Keeping Everything Inside

Songs have a tendency to stir up sometimes-strong emotions and memories within us; surely you've noticed. Linkin Park's 'With You' is one of many songs that take me back to my senior year of high school. Every once in a while I would actually do schoolwork that year, and when I did, it was usually later in the evening and the world was drowned out by the noise of Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory. I'd put the CD into my personal CD player (even though, at that point, iPods were more in vogue, I was too cheap to have one), stick the earbuds in my ears, turn it up way too loud and jam while getting through homework. Homework was always accomplished this way. Even now, when I have iTunes on shuffle and a song from Hybrid Theory begins unexpectedly, I am transported - I am sitting on the couch in the living room at the house; it's reasonably dark as I have a thing about waiting as long as possible to turn the lights on; my backpack and a couple hundred other insundry things sit next to me; Minerva, my cat, is 'helping' me hold my books on the other side; said books are backlit by the streetlight just outside...No matter where I am when I hear the album, no matter what I'm doing, no matter what time of day, I'm taken back there. (Which of course takes me back to the house, and all the thoughts and feelings, new and old, resurface as well...but that, of course, is another story for another time.)

When 'With You' came up on shuffle earlier, I remembered another aspect of what was happening my senior year. I was angry. I was depressed. My only outlet - like so many angry, depressed teens before me - was overly loud and extremely expressive music. I was angry at myself, at my family, at school, at the world - nothing was right, nothing did right by me, especially myself. It is likely all this helped the depression along - I kept disappointing myself and my family where school was concerned, and that was all the world could see: the bad student. If the only face They could see was that, then what good was it to have any good facets backing it up? My self-confidence hit rock bottom, and on some level I just gave up. I've never much outwardly cared how I look, but inside I thought I looked terrible and was constantly on my own case about it. I tried to send out the signals that I didn't care about being a rotten student; unfortunately that mask was ripped off quite brutally quite often, simply because I cared so much. While it's true that, today, I'm more of a mind of laissez-faire, of take-life-as-it-comes, and I heartily believe in Gerard Way's advice to 'be yourself, don't take anyone's shit, and never let them take you alive', I'm still angry. I'm still depressed. The only thing that has changed is the degree. Even though it still tears me apart inside when grades come out or I think about changing, I've taken on a certain nonchalance, an attitude that 'that's the way it is.' Guess what, mate?

It doesn't have to be that way. But I'm the only one who can change it.


平和
Remus