if you’re ever feeling down, just watch this video ♥
“Emo”
All right, just a warning, I have extremely strong views on this topic. First, emo most certainly is not a dress style. It’s more like a state of mind. Just because someone wears black and listens to music with screaming doesn’t mean they’re emo. You’re emo when you’re depressed and injure yourself. Whether that is by cutting, burning, or anything else. Although nowadays so many people, specifically girls, use the “I cut myself” line way too much. If you’re going through enough pain to feel the need to harm yourself, you don’t want others to know. You try your hardest to hide it. People that tell you they cut themselves just straight up are doing it for attention. Most of the time, a person who is feeling horrible enough to injure themselves doesn’t show much change in their lives. A cheerleader could hate herself and not think she is good enough or be having troubles at home might be cutting herself. She can remain the peppiest girl in school and get out there every week at football games to cheer. No one finds out and one day she just commits suicide. No one saw it coming. Everyone thought the Goth kids who wear black every day and listen to their crazy music would be the one to leave the world that way. Truth is, they’re the happy ones. They don’t care what people think of them. They simply are who they want to be. The cheerleader was the unhappy one. Because of stereotypes that have been created, most people never even know this. They just think those kids in the background are unhappy and wear black to show their state of mind. They think the girl everyone likes is happy. We need to realize that’s almost never the case. Yes, sometimes that cheerleader might quit the squad and start wearing black and more eyeliner and then people would know it was coming, but would they care. No. They’d write her off as a scab and find a new favourite girl. Her feelings would worsen because all the people that supposedly cared for her have left her when she needed them most. A girl at my church used to get up every time we were asked to give testimonies and say that she had been through so much crap and her life used to be so horrible. She’d say how she used to cut herself and her scars were so terrible. My own scars are ten times worse than hers and mine really aren’t even that bad. Every time she did this the few emo kids in our youth group or the ones that used to be emo were outraged. She was drawing so much attention to herself and we were the ones with big problems, but no one cared enough to notice. She made an effort to always look like she was about to burst into tears or had just finished crying. When we went to summer camp I was sharing my life story, which is quite horrible, and while I was talking, she interrupted me and asked if when I was finished they could pray for her. While I was talking I said how hard it is now that I’ve stopped cutting to wear short sleeves because my scars are extremely noticeable and people judge. When it was her turn to speak she went into how she couldn’t wear short sleeves because of her scars and she showed them to us. There was barely one line visible. She said she started cutting because she got raped. And don’t get me wrong, rape is a horrid thing, but this girl was not raped. She stated several times that she just couldn’t say no to the guy. That’s not rape. Rape is when you say no. If you just couldn’t tell the guy to back off then you made a mistake. She could be sad about that and have cut herself for that, but just the fact that she wants her life to sound as horrible as possible is quite ridiculous. There really are people out there that cut because disastrous things have happened in their lives. Maybe their parents hit them, or their best friend committed suicide, or they’re bullied at school for wearing black, or their mom left when they were 12, or the don’t know their real father, or they just found out everything in their life has been based upon a lie, or their parents died and they’re shoved around from foster home to foster home. We’ll never know for sure unless we get to know them and they let us in. But whatever their reason may be, most of the time it’s pretty legit, if they’re hiding it and not doing it for attention. You might say why or how could someone do that to themselves? It isn’t because we like to see the blood drip or we enjoy picking off our scabs and it most certainly is not because we want people to feel bad for us. We don’t want sympathy. We use it as a method of grasping and understanding our pain and feelings. When everything is wrapped up in our thoughts and running a muck in our brains, we can’t process anything. We cut to turn that pain or confusion or whatever it may be into something physical, something we can understand. We don’t do it because it’s fun or because we enjoy pain. It’s simply our way of dealing with our emotions. Before you go and label us as freaks, think.
