You're sitting in your room, blinds drawn shut in the middle of the afternoon. Your walls are pounding Kurt Kobain's raw vocals off of your bones while you lay on a distressed bed with your eyes shut envisioning your world spinning endlessly.
I never believed in turning my music down. I want to physically feel it, to be a part of it, nothing short of completely submerged in this pool of deep emotion and straight heart. I found camaraderie and companionship with Radiohead, Smashing Pumpinks, Alice In Chains. This time in my life, the initiation in high school that started with disassociation and living within my head.
When you begin to look at the world differently, sometimes placing yourself as victim, sometimes just as an observer with an unbiased view who merely is just trying to piece the world together one by one. I am just trying to piece the world together, sometimes, more often than not I am trying to piece myself together. Every so often when you feel you have nothing together, you are stuck between who you were, are and want to be. But you are all of those and so much more. When we think we are so complex but everyone seems to easily define us.
Sometimes life seems a little more dreary, and some days seem to endlessly flow into the next with no break or pause to breath deeply. We tend to feel life so deeply sometimes. Your worn out converse are nothing but loved and loved hard but all they can see is an unkept mess. But life is messy.
My first concert was Greenday. I was 17. Billy Joe claiming his individuality, I felt my heart in my throat and my whole soul moved with the bass. It was almost a spiritual experience really, finding my place among strangers sharing this moment and basking in the lights and guitar. I still find solitude and contentment in these moments, I still go looking late at night to find myself in these brutally honest musical poetry.
We are 14. 17. 21. Filled with this angst and aggression and feeling that we fill our lungs with and relish in this existence we call our own. This teenage angst but I find it following me into my early 20s. I see it in my sister, in my peers. This lonely feeling when in all actuality it is anything but. I think that loneliness isn’t the fact that you are physically by yourself, you can be in a room full of people and still be lonely. I think its more so being misunderstood and feeling out of place.
Not content with yourself.
Loneliness has so many definitions. And angst, that doesn’t belong to any age group but simply is a part of life and growing up. Because we are exposed to more and more of the world as time goes on and we grown and form perceptions and notions and choose whether to live internally or externally. Sometimes even a mixture of both.
There’s not really a cure, or an outlet, the best you can do is submerge yourself in these feelings and truly learn to appreciate any sort of raw emotion. After all, angst doesn’t just live in your high school years.
