The following are the stories of a father and daughter that have been helpful in the creation of this site.
"Stephanie's" Story
When I was thirteen, one of my friends got into the “emo scene.” At first, I thought it was weird, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. My friend kept telling me how special it made people and how it was “real hardcore.” I didn’t see any point to it then. At that time, I guess you could say that I was the typical “good kid.” I didn’t really do anything wrong. I played softball, got good grades, didn’t get into trouble. I was a boring kid, I guess. My friend kept bothering me to get into this emo stuff. She had been my friend for a long time, and we used to share everything. She was like a sister to me, so I gave in and just started hanging out with her and the other emo kids.
When I started hanging out with them, I was still me, and what they were doing seemed to be pretty strange. They would light candles around pictures of BAND NAME DELETED They would talk about how life is so dark, so meaningless, that no one really understood them and that everyone is against them. I just sat there and couldn’t really understand what they were talking about. My life was good. My parents cared, they checked on me, they went on trips with me, and actually talked to me like I was a human being. I knew they loved me!
The more and more that I spent time with them, the more their ideas started to get to me. I started to suspect that anytime that my parents told me that I couldn’t do something that they didn’t care. At least that’s what my new emo friends told me. I started to see things negatively. Even more important, I started to see positive things as negative things. For example, good grades were “selling out.” My thinking was starting to turn negative, and I didn’t even know it at the time. Anytime something went wrong, my new friends were there to tell me that it happened because people didn’t care, that everyone hated me. I started to believe them. It was almost as if they were trying to separate me from my parents and my non-emo friends. They’d tell me that everyone else hated what we were. They said that emo was the only “real” thing, and that everyone else is “fake.” It was like they were changing my reality, though I didn’t know it at the time. I started to think that my parents hated me, and I started to stay away from them.
I started to get more into emo. By then, I didn’t have friends that weren’t emo. I stopped playing sports. I still was getting OK grades, but those eventually dropped too. After all, everything other than emo is “fake”, right? One night, the others came to me and told me that it was time for me to become “true hardcore.” They said to be a “real emo,” you had to “show your pain.” They sat in a circle around me, gave me a razor, and told me that the only way to be a true emo was to cut myself. I had seen the scars on their bodies, I knew they were cutting. I always had thought that it was a sick idea, but I never thought that they’d want me to do it too. I didn’t really want to cut myself then and there, but that made it look like it was a good thing. I was also afraid that if I didn’t cut, they’d reject me and I had already left my other friends. I didn’t want to be alone! The put on BAND NAME DELETED almost a full volume and they just looked at me like I was expected to cut.” I started to cry, but I gave in and cut myself in a place that would be easy to hide (I won’t say where because I don’t want other kids to follow what I did.). After I had done it, the girls in the circle came and hugged me. On one hand, I was horrified about what I had done to myself. On the other, I felt so good to be loved (at least I thought it was love), and the cutting seemed to take the tension out of me. I felt relaxed, and loved.
From there, my life started to go down. I never did school work. My grades went to failing. I had no motivation for anything other than emo music and “the blade you stain.” That’s what we called the things we used to cut. My cutting eventually got to the point that I was doing it about five times a week. It’s hard to explain why cutting is so fascinating. It just is. My therapists and doctors tell me it’s an addiction. I can see why. It really feels good in a way. I know that it seems crazy, but trust me, it does.
As for the lifestyle, I got further and further into emo. I got onto the forums, and I read about the hopelessness, death, and suicide. I read about the cutting, and how to try to hide it. Everything I looked at “proved” what my friends were telling me. The music was big for me too. I won’t get too far into it. I don’t want other kids to get trapped like I was. I will say that BAND NAME DELETED was a big influence for me and my emo friends. We would listen to them all the time. BAND NAME DELETED shirts and hoodies were a major part of our “uniforms.” We would quote the lyrics before we would cut. They were our gods!! We though that we were doing what we were supposed to do. We thought we were following the true religion. We were idiots to do anything just because a band suggested it.
My relationship with my family went bad too. My parents were the same. I had changed. They tried to talk to me, I ignored them. They tried to get me to go do things with them, I rejected them. They kept on reaching out. I kept on turning away. They kept trying to help me and I thought they were trying to take my life away. My emo life, that is. It wasn’t them, it was me. I chose emo over them. I chose to believe the messages on the sites and in the music. BAND NAME DELETED had become my family, my parents were my enemy. That’s the part that I really feel bad about. They have been, and always will be great to me, and I refused to let them help me. I still feel pretty guilty about that. I still remember the look on my father’s face when he found me cutting. He looked like someone stabbed him in his heart. I knew that I was causing other people pain, just not myself.
After that, I tried to kill myself. I remember reading about people that committed suicide on the forums. I thought that it was a way out, and I always liked how there would be “tribute” sites made up for people that committed suicide. It was almost like they were made out to be heroes or something. I’m not going to say what I did. I don’t want others to do the same. I was lucky, my parents found me just in time. I nearly succeeded. I’ve read about how emos think they join the “black parade” when they die. I’ve never heard anyone say that. I (now) think it’s a metaphor. I can understand how some emos would say it though. After all, that’s what MCR said. There were a lot of us that thought that this was what BAND NAME DELETED wanted us to do.
After my suicide attempt, I went to a psychiatric hospital for about three weeks. My parents kept me from anything emo. One of the therapists gave them a link to Dr. Emo’s site. (I heard she hates that name, but I think my father teases her with it.) So they took emo away from me. I hated them for it. I cursed at them, threatened them, and basically made their lives hell. I thought my world was being taken from me. They stood up to me and told me how much they loved me. They said it in their words, and showed it in their actions. As I started to feel better about myself, I started to loose the negative thoughts that emo had given me. I started to think clearly again. I could see the world for what it is, not like some pit of misery. Emo lost its power over me. I had left the cult.
