Emotional

Ever since Green Day announced their Hella Mega Tour with Fall Out Boy and Wheezer and the long-awaited return of My Chemical Romance finally came to fruition, I've seen the words Emo Revival be tossed around. Now, I've got tickets to be seeing both of these concerts in June this year in London and my eyeliner has never been darker and my serotonin never higher.

But, that doesn't mean I'm happy with calling myself Emo. I wasn't happy to call myself Emo back when it was first being tossed around in the alternative scene.

The early 2000's didn't coin the term. It first emerged as a sub-genre in the mid 1980s and was officially coined as a term in the 1990s with the emergence of bands such as Jimmy Eat World and the aforementioned FOB and Wheezer. Emo is simply short for "Emotional," referring to the emotionally charged and sometimes confessional nature of lyrics from alternative bands at the time.

Despite being regarded by much of pop culture as one of the main headliners of the genre, aforementioned band My Chemical Romance expressed distaste for the label on their music and would stand by this opinion for most of their initial career pre-reunion.

Here's my problem with the Emo label in everyday usage, particularly in describing people.

Emo's connection with mental health.

Throughout my adolescent years I noticed a harmful pattern emerge between the 'popular' crowd versus the alternative community, where the word Emo was used to degrade anyone who either visibly, emotionally, or actively didn't fit in with the mainstream crowd often in a bullying type manner.

I'm pretty sure there was even a rapper who talked about 'being emo' in a satirical, harmful way back in 2008, but maybe that was fever dream of mine.

Perhaps one of the worst associations with the term is the image of self-harm. As someone who has continued to struggle with self-harm since the age of 12, to watch and experience something that I and many others struggle with become slotted into a simple derogatory label was disheartening and demoralizing.

My own mother once called me Emo, unaware of the negative connotions the word carried in my generation and of the fact that I was self-harming (I wouldn't tell her that I was until two years after this).

I never understood how it was so easy for some people to dismiss my mental health problems as a "phase" or a scene for them to slap a label on and drag it through the dirt. I was self-harming before I discovered Emo, and I self-harmed after the craze had passed. I didn't self-harm because I was or wanted to be what the mainstream considered Emo.

I self-harmed because I have mental illness.

So, in wake of this so-called Emo Revival taking place I'm cautious about using the word Emo to describe a person because for someone like me it could bring up memories and feelings of a time where it was easy to slander someone's mental health without even knowing about it.

That won't stop me from listening to my favorite bands that I listened to back then, wearing black and smudging black eyeliner on whenever I feel like it. I listen to certain music because I resonate with the emotions the creators pour into each lyric and I can find something of myself in their stories, their words, their struggles and their victories. Does that make me Emo?

Not in the way it used to mean.

I'm emotional. I'm complicated. I'm sick. I'm struggling. I'm conquering.

I'm simply a human who chooses to feel.