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High school full of Marilyn Manson, anarchy symbols and a lot of pot
September 27, 2005
I belonged to a different clique of people in high school than most. The "headbangers," the "hessians" and even the "skaters" were some of the names given to us.
None of these were really accurate labels for us, but we rolled our eyes and took it in stride.
One thing about our clique was that we held a pretty elitist mentality: everyone else was blind and wrong, and we were supremely right. Passing through the hallways in school, we saw everyone else as cattle in the herd. Lemmings just marching along to the same tune, eventually fated to fall off the cliff (the cliff being a house with a family, dog and white picket fence).
We were outcasts. A handful of kids who didn't fit in anywhere else. We were strange and alien in the eyes of others. And in turn, we embraced this self-fulfilling prophesy.
We wore a lot of black clothes, we took drugs, hung out in packs and glared at everyone else. We found a connection in our oddities, which brought us together.
But contrary to popular stereotypes, we weren't just a bunch of pot-smoking losers. A lot of us were of above-average intelligence. We read philosophy and classic literature. We found comfort in many forms of art, the most prominent being music. While most high-schoolers were going to homecoming and prom, partying with beer-bongs and cruising around in their parent-bought expensive cars, we were asking questions about life that most don't ponder until later in college.
We questioned everyone and everything. The state and institution were our enemies. We found enjoyment in rebellion, regardless of the cause. Lifting our noses in the face of authority, we scrawled anarchy symbols everywhere we went and preached about "The Man" and his oppressive tyranny of us all. Oddly enough, to this day, I'm still not sure who "The Man" is.
But because of the way we were viewed, our destiny was drawn out long before we even had a choice. I never knew how my life was going to unfold when I was a young teenager. I never imagined that some of my high-school years would be filled with drug-induced, zealous conversations about the meaning of life, with Marilyn Manson blasting through speakers in the background.
Around my senior year, I realized that I didn't choose to be in this clique. It chose me. It chose all of us. We didn't listen to the kind of music we did just because we liked it-it spoke of who we were. The things that defined us.
There's a line from a Marilyn Manson song that I still think about today. Repeating over and over, Manson screams, "No salvation, no forgiveness." This line says so much about what we were finding out about ourselves at the time. We lived in a world where we saw no salvation-no hope in the future. Many of us were the way we were because of things we had gone though growing up, traumatic and otherwise. And we had no forgiveness for anyone, ever. Even if it was a scapegoat, we blamed the way we were on society and our peers.
To quote yet another Manson song, "This is your world in which we grow, and we will grow to hate you." That was our mantra back then-a bleak, angst-filled dogma that we all lived by.
As an adult, I've since abandoned many of the aspects of that part of my childhood. I'm a little wiser now, and one thing I've learned is the art of self-responsibility. I've also learned that I wasn't quite as unique as we thought we were back then-that there are a lot of fundamental aspects of life that we all share, good and bad.
But I still have a bit of an edge to me. The world still sometimes seems a dark and scarred place. I still have my doubts about humankind, and I still often think I'm privy to an insight that's not shared by the majority of people.
Regardless, I still believe that the life unfolding in front of me isn't one that I necessarily chose. For someone like me-that has gone through the experiences and lived the way I have-there was just no other way for my life to unfold. But, I suppose, isn't that true with all of us?
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