I stopped thinking that BAND NAME DELETED were gods, and I saw them for what they were. They’re a band that makes millions and millions of dollars off of kids like me. They probably live in mansions and fly in private planes. I doubt they have any misery or pain. They have a record company to market them and profit from all the shirts and other merchandise they conned us into buying. Basically, they have an image, and the marketing people build on that! They’re an act with an image, nothing more. All the stories about their lives and what they do in real life are probably written by some marketing company or something like that. In ten years, they’ll be on a VH1 special about has-been bands (that’s my father’s joke. I agree.).
Now, I really am OK. I’m away from emo. I threw out my BAND NAME DELETED stuff. That’s by my own choice. I feel like I’ve lost two years of my life. I can get that back. My scars will heal one day. I can’t wait. When I see them now, I remember how I was tricked into something that is just a marketing ploy.
As for my emo friends, most of them are still emo. They stopped talking to me when I decided to stop. They tried to spread rumors about me, but no one cared. Since the emos has threatened other people that have spoke out, I am in a private school. The friend that got me started in emo is in some kind of residential program. She went to the hospital about five times for cutting and trying suicide, so she was placed. The last I heard, she’s still emo, and still cutting. She’ll probably either get better one day, or die for emo. Lucky for me, emo isn’t worth a moment of my time! It’s definitely not worth my life!
I’ve read Dr. Emo’s forum. I saw that the emos were posting there. Honestly, if I was still emo, I’d be doing that too. We knew what were doing. We just didn’t want to get caught. We didn’t want anyone figuring out what was going on. We were convinced that everyone was against us. They just didn’t understand how “real” this all was!
Dr. Emo’s site is pretty much right. I saw the pictures there. I read the poetry, I listened to the music. I was doing just what she is talking about. I can see why the emos want her dead. She’s pointing out what they are doing. She’s also insulting their “gods.” They don’t want to be caught anymore than I did.
I know that the emos will threaten me. I’m glad Gary offered to put the site up so they can’t find me or my family. I just hope he stays safe! I know that I’ll be called a liar. They’ll say I made it up, but the scars are real. There isn’t anything they can say now that’ll change the truth. I’m a survivor, and no one can take that away from me.
Walter's Story
My daughter was a
"normal kid." She was smart, creative, athletic. We really didn't
have any big problems with her. She wasn't perfect. No kid is, but
she was (and is) a good, kindhearted human being.
When she was
thirteen, things began to change. She started spending time with some
local kids that were into emo. At the time, my wife and I thought nothing
of it. We remembered being kids. Teens always have to do things to
make themselves individuals. We thought it was just a phase and she
would be back to being herself at some point. As time wore on,
she began to withdraw from us. We were always a family that did many
things together, but she started to balk at going on family trips, and would
seem very resentful when anything came between her and her friends. Again,
we thought this was nothing more than normal teenaged rebellion, and just tried
to keep her close and try to communicate with her.
As time wore on, she
began to look sad all the time. She became angry any time we questioned
any of her activities. She refused to talk to us. When we approached
her, she would ignore us, or give us short meaningless answers to what she was
doing. He grades began to drop. She dropped out of all of her
activities, and she stopped associating with anyone other than her emo
friends. Anytime that we told her she could not do something, or could
have something, she would scream at us and claim that we hated her. Also,
we didn't pick up on it at the time, but she always seemed to be wearing long
sleeves, or wristbands. We just thought it was part of the "uniform." I
also remember that it was a struggle on laundry day when my wife or myself
wanted to wash her BAND NAME DELETED hoodie. She would get very upset
with that.
At this point, we were getting very fearful for our
daughter. She was doing nothing at school. She was with either in
her room, on her computer, or with her emo friends. Late one night, the
bathroom door was open, so I walked in. I didn't expect anyone else to be
in there. My daughter never heard me because she was listening to her MP3
Player. I saw my daughter with a razor in her hand, cutting her
wrists. I was shocked. At the time, I just froze. I couldn’t
believe what I was seeing. My daughter ran out of the bathroom and locked
herself in her bedroom. I got my wife out of bed and we went to my
daughter’s room. We had to force the door, and when we got inside, we
found our daughter attempting to hang herself. Her lips were starting to
turn blue when I lifted her to take the pressure of her head and neck as my wife
struggled to remove the cord from her neck. We called 911, and after she
was medically stabilized, she was taken to a psychiatric facility. I have
to be honest. I don’t like reliving that moment. I still wake up a
night in a panic about that. I share it because I think others need to
know about this subculture. We are not the only family that has seen
this.
When my daughter was
in the hospital, one of the therapists there gave us the link to “Dr. Emo’s”
site. When I saw that, everything that happened became clear to me.
We worked on this in her therapy, and I took all of the emo related things out
of my daughter’s room, and packed it up. I found quite a few razors, and
books of poetry that talked about suicide, cutting, and how all life is hopeless
and that death is the only way out of the misery. When she came back, we
discussed the matter, and that we were removing her from the subculture.
She raged at first, but she seemed to accept it more and more as time wore
on. Her therapist said that as she got away from the negative influences,
she would see life more rationally. This turned out to be true. She became
more and more like herself. It took months, but the longer she was away
from emo, the more and more we saw of the upbeat kid that we hadn’t seen for
nearly two years.
One day, she came to
me and said that it was time to get rid of her “emo stuff.” We threw most
of it away in the garbage. There were a few things that she wanted to
burn. I think it was symbolic for here. So we went to the back yard
and burnt her poetry book, some posters, and her BAND NAME DELETED hoodie.
My daughter is in private school now. With all the threats made against Dr. Emo and the others, we decided that it would be safer to stay in a more protected environment.