The year: 2014. I was a young tweenager browsing the shelves of my middle school library and found myself in the magazine section. I noticed a magazine about music that caught my eye because it had the characteristic orange hair of Hayley Williams on the cover. At that time I was familiar with Paramore because their song Decode had sort of randomly always been in my iTunes library for as long as I could remember even though I personally never purchased it- in my memories it was some sort of promo for the Twilight movies, but I looked it up and couldn't seem to find any evidence of iTunes putting that song in people's libraries for free, so my dad must have purchased it after hearing it on the radio or something. I was obsessed with the song, and Hayley Williams by extension, so I picked up the magazine. Inside were articles all about pop punk bands. The aesthetic really drew me in- I had a friend whom I considered to be much cooler and more knowledgable about the world than me, and she had put me onto nightcore music and scene fashion, so, like, I knew what emo meant in an absract sense. But seeing those articles in that magazine intrigued me, so I checked the magazine out and searched up some of the bands on the YouTube app on my mom's iPod touch.

After Paramore, the next band I started to get into was Panic! at the Disco. I must have watched every single music video they had ever made, sitting there on the floor of my bedroom after school, and I was enthralled. After watching a music video, I would scroll through the suggested videos and search the "emo" tag on Tumblr. This led to me discovering Black Veil Brides, Sleeping With Sirens, and Pierce the Veil. I saw the music called a variety of things- screamo, emo, pop punk, post-hardcore, etc. A girl in my Girl Scout troop asked you if you liked the band Falling in Reverse and I admitted I had never heard of them, so she handed me an earbud and together we listened to the song I'm Not a Vampire during the Girl Scouts meeting haha. I started calling myself emo, looking up any and every band I happened to see a cool edit of on Tumblr or We Heart It- which, sidenote, who else remembers We Heart It???

Once I started calling myself emo, though, one band became truly inescapable. I couldn't scroll on Tumblr or Quotev (y'all remember Quotev???) for more than ten seconds without seeing their name come up- they were considered the originators, the leaders, of the emo/post-hardcore/pop punk genre as I had come to know it. Tragically, they had recently broken up, but people on Tumblr seemed pretty convinced this was a short-term hiatus and they would be back making new music again some day. They were called My Chemical Romance, and their most popular album by far seemed to be The Black Parade. If I was going to go around my middle school calling myself emo, I would have to educate myself. I searched them up on YouTube and clicked on the first result, which was the Teenagers music video.

After that, I'd say the rest is history. I fell head-over-heels in love with their music. At this point, I wasn't super obsessed with the members themselves or the lore or anything like that. I purely liked them because I liked how their music sounded, the aesthetics of their music videos, and many of the lyrics really resonated with me. I listened to all four of their albums- actually I never listened to Bullets all the way through until more recently, sorry- but in those mid-2010s years I only ever got super duper obsessed with The Black Parade. And even still, I never cared to learn the lore or more about the plot or anything, I just really liked the music. Especially the song Famous Last Words. As I went into my teenage years, that song became extremely meaningful to me.

So yeah, I was a casual My Chemical Romance fan between the years of 2014 to 2019. But then, in 2019, my dad was diagnosed with cancer and everything really changed for me. Listening to the Black Parade had taken on a whole new meaning and I gained such a deeper appreciation for the storyline and the lyrics. The story of the Patient grappling with life and death, facing down the fact that he is going to die, was suddenly way too real for me. After my dad's death, I listened to the song Cancer religiously. Gerard's vocals and the straightforward, desperate lyrics felt like they pierced right into my gut and flayed me open. It was so painful to listen to the song, but sort of painful in a good way.

One October evening, alone in my dorm room, I randomly decided to put the album on from start to finish. I had been a little scared to listen to the entire album again after my dad passed away, but it had been a little over ten months since his death at this point and for some reason I was really feeling pulled to listen to it. I sat down on the floor, put my headphones on, and just listened to the entire album, from The End to Blood, while I folded my laundry. I did have to take one break- the song Disenchanted triggered me really badly and I started almost having a panic attack over the lyric "You're just a sad song with nothing to say about a lifelong wait for a hospital stay," but other than that I listened uninterrupted. IDK if any other autistic people can relate to this, but sometimes you're consuming a piece of media and you just feel something sliding into place inside yourself and you're like oh, okay, this is going to be My Thing now. This has become Important To Me. That's what happened to me when I listened to the Black Parade in October of 2020.