Ironically one of my personal inspirations is Gerard Way, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance (one of those aforementioned pseudo-emo bands). He makes art and rock music, comic books, and he generally recommends really off-the-wall and unusual things, things that seem psychedelic even if they're made by people who are completely sober. That's what I love. He started a line of quirky comic books at DC Comics called Young Animal: Comics for Dangerous Humans. Here, dangerous is not meaning likely to cause pain, but dangerous toward the present trajectory of the world. The idea is to create things that cause change, that inspire people.
I'm not straight-edge at all, but I had a suck-tastic upbringing because of substance abuse and I'm personally disgusted by the notion that certain drugs enhance your creativity. It really seems to me like it's a lot more productive to chip away at changing the world than it is to destroy your ability to accurately perceive the world as it is.
Being cool is worthless. Don't be cool if you're not defaultedly. Do all of us a favor and be uncool. Geek out. Do your own thing. If people weren't so concerned with trends or what's happening, a lot more interesting things would be happening and less people would waste their twenties being bored on Pinterest.
If you don't know what to do, roll some dice to find out. Make a commitment. Follow through. Don't procrastinate.
Save your generation. We're killing each other by sleeping in.
What do you guys want to add to the world?
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