How a 90s punk helped me find the meaning of life
Recently, my housemate started volunteering on a suicide prevention hotline, since we're kind of stuck at home with nothing meaningful to do.
At dinner she tells me the stories collected, the problems and traits of the callers, if she believes to have helped or not, et cetera. But today I participated in one of these calls, and it felt really good. I never thought my stories could be of aid to anyone's problems, but now it seems I helped a person find new meaning in life using myself as an example. It went something like this:
My friend at first received the call, from a teenager depressed for being involuntarily an outcast of society. Their choices of style, of being, were said to be keeping away any kind of happiness they could achieve, and it got to a point so severe they cannot go back in these choices. Their life ruined, with no friends, an uncaring family; no prospect of success, living day after day in an unbearable cycle. The answer found for the problem was suicide.
So she asks: and all this suffering is only because of the person you came to be? — To which they responded yes.
And then: but is changing what you wanted? — Once again, yes.
Finally: then I know someone that could help you way more than me — and that's where I come in, the call on speaker. She explains the situation, and I give the best advice I could: be yourself, be cool, don't be a fool. And we talk for the rest of the afternoon about our tastes and whatnot, talking them out of that crazy idea of ending it all.
At the end of the day, I don't think they were actually going to kill themselves. It was teen talk — which I know very well —, but there was true sadness in that sputnik sweetheart, and no reason to be this way, to sucumb to the unfairness of this world. Life, I mean, living is about overcoming obstacles, and everything, as you'll eventually come to find, is a potencial obstacle. And it isn't a clean olympic race in any way; there might be shackles, there might be dragons and punches to the face; but there's only one track, and you have inside you what it takes not to eliminate the obstacles, but to endure them until you finish the race. Swallowing a bottle of pills is to lie to yourself about a victory — is to be a fool.
The point here is not the suicide, is to be yourself, be secure with yourself. Rely and trust upon your own decisions, on your beliefs, because only after you own up to yourself you can begin to find true happiness —, or at the very least, find the base to a comfortable life journey. In other words, expect to find inside yourself what's needed for self-fulfilment.
For a very long time in my teenage years I was around a very close (and small) group of friends, and we all knew each other very well, and accepted with ease any kind of changes, encouraging and even influencing them at times. And when our families would come to lack in affection, in acceptance, we knew that despite everything, we would always be there for one another. Happens that amidst my youth the hand of destiny came to smite down most of those I cared about and cared about me. I found myself alone in the world, with little to no support to what related to my self. The unfairness of the world weighed down on me, and that's when judgement started to hurt. The person I was was frowned upon by society, and the sensitivity of my heart and mind took me to hell inside a bottomless pit of hopelesness; and even then I still wasn't everything I wanted to be. There was still much to come, many decisions that made me a marginal in the populace, a freak.
I have attempted suicide numerous times, and every time something would wrong, until it got to the point I stopped trying, believing to not be good enough even for something seemingly so easy. But truth is that maybe it was a sign after all, maybe I'm destined for great things, or at least, at the time, destined to find a better place in the future. And I did find a better place, at least one in which I can live a normal life like anybody else, and still be the person I chose to be. I still find myself pondering if it would be better having it work the first time, since I'm never 100%, but hey, in a certain way I have finally found peace; built a base to step on until I return to dust. Accepted once and for all my complete independence.
And you know who helped me a lot with that? Kimya Dawson.
In the call, I asked for my friend to keep up the beat and sang the entirety of "D2 Boyfriend". It was lots of fun, and served well to illustrate what I was trying to say: "Be yourself. Be proud of yourself. You'll be cool (Super cool!)". The Moldy Peaches album has been in my life through all of its entirety, and I've been listening to it since my childhood, and many of its songs have lead me to find an answer to many of life's problems (at least the youth problems), and "D2 Boyfriend" caught my attention in that torturous era of identity-searching suffering (that song and the "Remember That I Love You" album to be fair). Kimya Dawson helped me understand that there was nothing wrong with me, only with society. I wasn't killing, stealing, running naked accross the avenue, just being myself in a way harmless to the rest, so why should I have to just sit down and accept people's judgement? I had as much a heart, a brain, hands and legs as anybody else, and to distinct in a way of being, in a way of dressing, of enjoying life, should not be a martyrdom.
So yeah, and now I'm here. The real me. The me-me. With me problems, not other people's. Living in/by myself; proud of being who I am, and nothing can take that from me.