I have difficulty crying. I don’t think I’ve shed a tear in almost two years. I sometimes tell my friends that I have cried recently. It’s always a lie. I just figure that those are situations where I feel sad and a normal person would cry. Break-ups. Fights with family. Struggles with mental health. Loneliness. A billion reasons to cry and not a single tear.
And the closest I get to tears are the times when I listen to this song at 2 am to remind myself that I am loved. I listen to a lot of music at 2 am, dancing to death metal to try and remind myself that I am still human. I listen to a lot of extreme music, as I’m sure you’ll see if you go through all these songs. I grew up with it. It’s very much part of my identity.
Extreme music is many things to me. It is many things that a lot of other music just isn’t for me. The entire ethos of the myriad genres is that of defiance. Fighting those who try to push you down. Rebelling against power structures. A community built around shared loneliness, anger, and frustration. It’s music that is filled with such intense emotion that it makes up for my dulled heart.
Rise Against is very much a band that exists in that framework. Their songs are deeply beautiful, deeply political, deeply angry. I love basically everything they’ve written for so many reasons. I listen to them for so many reasons. Yet at 2 am, when I am feeling so, so inhuman this is always the song I turn to. Because I am not alone. Because I will always have the support of other people. And because other people will need me to support them. It speaks to a lot of the things I’ve struggled with. It speaks to a lot of the forces trying to tear us down and is filled with so much rage and sadness and emotion that I can’t help but see myself as part of something greater. Something so deeply Alive. And that reminder that we are Alive and we are Connected and we are Beautiful and we are Loved and we are Love. I don’t know, it just really gets to me when I need it. It’s one of those songs that’s just there whenever I need it.
