When Both Our Cars Collide

I'll never forget the moment I first laid eyes upon Gerard Way. 

It was 2006. I was a teenage girl who had just decided she wanted to get into rock music. I started with the classics and was working my way up to the present day. While Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and a slew of other dad-rock bands were cool and all, I had a real hunger for something to move my modern soul. I didn't have a clear sense of what that would feel like yet. I just heard the call. It brought me to MTV.com.

There I was, on the site, seeing what sounds were coming from the world of rock circa early millennium. I came upon this picture of a...man? Woman? I wasn't sure at the time (we weren't non-binary back then). All I saw was this being with long black hair, red eye makeup, and a pained but exquisite expression. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but like a moth to a fire, I was urged to come near. I had no idea that what I was about to click on would alter my life forever. 

What began playing was the music video for Helena. My mouth actually dropped. I stopped breathing. I couldn't comprehend the sudden gravity of what I was witnessing. It was a home I recognized but had never actually seen in real life. Something my dreams had always hinted at, everything my heart had been silently asking for. It reeked of drama, of emotion, of a darkness that I sensed but could never name, resting comfortably in Gerard's wide open hands.

I couldn't believe this man existed. That someone could look like this, move like this, and be out there in the world. Whatever this mysterious essence was, it was distilled down into one perfect human. He was the utter embodiment of whatever you could call this art form. He was art.

Besides the daring of his appearance, the other thing that immediately grabbed me about him was the sheer vulnerability he had unleashed in himself. I mean, the man is practically ugly crying during the whole entire video. Every lyric is dripping with his wailing passion. For this alone, to me, he was more than art, he a miracle.

After spending years growing up around people who buried their most tender emotions but erupted at the first site of anger, I felt right at home with major emotional displays. The refreshing relief I felt was seeing someone finally express their sadness too, in just as elaborate a fashion as their rage. Gerard never held back his pain. It was so opaque. Until I heard the bells of My Chemical Romance, I never knew something that was long hidden in myself: how sad I actually was.

I grew up never feeling like I was good enough. In a space where I could've felt the safest, I was bullied and attacked for my every way of being. My self-expression, as a result, got squashed as a form of protection from the wrath of others. I responded with a toughness of my own and a great deal of hiding myself from the people I loved. When this video came my way, the fortress around my heart was sieged, and all that was left was the sad little girl who wanted to sing and play and dress up her artistic expression, just like this band.

In an attempt to uncover the depths of my newfound emotions, I fell in love with Gerard. I truly felt like we were the same scarred soul mates. I had to know everything about him. What it was like growing up for him, how he was able to process these feelings, and how he created such magnificent art as a result. Loving Gerard was a kind of self-imposed therapy. I needed to feel better. Gerard was the door and the key.

Not only did I love him, but I wanted to be him. I wanted to know what he knew, how he was so perfectly able to transmute pain into beauty. I started dressing like him. I cut my hair like him. I even got green eye contacts. I became an actress in a permanent Gerard Way cosplay. By some magic or osmosis, I was going to figure this man out.

As I grew up with Gerard's music, I realized that what was special about him was that he had no barriers to being vulnerable and expressing his image exactly as he saw fit. Sure, he had pain, but nothing was going to stop him from letting it out because he saw nothing wrong with it. It was something he had, it wasn't who he was. He was going to exorcise it all in the funeral pyre that was his band. That was entirely admirable.

My Gerard costume with time got dropped and I began to find my own pyre. More than one, in fact. I began to dress in my own, newly discovered style. I began drawing and taking photographs. I also had a brief stint in a band that was essentially a copycat to Gerard's but it taught me that I loved performing, and if anything else, being on a stage was a great catharsis to me. I pursued that with everything I had and quickly rose in the ranks of the theatre department of my high school. I even went to college for it. But not without some reservation.

Before leaving high school, I had been several years without listening to My Chemical Romance. I picked them back up briefly and was filled with a surge of remembrance. A familiar passion overtook me that had me question if I really wanted to be an actress or if instead I really wanted to be a singer. Well, the previous band failed, I couldn't write music, and I was just a "pretty good" singer. I wasn't great. But I sure could act. It seemed like a silly question to be asking myself, so I continued down the course I was already on.

Midway through college, I heard that My Chemical Romance was breaking up. Made sense considering their last record wasn't nearly as superb as their previous three. Still, it felt like a part of my past was finally dying and needed to be mourned. I lit a candle for the death of the band and gave their albums another listen. Again, they moved me, Gerard had me, and I was struck by that same question...what would it be like to be a singer? Honestly, it was something I wanted to do when I was a little girl. It just felt too risky now. I was already established in myself as an actress. You can guess what decision I made.

In the years that followed college, after much trial, error, and misery, I stopped acting. It never felt like enough. I always wanted to explore myself. The characters I played always called me to explore someone else. I was speaking someone else's words, appearing in other people's images, trying to fit into someone else's vision. Not my own. As someone who always longed to plumb her own depths and then share them with the world, I was bored and entirely lacking, once again, in self-expression. I had created the perfect trap for myself.

Cut to this year. 2020. Covid-19 hits and out of some random stroke of inspiration, I put on a My Chemical Romance album for the first time since the band broke up. I hear my old familiar friends on the guitar, the drums, the bass. Then I hear Gerard. BOOM. Like a collision, I am hit with that question one final time: what would it be like to let myself sing?

I realized at that moment how deep the misery has gone. And where it all began. It wasn't the fault of the people who belittled me. It was me. It was always me. I had perfected the defense mechanism of dampening myself in order to avoid people finding fault with me, and as a result, I took my most natural form of self-expression and buried it underground for the rest of my life. And here it was, coming back from the dead, asking me to fill it with my lifeblood. It was quarantine. I had nothing to lose and perhaps everything to gain. Gerard's siren call finally got me. I decided to sing.

Now I shamelessly listen to My Chemical Romance throughout each and every day. I am getting singing lessons. I am writing music. I am playing instruments. And most importantly, I started my own band. In the middle of Covid. We write songs every week and are growing in confidence. I couldn't be happier. I'm finally feeling that thing real artists always talk about: doing something because you must. Genuinely not caring about riches and fame, but just doing the thing because it is the only time you feel alive. That's me now. Thanks to Gerard, I am finally unleashed. I am self-expressed.

Even though I'm not crushing on Gerard anymore, I've learned a lot about him in these past few months, and as an adult, I have more appreciation for him than ever. Turns out my teenage hunch was right, and we have tons in common. Our spirituality, our philosophy on life, our sense of humor, the kinds of songs we want to write, and so much more. He really is a remarkable man and I'm still learning so much from him. What's most exciting now is that I can listen to him from the space of being a fellow musician, which means there's a whole new area with him to explore. I couldn't be more thrilled.

I am so blessed by each and every time Gerard comes back into my life. He has always been my patron saint of self-expression. I am eternally grateful to him. Every time I felt dead, he brought a jolt of electricity into my chest to bring me back. Now I am finally revived. Free from my old protected facade, I am finally the real, self-expressed me.

I don't think I'll have to wait for him to swing back around to revive me again in the future. I think this time he's here to stay. And so am I.