Excuse the fuck out of me but… FUCK THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I want to see none more of these ads because this teaches people to define themselves by others. As an adult who changed for others growing up so many times – I took me actual years to find out who I was when I finished high school. Did a I really like these bands? Did I really like these shows, books, and games? I was a collage-like shadow of the people around me at any given time until I was eighteen years old wading the waters of uncertainty until college.
I was starting over with no friends and no personality outside my pressing depression and anxiety, and my frantic hot-mess-mom status. Still, I wasn’t defining myself – I was defined by my status as a mother and my affliction of mental illness. It would be a whole year, when I was turning nineteen, that I realized I could exist as an individual uniquely. That is when I saw myself make a mark on someone else that belonged to me. My love of something that I could share with another person who became genuinely vested in it as equally as myself. It was not a forced behavior or a shadowed one – but one that I actually shared. It was a joint interest. Our love of the thing was not manufactured by either party.
That friend – I lost her when we graduated. We were just different people, it seemed, and we went our separate ways. But she still loves those things I shared with her, maybe quietly, but it’s still present and strong. Since then I have spent the last five years figuring out who I am while dealing with depression and anxiety as “curveballs” instead of “traits” of who I am. I have made being a parent a factor in who I am in a way that is unique to me and my personality. No more do I say “I’m a young mom” as though it’s just another piece of my identity puzzle. Instead I say it distinctly because there is no other mom exactly like me in the entire world.
I don’t want people to see ads like this an be shaped by the lies, the indecision, and the dependency that it creates. I want commercials that move me – ads that understand me – and media that shows the world what it’s capable of rather than what this fodder encourages us to become in life: forever impressionable.
I want you to like that band because you fucking like it and don’t give a fuck what anyone else says or thinks. People will like you for you, even if they don’t like the same things, because people like personalities. People fall in love with who you are as a whole. Not the pieces of personality that you can collect from everyone else.
So in closing, I kindly reiterate.
FUCK THIS!
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