#guess which demographic picked on me when I was acting Too Autistic! guess!
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white womanhood… fuck it
#there is no white sisterhood#i am femme presenting the gaslighting and manipulation in white women is real#obviously I don’t bear the brunt of it#being white myself#but damn. this is why I don’t want to come out as genderqueer!#guess which demographic picked on me when I was acting Too Autistic! guess!
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The Conflict Within Myself - Track 6: Paranoize
You ever had a weird thought burst your bubble out of nowhere? Well, that’s what this is!
Paralleling with TAIM and Fire before it, The Conflict Within Myself takes sharp tone shift after the 5th track in the album/project. I think I subconsciously do it to mark a shift, like a conclusion of one section of the project, and the genesis of the next. In this case, Paranoize marks the beginning of a new stage of the album (Act II: The Conflict, for which the album is named).
Early in the fall of 2019, I was leaving class, headed to my car when I had, of all things, a panic attack. I didn’t even know it at first, but the fact that I couldn’t stop hyperventilating definitely gave it away. I got to my car as quick as I could and kinda collapsed into my seat and, just let it happen. This event and my thoughts immediately thereafter make up the lyrical (and compositional) structure of Paranoize. That wasn’t my first panic attack, so it’s kind of an amalgamation of all my major experiences having them, and the thoughts that having those attacks conjured.
I’m not sure if I told y’all in a previous song post but, I have, among other things, anxiety. After I have a panic attack, I always feel this... absence of stability (I mean, it makes sense that I feel this, I guess I’m just telling y’all what happens with me), as if there was a lens of dismay superimposed over my eyes; everything just feels... bad, and... thrown off. Don’t know if anyone else experiences it this way.
I had been trying to write Paranoize for at least 3 years at that point, and I thought that this would be a literally perfect time to write this song, while I was still in it, still reeling from it. Plus, I don’t know if the song would’ve been as sincere and authentic as it ended up being. In this part of the album, the virtual paradise created in the first part of the album is seriously challenged for the first time. In the context of me, it’s an expression of the beginning of a greater disillusionment with a lot of different things that I, along with many people my age and older, were experiencing, like how a lot of people thought racism was dead by the 2000s among others. My adolescent invincibility was threatened by something that I didn’t know about. First among these to appear: Anxiety.
The paradise is expressed in lines like “We got Barry and Larry the Cucumber, and good fortune, we ain’t ever going under” speaks to the sometimes-too-rigid ideals of my christian upbringing (Larry is a Character in the Christian kids series, VeggieTales) as well as having the first black president in the, at that time, 230+ years of US history (Barry is short for Barack in this case). As you learn more about other cultures and about what perfection really means, you start to see holes in some of the arguments made by christians who are a bit more religious than spiritual. Many people who were raised in the faith end up leaving it in light of these truths. I believe that a couple visions that God showed me in middle school and my desire to understand unbiased perfection (and in effect, God himself) kept me from following suit. Anyways, I don’t know how history will remember this, or if anyone else in the current time picked up on this, but I think Barack being president opened up some nasty cans of worms for the US. Weird stuff we thought we were past, and stuff that we didn’t know mattered before. over the course of his presidency, it’s as if his very presence in that office outlined all the problems we need to face as a nation. A painful blessing, in a sense.
As the song goes on, I outline the origin of the song’s title. As I experienced more and more anxiety, music became a great help for me. However, as I found and continuously listened to different songs that helped me, like penicillin to a virus, my problems seemed to gain a tolerance to the healing power of those songs. They began to haunt me every time I listened to them. They would remind me all too much of the very problems I once used them to solve as time went on. I began to doubt the sentiments of those songs, and they stopped working to help me combat my anxiety along with my general worry. High school was an anxious time... The title of Paranoize is a play on the word “paranoid” mixed with the word “noise” to apply the feeling of anxiety to music. Wow, this is hard to explain. No wonder it took me 3 years to write this song!
In my anxiety, I am often put face-to-face with my own perfectionism, the very thing that I mentioned in a slightly better light in Making It. As my anxiety worsened in high school, it became equal parts advantage and detriment. I was meticulous and thorough, but deeply disturbed by any time when I wasn’t. As time went on, I began to dissect (or disseminate ;)) my perfectionism itself and some of the underlying sentiments many perfectionists feel. At this point, you really start to doubt yourself almost universally. You second-guess nearly everything you do (or don’t do). And while all that’s happening, you realize that much of the pressure you’re feeling is self-imposed, and... it’s just not a pretty picture mentally.
Luckily, I catch myself slipping into negativity and assert my convictions to keep me from falling (let me tell you, it’s like standing on stilts). My aspirations, my dreams, the way I want to execute those things, etc. In my mind (as well as externally), it feels as if no one hears what I’m saying or want, and when that happens, coupled with anxiety, you start getting desperate... and defensive. You may say things you probably don’t mean to those around you and it’s just a bad day... but you know it’s not you, really. You’re just pushed into a weird position by your emotions and mental health, and you have yet to figure out how to keep it from controlling you. (Anxiety 101, folks!) Then comes the brain fog and exhaustion associated with more severe anxiety. Makes it hard to make decisions, you’re always tired, all that jazz.
I also began to feel insecure about the fact that I didn’t have an Adele-level singing voice that wins the hearts of millions. And then that stereotype about how all black men who are into music should become rappers, and rappers only. Then I say, 1: That’s overrated for my demographic, 2: “I do it soley for the sake of self-expression!” Singing is called for in some parts as is rapping. If you think you can do both, why shouldn’t you, regardless of opposition? Follow your dreams! ;)
Over the course of my life, I have heard contradictory opinions, and those can really put you at an impasse at first. I think it’s especially hard when you are autistic, and the world is wired differently than you are, and they try to understand you by changing how you operate naturally, such that you become easier to understand to others, including your family. Grave mistake, parents of autistic people. Please, show them how the world works, but let them be who they are. I took medications to help me focus in school at this time, and I found that they didn’t really help me that much long-term, and they even became detrimental over time in the short term. I still didn’t feel very understood on or off it. Then more big self-talk, more pep talk, but eventually, the anxiety always ended up taking a lot more of my mental self control than I would’ve liked.
And all that goes through my head in one minute. Literally, 1 minute.
So yeah, that marks the beginning of what you will find out to be a crazy trip through my head.
The music in Paranoize changes with the emotional tone of my thoughts. I drew from so many influences, and this is the only time on Conflict that they are this distilled. I had a lot of fun composing this song. it was quite crazy as well, like the pull-your-hair-out kind, too. Paranoize sets the ground work for an array of other problems to build on, as you will see...
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