#uncool/stupid/cringe/opinionated i am

[cowboykeery]

so sick and tired of “stop posing like a millennial/stop the millennial pause” like why do we continue to make fun of people for the dumbest fucking reasons

[ourhero]

Back in the Saddle...

Editor’s note: be patient- I’m trying to get back in the swing of things:

While I was in therapy last week, I listed off my goals: 1. Lose weight 2. Drink less 3. Write more

Numbers 1 and 2 are currently in progress (and doing well- I’m down almost 8lbs in two weeks!), but number 3 seems to be evading me. And I don’t know why. Writing is something that has always come so naturally to me; something that helped escape and get my thoughts out when I didn’t know how to otherwise. Maybe because I felt like I needed to hide some stuff from the Internet and solely write about it in my journal (ha- that’s not a maybe; I did that. That happened). But I guess I never knew what I wanted to write about for people to read since my life was consumed by unsafe for the Internet topics (and I was worried about my image (HA)).

So, here we go. I’m back. It’s been 521 days (ugh, I just cringed) since I’ve posted here. I’ve been writing, but nothing for public consumption. I want that to change. So, I guess we’ll try again. But coming up with what to write about was hard… so I thought back to what’s been happening in my life lately and one lesson stood out to me: not everyone is going to like you.

Hear me out- I know that this isn’t a farfetched concept and that I’m sure this is something that we’ve all heard for many years, iterated in different ways, and in shareable images with cute fonts and beautiful backgrounds. The one that has come up recently has been “You can’t make everyone happy- you’re not an avocado”. Well, yes, however, you may be an avocado, but you may not be a ripe avocado (have you ever waited too long? I mean, of course, you have). But really- do I want to make everyone happy? My immediate answer is yes. But then, I had to stop and think about it another way, which led me to: do I care?

I look back at my old journals (see previous post)- mostly from middle school- and the entries are full of the same thing; “I wish I was popular”… “I wish people liked me”… “Why can’t I be normal?”. I always feel a bit sad for 7th grade Brady. She had a rough go and few people really understood.

One of the things I discovered recently (in therapy… Charlie is working hard for his money!) is that in order to be our best future selves, we have to be kind to not only ourselves now, but our past selves, too. For the longest time, I hated past Brady. I thought she was weak, stupid, and I hated that she was insecure and that she just couldn’t handle the emotions and issues being thrown at her. What a wuss. It wasn’t until I put myself back in her shoes (a scared 13 year-old) that I suddenly appreciated her so much more. A girl- barely a teenager- who struggled through mental illness so early in life. She was given pills, and therapy, and the latest and greatest diets, but nothing worked. Nothing eased the anxiety or erased the depression. She was just Brady- sad, depressed, anxious, outgoing and passionate Brady. She just was trying to get through- to not fail. To understand “normal”. A girl who, despite feeling lonely and uncool, stuck to what she loved (I’m talking playing with American Girl dolls ‘til about 8th grade). And somehow, with the help of a huge tribe, she did it- she saw the light and followed it to find her best self. Oh sure, she’d become an expert on anxiety and depression later when her friends hit those bumps in their 20’s, but she didn’t know that then.

She made sense of it eventually. Fast forward and here we are. I’m 30 and finally feeling like I know myself better than ever before. I am who I am. I am loud. I am obnoxious. I am passionate, crazy, opinionated, funny and loving every moment. And I know some people don’t like that. I know some people prefer if I didn’t so freely live my life the way that makes me the happiest. But you know what? I don’t answer to them. And they don’t know past Brady. And they don’t know what it took to get here. And so, I won’t change.

I realize that I talk about my past a lot in my writing; maybe there’s more demons there than I care to admit (that’s what therapy is for…). But, truth be told, it’s made me who I am, even if I hated it; even if at times I almost quit (catch me?). And what I’ve recently discovered is I like me. I like who I am, I like my friends, I like my life, and I am so fucking lucky. Because not everyone can say that. Not everyone came out of their personal struggles better for it. But somehow, I did.  And that’s not to say I’m perfect; but I am happy. And isn’t that one in the same?

You cannot be the perfect person. You cannot be what everyone likes. Someone will always not like you. And that’s okay.

What matters is that, at the end of the day, when you crawl into bed, you can smile and say, at least I like me.

I mean, I can. And that’s enough right now.

[champagne121212]

not to out myself as someone who's #uncool and #cringe on my pure and holy mcr thirstposting and poetry blog but. frankly i am just waiting for the cringe culture cycle to come around for twenty one pilots in the way that it has for panic at the disco. in the way that panic was a beacon of light for emo kids in the 2000s-2010s and then became Irrevocably Cringe due to brendon urie's entire personality and his rabid commercialization of the music. but now finally i am seeing a lot of people say hey actually panic isn't shitty and stupid, what it is is a shell of its former self being puppeted around by an out of touch celebrity desperate for continued relevance. and yeah a lot of that argument is that brendon has been singlehandedly dragging around the corpse of a project that used to have other talented artists in it who made it as great as it was. but i think honestly the same larger argument can be applied to twenty one pilots. another band that was genuinely a lifeline for emo kids in the late 00s, early 10s, and had a lot to say about religious trauma and mental illness and the intersection of the two. there's truly a lot of raw emotion in their early stuff, especially with the sort of plain and stark message of "if there is a god who created me and loves me then why am i suicidal, why am i suffering, why am i in agony." i'm not gonna say they were the only ones doing that at the time because i'm sure they weren't but what i will say is they had a message and a passion and a desperate need to get their pain out through their music that resonated with a lot of people. it's good music actually. and i think the same thing happened to them that happened to brendon, they lost their message in the spotlight. i don't want to pinpoint when because i don't think that's a simple thing to do, i think a lot of people have different opinions on different eras of the two bands and whether they were "still good" or not. i think it's more of a gradual process from someone with artistic vision and things they need to say to music that plays in an old navy. but i think if you were a kid during the heyday of either band who loved them and now find them irredeemably cringe, i get it, i was too. just maybe sometime when you're bored go back and give regional at best or self titled a listen. it's not perfect, there's certainly some heavy-handed writing in rab and self titled is prone to the occasional extremely long and drawn out metaphor. but there's something real in there. there's genuine care and love for the words and music.