On Blogging and the Evils of Emo

There was a time when young people, wracked with angst and unnameable frustration, had no way to verbally outlet their feelings other than venting them, out loud, to a friend, in person.

Thank God such barbarism is behind us.

Then came the Blogging Age, when any twelve year old with an email account could throw a up a weblog and shout from the virtual mountaintops to any schmuck willing to listen.

And shout we did. About anything. And everything. It was self-centered, indulgent, and over-dramatic, but it was also cathartic, and expressive, and everything I needed when I was 16. I continued blogging through my early twenties, but all the while something was shifting.

Emo became a thing. Not "emo" as description of style, or "emo" as a vague off-shooting subset of American indie-rock, but "emo" as a derogatory term for anything emotional.

"Stop being emo," we said to the whiners.

 But dammit, we also said it to people who were just hurting, to people who had something legitimate to say. And so we, as a generation, shamed ourselves into shutting up about things that actually mattered to us.

We moved on to the microblogs like Twitter and Facebook statuses, and eventually just throwing pictures at each other with Instagram. Which is fine. I enjoy those, actually.

But somewhere along the way we lost something. I don't think some of us ever got over the idea that "emo" is bad, and that no one wants to hear what we have to say (outside of short, newsfeed-able microbursts of expression).

So I'll say it now, for what little it's worth, for what little it means coming from me:

Emo is okay.

Blogging is okay.

And I'll whine that from the virtual mountaintops to any schmuck willing to listen.