The love of my life left me. The only thing I have left that still brings me any kind of satisfaction is gatekeeping emo - not just the genre, but the word itself. The smug feeling I get after reminding someone that it was originally short for "emotional core" is one of the only things that still brings me joy in this hopeless, lonely world.
I wish I could go back to the past and she could give me back all of my time and money and there was no more pain. I can't forgive her for ending everything we had together. For want of a time machine, I just spend all my days off work scrolling through YouTube and Instagram comment sections to remind people that The Black Parade is not, and never will be an emo album. It's all there is for me now.
It feels like I'm running around in circles, distracting myself with Reddit posts and pedantic conversations until I cry myself to sleep. I hate myself, and I am the hated. The flux of my tears only stops when I'm gatekeeping and the only way I can feel better about my loneliness is by redirecting my self-hatred onto the kids in my local scene.
It's gotten to the point where I intentionally seek out posers just to remind them that it's not about the fashion, it's about being absolutely miserable and completely alone. Every night I look up "emo girls" on Reddit just to verbally degrade them for being fake emo through my laptop screen. I spend every waking second of my free time waiting for somebody to call a nu metal band emo so I can lash out at them.
Love has ruined my mind to the point that I can't even think about anything except gatekeeping anymore. My dad will try to talk to me about getting therapy and it'll somehow turn into me explaining how Midwest emo only makes sense as a geographical descriptor. My brother told me my relationship was never meant to be and I started frothing at the mouth. I can't even listen to emo music because it would distract me from the gatekeeping.
Every day that she's gone, my definition of emo becomes more and more stringent. Even Braid has started to sound just like the mallcore she used to listen to. My grasp on reality is so weak now that I don't even know if I can call Moss Icon an emo band anymore. All my top bands are mainstream sellouts with over 30,000 spotify listeners and I haven't even seen a show since I was 17 because the scene died when I stopped going out. If I break down all that I am, I can't even say for sure that I'm emo.
I'm getting so tired of living like this bu
