Lessons of the Potential Emo

Lessons of the Potential Emo

You either love them or you hate them. If you hate them you despise them. If you love them you are one of them, and as they hate yourselves if you are one you actually hate them. And if you hate them, you despise them.

That's the short version on why everybody despises Emo kids.

But it's much deeper than that. There's an almost paranormal attraction to the dislike of the apathetic mass of teenagers who conform to being nonconforming. The problem lies in three different and unequal problems, which I will now name in order of importance.

As a 16 year old boy, I have a tendency to forget about things. Case in point, haircuts. After forgetting to get a haircut since last August, it is now at the same level as my eyes for the first time (it is now January 29th for the readers of the future, of which there are many because the only person in the entire world who is reading this presently is myself.)

This may sound like it has nothing to do with Emo kids, but this is my point. When your hair is short, it does not come into contact with your eyes. When long enough, it merely bypasses them, the tips far from the pupils. But at my length, which is unfortunately Emo length, the tips are in striking position against the retinas. I have brown hair, but many Emos dye it black because black symbolizes darkness. This dye adds weight to the hair, which only further pulls it down. Imagine if your entire day was filled with hardened hair stabbing at your retinas, and you begin to realize why they cry so often. Another dilemma is that when they try to cut their hair, a mix of greasiness derived from apathy about hygiene and the poor vision attributed to the hair, Emos tend to accidentally miss. And though the wrists are not usually near the head, while cutting it is common to use both hands. Poor vision and slippery fingers can explain cut wrists quite easily, and usually you forget about cutting your hair when you're bleeding from the wrists. Hence, one possible reason for being Emo.

Another more serious reason is that you wish to be Emo and have gone through no sad events. Not only are you a poser, you are posing as an already downtrodden stereotype. The cure for this is rap music by the barrel; posing as a thug can be rendered much more hilarious than posing as an Emo.

But it is the third reason that is either most severe or most falsely attributed to Emoness. It is a mixture of medical problems or misdiagnoses, ranging from ADD to depression. This, when mixed with horrid events in one's life, can easily explain sullen behavior. But I intend to prove, with myself as an example, that even the sullen ones who have medical problems and horrible life situations can be better off if they choose happiness.

I have always felt uncomfortable with people, since the beginnings of my memory. My siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, were extroverts; while I have a somewhat formidable amount of intelligence, they outclass me in emotional and social intelligence by a long straw. This is not to say that I do not do well in social situations; I love hanging out and I have many people that I regard as friends. These friends are not people that are outcasts, people that dress in black and are exactly the same as me. They are the entire Junior class of my school, and they range from people who have never once moved (like myself) to people who have been forced to learn English within the last year because of problems in Iraq, Haiti and India.

I also am, and I am saying this in all seriousness, the most paranoid and untrusting person I know. I am almost fully insecure about the smallest things, and I find it hard to put faith in most any person on the planet. I do not think that people are after me so much as I find it hard to believe that they are honest. I myself am a chronic liar, and whether I lie because I assume others do or I assume others lie because I do I will never know. That being said, you can either believe or disbelieve everything I say in this essay, but it feels better knowing that people have seen and disbelieved my position than the alternative.

These two traits of mine can be traced very roughly to two sources that I have already touched upon. The first source is simple: I have severe Social Anxiety Disorder, which of course they could have called anything that doesn't acronymize to say SAD. Zoloft was prescribed, as it not only aids depression but SAD as well. The normal dosage for a patient with SAD, at least according to Dr. Wood, is 50 milligrams. I was given 200.

Another pitfall in my plans for happiness is that the very first girl that I had a crush on was brutally raped at a summer camp between fifth and sixth grade. The last time I ever saw her, now six years and two months ago, she was sitting in a chair. Looking back, she had symptoms of people I have met with Autism. She could not bear to be touched, even by her parents. The councilor, the adult in charge, was given many years in prison with a chance of parole, which has done three things to me. Firstly, whatever chance I had in trusting others, especially a child's stalwart adult or authority figure, was shattered. Secondly, I have come to the conclusion that rapists ought be castrated with rusted knives, no matter what level of sanity or sex they be. But thirdly, and most crucially, I felt the need to detach from all I people I knew and sink into a sort of bubble; and though it was despair at first, it eventually was more of a protection device than a cry for help.

Now here's the kicker of my essay.

Last year, my sophomore year, I decided that I would stop taking Zoloft to see if any noticeable changes would happen to me. Now I agree that drugs can help many people, but my disorder is quite legitimate and I merely wanted a test. Secondly, I was spending Health class learning about sex and rape came up. Now I had not forgotten about Sarah, but I was mostly out of the protection bubble that accompanied my middle school years and I had learned to deal with it in a sense.

We watched a movie, 'She Stood Alone' I think it was called, some after-school TV special about a girl who is 'date-raped', despite the incident happening with a former boyfriend breaking into her house. Needless to say, the actual scene which depicted this was not a very happy time for me. But after the movie was done, the fantastic Mr. Baker asked us how we felt about the scene. A boy in the class, a sophomore like me, said that she liked it and that rape was not real, all girls want it.

I was sitting on the floor on the left of the desks because it was next to the driving simulators that the multi-purpose room contained, and he sat in the exact center of the room, first desk in the column. The class was somewhat but not fully silenced, and people probably assumed that I was getting a tissue.

I could have ripped his head off, a true statement considering my half-dozen feet compared to his five, but that would draw pity. I would not allow a single person in that room to feel a speck of pity for this person.

So instead of a fist, I used the entire hand. I slapped him so hard across the face that he nearly fell off his desk. The word slap denotes a feminine action, but you would be hard pressed to find a single student in that class that can find that connotation after what I did to him. Just one hit, and the room was silence.

I was given in-school suspension, or ISA for two days; our black female vice principal compared my anger at his comment (she by now knew my back story) to a possible reaction she would like to mead if somebody told her that they were glad Rosa Parks had recently died. Though generic, that line has always stuck with me. I could have been charged with assault, but the teachers basically agreed with me. The ISA supervisor allowed me to play Curveball while the truant behind me did his homework. I had won the respect of basically the entire female half of sophomore class and then some, but the lesson I learned overall is that it feels good to act upon ones problems.

I agree that people are worse off than me. I love my family, my parents are fantastic and my school is great in terms of people. I'm better at emotional intelligence now (but so are my siblings, the sister being a near psychic when it comes to reading feelings), but I still have much room for improvement. I was officially taken off my prescription last September, and though the lack of trust is a major issue I am at least trying to rectify it.

I had many, many chances to take the Emo path. I am the first person to talk to when you have some jerk using the over hyped 'always someone worse off' speech, because I know how hard it is to imagine someone worse than you when you have serious problems. But the difference between accepting your problems, even somewhat, and letting them dominate you is so vast and vital to a person's existence. Everybody must have a release method, be it a trusting friend, writing (but realizing when not to submit it, i.e. whenever the words blackened, thorny, heart and pain are used in the same poem), drawing, making movies, trying something new, doing something, anything but accepting the miseries of life. Learn to laugh, learn that not everybody is against you. I know how impossible it sounds and occasionally is, but the fact that you attempt to achieve more proves that you are worthy of being human.

There is a parody song called 'Emo Kid' or something that a friend showed me years back. It basically is a parody of every stereotype about Emos, from homosexual tendencies to their apathy. But one line strikes me as the truest thing you can possibly say about Emos, the reason that absolutely everyone despises them.

They don't want to feel better.