Gerard Way | My Hero
“Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.”
― Gerard Way
When quarantine started I began a self-improvement course and one of our homework was to list out heroes. First of all, a hero is not the same as someone you admire. A hero is someone who you identify with and at the end of the day they will save you in a particular moment. For example, if I’m at a party and someone throws shade at me, I would ask myself “what would my hero do in this situation?” Is a way to resolve problems instead of letting them pass by.
Wynona Ryder is my absolute hero, she is so cool! I love the way she dresses, the way she embraces her weirdness and how she chooses friends wisely. But in class my classmates had like 15 heroes to look up to so my teacher told me to look for another hero because Wynona Ryder doesn’t sum up all of what I’m trying to let out from hiding and become my true self.
I gave up. Having a hero is hard, not everyone is adequate. Until. It was Saturday afternoon and I was updating my Spotify playlists. I found a cool emo playlist that took me back to when I was 11 years old.
My Chemical Romance was a band that I wasn’t allowed to hear and I’m not talking about my parents, my friends thought it was depressing music and if I listen to that genre I wouldn’t be allowed to sit at their table on recess. That’s middle school, I needed to survive so I got stuck to listening to Taylor Swift’s country music.
So let’s go back to the playlist I found. I listened to every MCR’s album and cried in every song. Gerard Way is the definition of genius. He is creative, a poet, cartoonist, writer he is everything a creative person wants to be. He speaks his mind and gets the people who are told not to hear emo music because they would be left alone in recess. He wrote a comic book, The Umbrella Academy, which is incredible.
He told in one of his many interviews that sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person. He is right. What he did in his music, comics and everything else, is literally him saying to us that we are not alone and that no one is going to bring us down on the things we love to do. We should be able to embrace our weirdness and become the superhero we would always liked to be.
I have this part of the song “Welcome To The Black Parade” on every notebook I have which is an absolute hit and an anthem to all the damned. This is a way I remind myself that no one and nothing can take me down:
Do or die, you’ll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you’ll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part
I won’t explain or say I’m sorry
I’m unashamed, I’m gonna show my scars
Give a cheer for all the broken
Listen here, because it’s who we are
I’m just a man, I’m not a hero
Just a boy, who had to sing this song
I’m just a man, I’m not a hero
I don’t care.
If you haven’t heard an MCR song in your life, please have the chance to hear it. You won’t regret it because just like our parents have the “Yellow submarine” or “Radio Gaga” we will always have “The Black Parade” having our backs. That’s why Gerard Way is my hero.
Finally, I leave you a quote.
“If for one minute you think you’re better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day t-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn’t know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.”
― Gerard Way
