Tiana’s “saved by MCR” Story

every one does think MCR writes about suicide but they write about it to prevent it. they saved my life, i cut my self alot and had to wear arm warmers to hide the cuts and scars from people because i didnt want peopl to know and my friends to that i was emo till one day a girl i hated pulled down my arm warmers and raised it up in the air for the whole school too see i was then called emo and all that other shit i was then about to kill my self because of all the shity fuckin people at my school but then i went on the computer and about to email all my friends before i was about to kill myself saying i was emo and that i was going to kill my self and that i was sorry but then one of my friends sent me a song called “Famous last words” so i listened to it and i fell in love with it i looked up the band and it was called My Chemical Romance i put the knife back and became a fan of MCR i  love mcr and Gerard hes so cute and a good person.

Danet’s “saved by MCR” story

Hi, my name is Danet, and if you could, I wanted to share my story with anyone that would listen. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I’m 13 years old MCR defiantly saved my life more than once. When I was younger, my sister used to listen to MCR and I remember that the first time I ever heard them was when I watched the Helena music video with my sister. I loved it even thought I was so young. I remember watching a lot of MCR videos with her. But after a while, she got into other bands and I forgot about MCR. After all, I wasn’t old enough to really know what they were talking about when they sang songs like Famous Last Words and I’m Not Okay. I had a pretty okay life through 5^th grade. My parents fought a lot though and my dad treated my sister like shit. One night, my parents got into a huge fight. And I mean huge. The cops ended up coming to our house. The whole time my sister sat in my room with me while I cried. She stuck by me and I loved her for it. My parents decided on a divorce and it hit me hard because I was so close to my dad. My mum, sister, and I ended up moving out of state to live with my grandparents. Now, at first, everything was okay. Yeah, I had things like “Emo” and “Freak” thrown at me, but I tried to ignore it. When I went into middle school, things got really bad. I was constantly called Emo, freak, and weird, anything you can think of. People constantly asked if I was emo and I always said no. But it just got to be too much and I started cutting myself around 7^th grade. I just felt so alone and just plain scared. No one understood me or even wanted to try. My sister shut herself up and pushed everyone away, my so called dad acted like he didn’t give a shit and never paid child support, never talked to us, and went on vacations to Italy with the money that was supposed to be feeding us. This is where My Chem really starts to come into my life. I was looking through Fuse one day and saw a loaded episode on My Chemical Romance. I remembered the name and thought: Hey, I’ll listen to these guys again. So I recorded it and the next day watched it. It went through the song Welcome To The Black Parade and I remembered that. Then it started playing Famous Last Words and I remembered that one too so I started kind of humming along. Then it got to the chorus. I just stopped singing. I just sat there staring at the screen. It felt like I was hearing the song for the first time. I can’t even describe how it made me feel. I just cried. Because, for once, I felt like somebody understood me, I felt like somebody cared. I didn’t feel alone. And since then, I stopped cutting myself and I stopped all of self-harm. I made a promise. I literally said aloud, “I swear to you Gerard, I will never hurt myself again. No matter what.” Now MCR helps me through all of my hard situations. No matter how bad it is, all I have to do is think about something Gee, Frank, Bob, Mikey, or Ray said and I feel so much better. My friends turned to the ‘popular’ life and called me names, I thought of what Gee said “Hey Girls, you are beautiful.” I felt better. My grandparents turned out to be something I hate most (Homophobias), and I almost did something I would regret, but I thought about the song Teenagers and I just walked away. My mum started to try and change who I was, I just thought of how MCR wasn’t afraid to be MCR and I felt better. In a way, MCR had taught me all of those cliché life rules. Don’t do drugs, violence is not the answer, all of it I learned from MCR. And I’m proud of it. One of my friends asked me what I want to do before I die, my reply: “I want to meet My Chemical Romance and say ‘thank you’.” And I swear, one day I’m going to meet them and tell them thank you for giving me my life back.

Kirsty’s “Saved by MCR” story

When I was 18 I went through a period of self harm and the way I got through it was through music and relying on God. Music has always been an emotional release for me. I remember when I was younger sitting relaxing while The Offspring blared out my stereo speakers. About 6 months later I became a Christian.

