EMO - wasn't he on Sesame Street : Two Australian teens hang themselves.
Donna Williams
April 26, 2007
When two local Australian high school teenagers and My Space enthusiasts, Stephanie Gestier and Jodie Gater, were found hanging by their necks from a tree down the road from us, the buzz word EMO began informing those of us over 30 of the sad plight of these emotionally sensitive, passionate creatures. It was within days of the Virginia shootings in which a student killed 33 people on his college campus. In a world where notoriety is the new status, was this co-incidence? Why did these teens so obviously post your their own cryptic and teasing RIP type messages on public chat rooms? And why declare one’s depth of love for others the day before killing oneself if one didn’t have enough caring for oneself to avoid the compulsion to commit this group suicide?
Like the goths of the Victorian era, EMOs indulge in passion like chocoholics indulge Tim Tams. They drip with melodrama and pathos. When criticised that their pain is not genuine but contrived they match this with ‘evidence’ provided by often bravado-related self harm episodes and progressive self isolation which they claim are expressions of the depths which others don’t understand them or care.
Emotional blackmail is part of the process and comes with the territory. Because those indulging the EMO thing are so invested in the associated status and power of their self harming roles, gaining them professional treatment can sometimes mean they are compelled to make themselves so ‘deeply pained’ as to prove ‘treatment resistant’. In the EMO heirachy the person proving the deepest, most genuine, most urgent pain, becomes the focus, the buzz, of the group, so climbing that heirarchy means one must be prepared to be pretty ghastly to oneself. Clearly reminding them that many children in third world countries are dying of malnutrition, AIDS and facing child labor and prostitution isn’t likely to rock their boat because you’re only offering them an opt out of the heirarchy. Why should they take that opt out, its a game and they intend to move from dabblers to be key players if not ‘winners’. Ultimately, the highest proof of how genuine their pain supposedly is, the way to reach that star position, is suicide.
But this passion is not a passion for happiness, its a passion for self pity and an almost religious, self-hypnotic group reinforcement that ‘life is pain’ and that nobody understands an EMO like another EMO. Hence, they turn to chat rooms to support each other, play ‘rescue me’ and ‘poor me’ mind games with each other and themselves, and tease each other into ‘learning the truth’ or ‘confessing’ to their latest slash, jab, burn or overdose episode.
Like all addictive and obsessive-compulsive indulgences, there are emotional fixes people get bleeding their hormones for seemingly endless sappy emotion to bathe themselves in, getting high on the promise of an audience, a rescue or the ‘dirty little’ secret ‘nobody knows’ that they are a self harmer and everyone is going to remember them with such deep sorrow, so deep, so passionate, exactly as the EMO culture itself would dictate.
But EMOs aren’t conformist, are they? How could they be? They’re goth, punk hybrids. These were hardly conformist movements. Think again. Conformity isn’t a world of conservatism. Conformist-nonconformity is a global phenomenon as authoritarian, dictatorial, and stuffed with its own inherent potential stigmas for any who dare the real individuality to say ‘it gets old’, to give up such stuff for real individuality. And individuality, true individuality, is one of the lonliest of life’s paths.
Real eccentrics, not the personality transplanted version who mindlessly conform to the dictates expectations of subcultures are hard if not impossible to categorise. These days, no pigeon hole, no group, no group, no ‘friends’. Well, at least that’s the assumption. But does a bunch of anonymous strangers clicking a button to introduce themselves really amount to an internal feeling of achieving friendship? What if you thought it did? What if your subculture convinced you this was the real deal and all there was? Would you dare question the obvious emptiness? And if you did would you use that as ammunition to further wallow in self pity or as a prompt to do something more constructive?
It’s always very PC after events like this, to do the grieving and presume undiagnosed depression. But are we open minded enough to look beyond our sugaring of such events and see self-murder, exhibitionism and cult-like group mentality, even culturally promoted personality disorders? If we really feel that these two deaths were such a tragedy then lets honour them not with the pity that the culture addictively seeks, plies for and indulges in, but with understanding.
Donna Williams
www.donnawilliams.net
Like the goths of the Victorian era, EMOs indulge in passion like chocoholics indulge Tim Tams. They drip with melodrama and pathos. When criticised that their pain is not genuine but contrived they match this with ‘evidence’ provided by often bravado-related self harm episodes and progressive self isolation which they claim are expressions of the depths which others don’t understand them or care.
Emotional blackmail is part of the process and comes with the territory. Because those indulging the EMO thing are so invested in the associated status and power of their self harming roles, gaining them professional treatment can sometimes mean they are compelled to make themselves so ‘deeply pained’ as to prove ‘treatment resistant’. In the EMO heirachy the person proving the deepest, most genuine, most urgent pain, becomes the focus, the buzz, of the group, so climbing that heirarchy means one must be prepared to be pretty ghastly to oneself. Clearly reminding them that many children in third world countries are dying of malnutrition, AIDS and facing child labor and prostitution isn’t likely to rock their boat because you’re only offering them an opt out of the heirarchy. Why should they take that opt out, its a game and they intend to move from dabblers to be key players if not ‘winners’. Ultimately, the highest proof of how genuine their pain supposedly is, the way to reach that star position, is suicide.
But this passion is not a passion for happiness, its a passion for self pity and an almost religious, self-hypnotic group reinforcement that ‘life is pain’ and that nobody understands an EMO like another EMO. Hence, they turn to chat rooms to support each other, play ‘rescue me’ and ‘poor me’ mind games with each other and themselves, and tease each other into ‘learning the truth’ or ‘confessing’ to their latest slash, jab, burn or overdose episode.
Like all addictive and obsessive-compulsive indulgences, there are emotional fixes people get bleeding their hormones for seemingly endless sappy emotion to bathe themselves in, getting high on the promise of an audience, a rescue or the ‘dirty little’ secret ‘nobody knows’ that they are a self harmer and everyone is going to remember them with such deep sorrow, so deep, so passionate, exactly as the EMO culture itself would dictate.
But EMOs aren’t conformist, are they? How could they be? They’re goth, punk hybrids. These were hardly conformist movements. Think again. Conformity isn’t a world of conservatism. Conformist-nonconformity is a global phenomenon as authoritarian, dictatorial, and stuffed with its own inherent potential stigmas for any who dare the real individuality to say ‘it gets old’, to give up such stuff for real individuality. And individuality, true individuality, is one of the lonliest of life’s paths.
Real eccentrics, not the personality transplanted version who mindlessly conform to the dictates expectations of subcultures are hard if not impossible to categorise. These days, no pigeon hole, no group, no group, no ‘friends’. Well, at least that’s the assumption. But does a bunch of anonymous strangers clicking a button to introduce themselves really amount to an internal feeling of achieving friendship? What if you thought it did? What if your subculture convinced you this was the real deal and all there was? Would you dare question the obvious emptiness? And if you did would you use that as ammunition to further wallow in self pity or as a prompt to do something more constructive?
It’s always very PC after events like this, to do the grieving and presume undiagnosed depression. But are we open minded enough to look beyond our sugaring of such events and see self-murder, exhibitionism and cult-like group mentality, even culturally promoted personality disorders? If we really feel that these two deaths were such a tragedy then lets honour them not with the pity that the culture addictively seeks, plies for and indulges in, but with understanding.
Donna Williams
www.donnawilliams.net
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