Do you ever have conversation like this:

You: hey mom remember when we went to 6 Flags and got that really good kettle corn and then that roller coaster shattered into a thousand pieces and crashed to the ground??

Mom: No roller coaster ever did that.

You: What the hell i swear I remember that…

Yes. Adding some weird shit to a childhood memory, because the brain is just so imaginative. This faulty memory phenomenon is the basis of one of the most significant concepts in my mind. If anyone is familiar with Pink Floyd then they know of the band's album-turned screenplay "The Wall." If you haven't heard of this that's okay because I'm not talking about the actual meaning of the work but rather the alien concept I grew off of it.

I started getting into classic rock when I was 14. I don't know about anyone else, but my 14 year old self was not good at correctly interpreting art/music. So when I saw a live show of "The Wall," with its intense delivery and complexity, I royally misunderstood. While I picked up on the concepts of troubling adults, departing from childhood, and isolation from society, I blew them up into a different realm. My interpretation was this:

Society itself is a wall. In your childhood you begin mostly free from the hold of society, but as you experience illness and learn about death the blind hope cracks a little. In a state of vulnerability heightened by realizing the darknesses of the world, you fall into an education from adults who mold you into ultimately a drone carrying out society's creed for the rest of your existence. Already hard-to-grasp creative/unique potentials are pushed off the edge so that you can never find them. A colorless, monotone life results. And every person who falls into this societal trap is just "another brick in the wall."

It's incredibly hard to fight this wall, especially as a child, so it seems fairly hopeless to not be a part of it.

In the screenplay (reminder this is still my interpretation) the main character- a rock star- was struggling to not be apart of the wall that is society, but ultimately found that despite his understanding of the walls existence and his efforts, he himself was "comfortably numb" living in a world society constructed.

While this idea is rather negative and twisted, I derived great qualities from it. The world of meaning I missed in this artwork became a world of meaning of my own creation. I'm so grateful I didn't learn the true meaning until much later, because it gave me years to culminate a concept that is incredibly important to me. Feeling pressure to fight for myself or get told who I am and what to do by society is sometimes the only force driving me to rise above challenges and fight for my identity. It inspires me to protect myself from external locuses of control and transcend traps to metamorphose into truer versions of myself.

You might think I'm a crazy anti-socialite, but my experience with "The Wall" has actually opened my mind and consequently I am a happier person. Everyone deserves to set their minds free.