Things were great and I was enjoying life until I found that I didn’t fit the “Christian mould”. I wore black clothes, I listened to “loud” music, I didn’t say the “right words” and I thought differently. That’s when some Christians I knew started to change me. I slowly became a completely different person and eventually felt trapped. I tried to wear other colours but always seemed to go back to black. I tried to say the right things but it never seemed to come out right. I tried to listen to slower music but it was all so boring. I ended up in a place where I didn’t enjoy doing anything anymore. I was sinking deeper and deeper into depression. I felt like I was meant to be a different person to be a real Christian, but I eventually realised that this wasn’t the way God intended my life to be.

I developed a “meh” attitude and wore my black clothes proudly even though I knew people were looking at me strangely. I listened to my heavy metal Christian music even though I knew people would make a comment about it being “too loud” or something silly like that.
It wasn’t until I got back into MCR that things started to fall back into place.

I started watching music videos on YouTube and stumbled across MCR music videos. The first time I saw I’m not ok and Helena I was hooked and seeing them again it was like I’d stumbled upon something great. I started to remember how I felt when first watched these videos. Then I moved on to more MCR videos (I Don’t Love You, Teenagers, Ghost of You). I feel in love again and something sparked. I had found what made me excited and what made me me. People can call me emo or whatever, I don’t care anymore. MCR (and God) have made me realise that it doesn’t matter what other people think. Life is all about being true to yourself and doing what you love.

I want to make videos/films and work with computers, I don’t care how nerdy that it. I want to be moved emotionally by music, I don’t care how emo that makes me. I want to wear the clothes I feel comfortable in and not be effected by what other people think. MCR seem to have a “f*** you, I’ll do what I want” attitude. Its shown by the way they write songs about whatever they want, they make videos about whatever they want and they live life however they want. I want my life to be similar, but with less swearing =)

Finding emo: It eludes a real definition

From madison.com/wsj

They might be your kids. For sure, they know all about emo and you do not. It is a well-known and common international youth subculture, a celebration of depression that, so far, is virtually invisible to most adults.”For me, the most disturbing part of this emo ‘ phenomenon is the whole I hate my life, I want to die ‘ part, ” says Chelli Riddiough, a junior at Madison West High School. “The I want to cut myself ‘ joke that ‘s not really a joke at all. Thanks to the rejection of forthright emotions, teenage depression is being dismissed as just being emo. ”

Emo is a kind of music, and a kind of fashion style, and above all a kind of demeanor. It ‘s so well known among young people that they already see it as cliche. It ‘s verbal shorthand for “emotional. ” If the term had been current a generation ago, humorous depressives such as Charlie Brown and Woody Allen would have been labeled emo. Except that today it ‘s not funny.

“I have a lot of friends that are truly emo, ” says Alex Policastro, a 17-year-old student at the Madison Area Technical College. “I think emos are people that have had a tough life, or just a tough time, and either need help or should be helped. ”

Searching for emo

Finding emo is rough, if you ‘re older. On the one hand, it ‘s so well known that if you run “emo ” on the Google search engine, you ‘ll find 50.3 million listings. Compare that to, for example, 8.16 million for “Jesus Christ ” or 1.94 million for “bill of rights. ”

That ‘s perhaps not surprising; according to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the average age of the most active creators of Internet-content is 25. Emo seems to skew far younger than that, reaching down even into middle school.

On the other hand, we asked adults if they knew what emo was. We asked school psychologists, area high school and middle school counseling staffs, experts at the UW-Madison School of Education, and the Madison-based Briarpatch youth crisis intervention service. Some had heard of emo. No one could even define it.

So what is emo?

“Oftentimes, emo is used as a derogatory term, a sort of grow up and grow out of it ‘ statement, ” says Riddiough. “For the most part, the term is typified as pessimistic, angsty, self-injurious and even suicidal. And sometimes homosexual, since male and female emo styles are pretty much the same. ”

“I don ‘t know if I ‘d really classify myself as emo, ” says Jennifer Wilson, age 21, a Madison sales associate. But others have called her emo. “It ‘s kind of one of those things that outsiders label others as, if that makes sense. Like, a football player wouldn ‘t label himself as a jock. ‘ ”

“I have been called emo before, ” says Policastro. “I am not emo. If you want, you can categorize me as punk, maybe. ”

Says Riddiough, “Nobody I know would gladly admit to being emo. It ‘s become such a joking term, such an insult, even, that few would seriously describe themselves as such. ”

