I mean honestly, The Black Parade is where emos go when they die? Where do they get this crap?

When I was thirteen, one of my friends got into the “emo scene.” At first, I thought it was weird, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. My friend kept telling me how special it made people and how it was “real hardcore.” I didn’t see any point to it then. At that time, I guess you could say that I was the typical “good kid.” I didn’t really do anything wrong. I played softball, got good grades, didn’t get into trouble. I was a boring kid, I guess. My friend kept bothering me to get into this emo stuff. She had been my friend for a long time, and we used to share everything. She was like a sister to me, so I gave in and just started hanging out with her and the other emo kids.

When I started hanging out with them, I was still me, and what they were doing seemed to be pretty strange. They would light candles around pictures of BAND NAME DELETED They would talk about how life is so dark, so meaningless, that no one really understood them and that everyone is against them. I just sat there and couldn’t really understand what they were talking about. My life was good. My parents cared, they checked on me, they went on trips with me, and actually talked to me like I was a human being. I knew they loved me!

The more and more that I spent time with them, the more their ideas started to get to me. I started to suspect that anytime that my parents told me that I couldn’t do something that they didn’t care. At least that’s what my new emo friends told me. I started to see things negatively. Even more important, I started to see positive things as negative things. For example, good grades were “selling out.” My thinking was starting to turn negative, and I didn’t even know it at the time. Anytime something went wrong, my new friends were there to tell me that it happened because people didn’t care, that everyone hated me. I started to believe them. It was almost as if they were trying to separate me from my parents and my non-emo friends. They’d tell me that everyone else hated what we were. They said that emo was the only “real” thing, and that everyone else is “fake.” It was like they were changing my reality, though I didn’t know it at the time. I started to think that my parents hated me, and I started to stay away from them.

I started to get more into emo. By then, I didn’t have friends that weren’t emo. I stopped playing sports. I still was getting OK grades, but those eventually dropped too. After all, everything other than emo is “fake”, right? One night, the others came to me and told me that it was time for me to become “true hardcore.” They said to be a “real emo,” you had to “show your pain.” They sat in a circle around me, gave me a razor, and told me that the only way to be a true emo was to cut myself. I had seen the scars on their bodies, I knew they were cutting. I always had thought that it was a sick idea, but I never thought that they’d want me to do it too. I didn’t really want to cut myself then and there, but that made it look like it was a good thing. I was also afraid that if I didn’t cut, they’d reject me and I had already left my other friends. I didn’t want to be alone! The put on BAND NAME DELETED almost a full volume and they just looked at me like I was expected to cut.” I started to cry, but I gave in and cut myself in a place that would be easy to hide (I won’t say where because I don’t want other kids to follow what I did.). After I had done it, the girls in the circle came and hugged me. On one hand, I was horrified about what I had done to myself. On the other, I felt so good to be loved (at least I thought it was love), and the cutting seemed to take the tension out of me. I felt relaxed, and loved.

From there, my life started to go down. I never did school work. My grades went to failing. I had no motivation for anything other than emo music and “the blade you stain.” That’s what we called the things we used to cut. My cutting eventually got to the point that I was doing it about five times a week. It’s hard to explain why cutting is so fascinating. It just is. My therapists and doctors tell me it’s an addiction. I can see why. It really feels good in a way. I know that it seems crazy, but trust me, it does.

As for the lifestyle, I got further and further into emo. I got onto the forums, and I read about the hopelessness, death, and suicide. I read about the cutting, and how to try to hide it. Everything I looked at “proved” what my friends were telling me. The music was big for me too. I won’t get too far into it. I don’t want other kids to get trapped like I was. I will say that BAND NAME DELETED was a big influence for me and my emo friends. We would listen to them all the time. BAND NAME DELETED shirts and hoodies were a major part of our “uniforms.” We would quote the lyrics before we would cut. They were our gods!! We though that we were doing what we were supposed to do. We thought we were following the true religion. We were idiots to do anything just because a band suggested it.

My relationship with my family went bad too. My parents were the same. I had changed. They tried to talk to me, I ignored them. They tried to get me to go do things with them, I rejected them. They kept on reaching out. I kept on turning away. They kept trying to help me and I thought they were trying to take my life away. My emo life, that is. It wasn’t them, it was me. I chose emo over them. I chose to believe the messages on the sites and in the music. BAND NAME DELETED had become my family, my parents were my enemy. That’s the part that I really feel bad about. They have been, and always will be great to me, and I refused to let them help me. I still feel pretty guilty about that. I still remember the look on my father’s face when he found me cutting. He looked like someone stabbed him in his heart. I knew that I was causing other people pain, just not myself.

After that, I tried to kill myself. I remember reading about people that committed suicide on the forums. I thought that it was a way out, and I always liked how there would be “tribute” sites made up for people that committed suicide. It was almost like they were made out to be heroes or something. I’m not going to say what I did. I don’t want others to do the same. I was lucky, my parents found me just in time. I nearly succeeded. I’ve read about how emos think they join the “black parade” when they die. I’ve never heard anyone say that. I (now) think it’s a metaphor. I can understand how some emos would say it though. After all, that’s what MCR said. There were a lot of us that thought that this was what BAND NAME DELETED wanted us to do.

After my suicide attempt, I went to a psychiatric hospital for about three weeks. My parents kept me from anything emo. One of the therapists gave them a link to Dr. Emo’s site. (I heard she hates that name, but I think my father teases her with it.) So they took emo away from me. I hated them for it. I cursed at them, threatened them, and basically made their lives hell. I thought my world was being taken from me. They stood up to me and told me how much they loved me. They said it in their words, and showed it in their actions. As I started to feel better about myself, I started to loose the negative thoughts that emo had given me. I started to think clearly again. I could see the world for what it is, not like some pit of misery. Emo lost its power over me. I had left the cult.

I stopped thinking that BAND NAME DELETED were gods, and I saw them for what they were. They’re a band that makes millions and millions of dollars off of kids like me. They probably live in mansions and fly in private planes. I doubt they have any misery or pain. They have a record company to market them and profit from all the shirts and other merchandise they conned us into buying. Basically, they have an image, and the marketing people build on that! They’re an act with an image, nothing more. All the stories about their lives and what they do in real life are probably written by some marketing company or something like that. In ten years, they’ll be on a VH1 special about has-been bands (that’s my father’s joke. I agree.).

Now, I really am OK. I’m away from emo. I threw out my BAND NAME DELETED stuff. That’s by my own choice. I feel like I’ve lost two years of my life. I can get that back. My scars will heal one day. I can’t wait. When I see them now, I remember how I was tricked into something that is just a marketing ploy.

As for my emo friends, most of them are still emo. They stopped talking to me when I decided to stop. They tried to spread rumors about me, but no one cared. Since the emos has threatened other people that have spoke out, I am in a private school. The friend that got me started in emo is in some kind of residential program. She went to the hospital about five times for cutting and trying suicide, so she was placed. The last I heard, she’s still emo, and still cutting. She’ll probably either get better one day, or die for emo. Lucky for me, emo isn’t worth a moment of my time! It’s definitely not worth my life!

Emo music is ONLY a genre of music, i.e. there are generally NO connotations to suicide etc. in it. the most popular “emo” music groups that this report mentions – actually have some very uplifting songs even the infamous MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE in their album “the black parade” have had no suicidal notes in them at ALL.

Get A GRIP whoever wrote this.