on music and motivation

Alright, I'm about to pour my heart out a little bit, so bear with my yapping. Trigger warnings for animal death, struggles with mental health.

It's no secret at all that I want to pursue music, I want to scream that fact from the rafters, and I have. My favorite place to sing is on my roof where my family can't hear me practice. 

I've decided to start music for a few reasons, but I can't simply list them because they're all interconnected tightly. 

This past year has been hell, plain and simple. I'd struggled to get through my high school education, exhausted beyond belief every single day, barely awake, more an object than a person. And that's not an exaggeration. I was completely out of it every day, almost completely dissociated, like I was running on low power and autopilot at the same time. I eventually came out on the other side, but I was left floating, obviously unfit to go to college. I was aimless and depressed, even feeling terrible on vacation, which is hard when you're in Acadia National Park. I was eating unhealthy, sleeping too much and staying up late, hating my body. I couldn't feel anything at all, to the point where I was concerned I didn't have empathy at all. I truly believed there was no hope for me.

But there was. Unfortunately for me, the boost of energy I need to get me off rock bottom often comes in the form of a manic episode. And it did, kinda. But bipolar disorder does this magical thing sometimes where it gets you someplace normal for a while. And it was all triggered by one thing: My Chemical Romance.

Which, I know, it's such a cliche that they saved my life. And they might have, they might not have. I've never been suicidal due to extreme fear of missing out. But it might have gotten worse. What I do know is that without MyChem I would be having a terrible time right now. 

So I get into MCR, right? Hadn't been in a real people fandom since DSMP a few years ago. Which was on purpose. I recognized that my parasocial relationships were causing me a lot of pain and I was kinda unequipped to deal with the disappointment that comes along with them. But it was kind of cathartic to be obsessed with MUSIC for once. I didn't really think much of it until a morning a few weeks ago. 

I went to sleep around 12 at night, and woke up at around 4 in the morning with a nasty toothache, which made me giggle, because I was thinking "I better not have a rotten tooth because if it forms an abscess, then i'll HAVE to record an album just to say Gerard Way isn't all that special." So I rolled around and tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't because my tooth hurt so much. I sat in my bed, put my headphones on, and watched the 2011 Reading Festival MCR set. I saw the sun rising out my window, and suddenly I was struck by the idea of climbing up to the top of my roof and watching the morning unfold. So I did. I sat up there listening to music and watching planes fly overhead and watching the whole world wake up for an hour at least. My ass hurt really bad at the end but it was worth it because the feeling you get being outside before anyone else makes it seem like you are the only person in the whole wide world and it's amazing. The two songs that I remember listening to the most up there were AMBULANCE (MyChem) and Are We The Waiting (Green Day), which are both very hopeful songs, and songs like that give me the power to start dreaming. 

So I sat up there and looked around as the sky changed color and I dreamed. I just let myself dream. I'm at my best when I'm dreaming. I love everything about me when I can see the world for more than it really is and way more than it really isn't. I watched as my future unfolded in a dozen different directions and I longed so badly to follow all of them, to fly off my roof and catch them and hold on and let them take me. But right now, that jump is too far. So I stuck to dreaming, which is fine by me.

When my father woke up and went outside to clean the pool, I moved down to the part of the roof where my window is, where I'm hidden from all the paths that people normally walk on around my house. And I sat there and I sang, and as I sang, I realized the most wonderful thing. Looking at myself in the mirror of my window, I saw a happy and confident person looking back at me. I saw someone fulfilled, someone who I'd seen before. It had seemed like I had forgotten him somewhere far behind me. It was such a pleasure to see him again.

Once it got too hot, I went back inside and started drafting a drawing. I listened to a few songs during that time, too, and I found the normal numbness that I couldn't break through was naturally falling away as I drew. I almost cried a few times, which had never happened with a drawing. It was the best feeling in the world.

I continued crying throughout the rest of the day, on and off. In the shower, I started thinking about my cat. My cat died about a year ago now. I got to thinking about how it wasn't possible for me to lack empathy completely. I remembered how he looked in the months before he died, how he wouldn't eat, how he just wasted away. He faded. He was no longer the way I knew him, and that hurt more than the knowledge that soon I wouldn't know him at all. It was the same for my dog a couple of years ago. He had cancer, and I remember the way you could feel the tumors everywhere under his skin, and the hair he was losing, and at one point he just lay in the same spot every day. It hurt so fucking bad to see him like that, to the point I begged my parents to just put him down already because I couldn't stand it. They held some delusional hope that he might get better, that he wasn't going to die, and because of that he died alone in the middle of the night. When I talk about that part of it I still burn with anger for him, how his suffering was prolonged because my parents couldn't let go. I realized that I should never, EVER doubt the fact that I can feel.

And that reminded me of the fact that music is the thing that makes me feel the most consistently. When my parents would yell at me in middle school, I would seek out Panic! at the Disco because I knew that listening to them would lift my mood. When I needed to cry in freshman year I would listen to Mitski, when I needed to cry in sophomore year I would listen to Car Seat Headrest, and when I needed to cry in junior year I would put on Radiohead. And it would work every single time. Music provided a template to me through which I could let out my emotions just by listening to it. 

I had headphones on for half of my high school career as well. Music was a barrier from the outside world, something I could use to protect me. I could focus on it and let it ground me. I had never realized before then how much music was a constant presence in my life. I realized that I already put on music whenever I was doing something that didn't require listening to anything else. 

I decided then that I wanted to give back. It was the first truly natural charitable thought I'd had in at least a year. The strength of that conviction surprised me. I wanted to do for other people what other people had done for me. I wanted to make the kind of music that I needed to hear. And I still do. It's a weird feeling, to want something like this. I've always been artistically inclined, but I've never wanted my art to mean something, to make a difference to anyone. Yeah, maybe, I'd get a few likes on my Warrior Cats fanart or whatever, and I thought that's what I wanted. 

But with music, I already love it. I've already connected it to myself like a lifeline. I would be dead without the music I love. And, damn it, I love to sing! I love to write! I love to dance around and act like a dumbass and I would love to do it on stage. I just want to make at least one person sing or laugh or cry or dance or even tap their feet. That would be a dream come true. Every time I get further away from music my life gets worse, so it only makes sense to dive in headfirst. Music won't fix me, I know that, because if it could have it would have. But it doesn't need to do that for me. I just want to let what I have inside me out and I want to make people feel.

So, truly, this isn't as much about MCR as I joke that it is. I've always been afraid of being forgotten, and I used to think of fame as being a band-aid for that. But I don't need to be famous. If I can make an impact on just one person so that they remember me after I'm no longer in their life, if I make art that moved them so much that it became a memory for them, I will probably die happy. 

I'm tired of being passive. I'm tired of being numb. I'm tired of floating. I need to tether myself somewhere where I can help other people tether themselves. I hope I'm right about that being where my purpose lies. 

-Beanz