So despised is emo that one contributor to Yahoo Answers, an advice Web site, confessed to cutting himself. But that wasn ‘t the problem. The problem was that friends labeled him emo as a result. He plaintively complained, “I don ‘t get why ur emo if u cut. It ‘s stupid I think. ”

Emo as a demeanor apparently arose in America. It spread via the Internet to Europe a few years ago. There, at least, it has begun to receive press attention. London ‘s Daily Mail reported that “teenagers are less equipped to manage strong emotions and a cult of suicide could have real and horrible consequences. ” Kathimerini, a Greek newspaper, warns that psychologists there are concerned. In Australia, according to the University of Queensland ‘s Newspace, “Emo is the new vogue. ”

A musical start

At first, emo was just music. “I believe emo came out of the hardcore scene — metal plus punk, ” says Jennifer Hanrahan, a host and DJ at the UW-Madison student radio station WSUM. “However, by the 2000s, emo had become more of a fashion style rather than a musical genre. ”

Hanrahan says that acts such as Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance all became known as emo, even though one could argue that there were differences in their music. Another famous emo band is the Brooklyn-based Rainer Maria, which started in Madison. The band has not responded to requests for comment.

Like individuals labeled emo, “The bands who are commonly called emo don ‘t appreciate the term, ” says Hanrahan.

Still, emo as music was relatively non-threatening, and it therefore played on top 40-radio stations and music television channels, “and so became popular with white middle to upper-class pre-teens and teens, ” Hanrahan says. It became commercial. “Due to its young and affluent audience, emo began to get a bad rap with the wider musical public, whether deservedly or not I can ‘t quite say. ”

The music defined the message, and the message came to define a more or less uniform androgynous fashion sense. “Nowadays, emo is considered as a white teen wearing tight black jeans, heavy mascara, and a floppy hairstyle, ” says Hanrahan. Every emo Web site agrees with the stereotyped portrait: bangs over one or both eyes, Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers and band T-shirts are signature emo traits. With the crystallization of outward style came a defined demeanor.

There has been teen angst as long as there have been teens, of course. We just keep coming up with different names for it; Romeo ‘s Juliet was only 13, after all. Before emo there were the black-clad “goths, ” whose clothes and black and white make-up resembled that of television ‘s “The Addams Family. ” Emo is very different.

“From what I ‘ve observed, Goth is about being angry and trying to be different, ” says Riddiough. “It ‘s about rebelling and, yes, wearing black. Emo is about being sad and emotionally weak. ”

The emo world

If you ‘re an outsider, emo is, above all, easy to ridicule. You can visit www.TheEmoQuiz.com ( “The glass is: a) Half empty, b) Half full, c) Shattered in a million sharp pieces, d) Full of blood “). There are also online cartoons, mocking emo in an artistic style resembling the big sad-eyed kitten posters of the 1960s. One shows a weeping young man, and announces, “Emo is just an excuse for boys to act like girls. ” Another shows an emo kid working on a poem, asking another emo kid, “What rhymes with razor blade? ”

Another common Internet joke is, “I wish my lawn were emo, so it would cut itself. ”

“As for the cutting thing, I don ‘t cut myself, ” says Wilson. “I never have. I know people who have cut themselves that wouldn ‘t be classified as emo. ‘ I know people who are emo that don ‘t cut themselves. I think that it ‘s more of a stereotype than a fact. I wouldn ‘t say there isn ‘t any direct correlation, but then again the whole emo thing ‘ is a huge stereotype anyway. ”

Still, sometimes emo can be a call for help.

“I have a male friend who used to be extremely emo, ” says Wilson. “I once called him to ask what he was up to. He said, I ‘m laying on the floor of my dark, cold basement listening to depressing music. I know, I ‘m emo. ‘ ”

“From my understanding, emo means emotionally disturbed, ‘ ” notes Policastro. “I am trying to spread help to people who need it. ”

Given that emo is most often an unfair stereotype label applied by others, is it necessarily bad?

“I think I definitely have certain emo characteristics, but overall, I ‘m a happy person, ” says Wilson. “The things that I would say about myself that are similar (to emo) are the fact that I love to express myself through things like art, writing, fashion and music. I dress a little less conservatively. I guess if you ‘re going by what emo ‘ is short for, emotional, ‘ then I suppose that could be true too. Everyone ‘s emotional. Maybe we ‘re all a little emo. ”

Riddiough agrees.

“It means the manifestation of sadness and pain, ” she says. “Everybody feels it. Everybody is emo. “

no one understands