I love music. I love it to death. Sometimes I have no words for something, but there's a song.
A lot of my emotions can be expressed more accurately by song than by discussion. A lot of the songs I feel express emotion aren't really about what I project into them. But isn't that what Music's really about? Taking a song, a song someone put their emotions, their energy, their feelings into....and FEELING it, making it...no LETTING IT be about something in your life?
Let's take this song: Aretha's Think. The original one.
To me, it will forever be my way to tell one person...
"Think! You're trying to push me into a box I don't belong in! You're taking who I am...no, who you SEE me as, and you're trying to make me "better" by making me just like every other stereotypical popular girl!"
You see, she thought I, the perfectly happy person, would be made LESS MISERABLE as she told me everything I was and loved being was WRONG, and that if I just acted like everyone else, I would be happy and have friends.
And to this day I have never been able to really tell her this:
If you had stopped to THINK about things, you would have seen that I was happier BEFORE you started your crusade to make me be just like everyone else. I was depressed, yes, but through no fault of my own. I wasn't unhappy, I was FUCKING DEPRESSED! It's a medical condition, not an emotion, and it cannot be FIXED by taking the things that make me happy and labeling them as "bad behavior", "bad habits", and "bad parenting.
Yes, bad PARENTING. She wasn't, and still is not, even my mother. Or my aunt, or my grandmother, or my older sister, older cousin, or any other sort of family member. She was someone who, having the opportunity to as my father's girlfriend, took a look at the girl with the Game Boy, the tee-shirts, the jeans, who considered any day where she wasn't outside doing something a total loss, who loved who she was. She said, "Oh, she is depressed, which is another word for unhappy(no, lady, it's a medical term, too, and you SAW me having fun, too, and took your OPINION and it didn't fit, so you threw the FACT away!), and I must fix that! Look at her, she's like a boy! She's in the woods, climbing, running around! She'd be happy to have more friends, and to get more friends, she must look and act like a popular girl!"
Now, here's my thing with popular girls. I don't like 'em as a general rule, because as a general rule popular girls in schools of any type are self-important bitches who think everyone should toady to them. I had a....very personal experience with one of those bitches.
Her name was.....hmm...let's call her Rachel. Rachel was my best friend since before we could walk. For the first four years I was in the school system I was in private school. And then, in fourth grade, I started at the local public school. Of COURSE Rachel went there. So the first day, when all 20 of us kids were waiting for the doors to open, I saw Rachel. So of course, I did the smart thing and waited to see where she was socially, right?
Nope. I was stupid. I was a MORON.
I didn't know any better.
I went up to her, said hi, and hugged her. Stupid in hindsight, but really, it was my first time setting FOOT in a public school. And of course she took me aside and explained popularity, right? Because she was one of my best friends, the see-every-weekend kinda best friends, right?
Nope. She pushed me onto my butt and said, "I don't know WHO the HELL you think you are, FREAK, because I've never seen you before in my LIFE."
And so it continued, and that's why I was miserable. The Head Bitch decided that I was a bit of gum on the sidewalk, and so I was treated for almost three years. Sure I went to her house, she invited me after all. But I got pushed around both physically and verbally, and her mother, my mother's friend, looked away and pretended it didn't happen as I was pushed down stairs, called freak and moron and idiot.
And so while this was going on and everyone knew, this BITCH girlfriend of my father's decided I needed to be taught everything about being a girl. Being a girl meant being popular, I was told. It meant wearing things I wouldn't wear now to go swimming in to beach parties when I was 10! It meant treating others like so much lint on a white shirt.
And it meant giving up my game boy.
That was IT. NO ONE TOOK MY POKEMON GAME AND THREW IT INTO THE TRASH!
So she learned that was a Limit. I actually physically attacked her for that. So she learned one thing and I learned one thing.
She learned that NO ONE MESSES WITH MY GAMES!
I learned to keep my games away from her.
When I was nine I got an iPod Mini. You know, those big clunky things in pale colors, metal, old-fashioned LCD screen?
I'm pretty sure it was never more than seven inches from my person until finally, after replacements and replacements of replacements, it died. That is to say, Apple decided to drop it from its supported devices.
From that time on, I had an iPod. The longest I have NOT had an iPod was....March to June.
But still, all that time, she was trying to change who I was, who I couldn't NOT be. I watched Wolf's Rain. She called it kiddie and a cartoon, and why was I watching it? She never saw one frame of it.
She said video games were for little kids and slightly older boys and I shouldn't be playing them, because I was one: too old and two: a girl. She didn't get why I liked sci-fi(and it wasn't really. Star Wars was great and Doctor Who, and Stargate was amazing, but I couldn't STAND anything else.), she called it over-hyped and stupid. I forgot to mention how many fans Stargate and Who had/have. She could NEVER understand why I went around with headphones glued to my ears. She thought my interest in Japan was "inappropriate" and once even ripped up my homework because it wasn't in English. It shouldn't have been...but I thought she knew the difference between Spanish with Japanese in the margins because it helped me remember a couple words and Japanese. I mean, there's no letter e in Japanese...it's all kanji and kana, no Latin lettering at all. Still...to her mind...
And so that's how I lived. Being accepted by more and more people for who I was, and going home to someone who never gave me an opportunity to tell her what I thought, because she was too busy criticising my decision to buy a period tunic dress...with my own money.
And where was my mom? There. I lived with her for the most part. She had to go to Florida my senior year because of Grandfather. I was kept out of the loop, my dad decided I'd do better being told lies and half-truths as my grades got so bad I almost didn't pass, though they.....that's another story for another day. But I was told everything was fine, they could come back at any time, while my mom had a heart attack and Grandfather couldn't walk on his own.
And through this all, that BITCH was the one who told my father to keep it from me.
My mom was always there to say that I was who I was and I should be proud. Grandfather was there to be my dad in a lot of ways. He was always there, and he didn't have to work through Ms. Girlfriend saying that she would do better talking with me when I was "being inppropriate". So she was the one to tell me that no one wanted to hear about how I was doing in Japanese when the person I was talking to asked. She was the one to tell me no one listened to music and hummed while doing homework. She was the one to tell me that I needed to start wearing miniskirts and ruffles because I was 12, and not a little kid who wore jeans and tees to school. That I..........and on and on with the bad crap that I knew wasn't true.
And that all brings us back to the song.
"Think about what you're tryin' to do to me!"
And think: why should your laws of how a girl should be apply to me?
Let your rigid mindset go, let yourself be free to accept the differences in people.
We are not all how you think we should be! We have the FREEDOM to chose who we can be.
And that is how that song makes me feel, that is what I put into it.
Someone for years trying to make me who I am not, who, if she had just thought instead of putting me into a box and trying to cut out all of who I was that fit into it.
If she had thought, who knows how our relationship would have turned out, instead of the barely0civil thing we have now, where I pretend to like her just a little.
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