United States of Me #

Background #

Been on a nostalgia trip preparing for this video about my first recording experience, making my album “To My Sisters. . .” This is one of the tracks from that record; track 8 of 9, to be exact.

A little backstory;

Surprising exactly no one, I had difficulty fitting in at school. I was the subject of a lot of rumors; I was one of the first goths in my middle school and it kind of went downhill from there. When I missed the first three weeks of 8th grade because of a custody dispute between my parents, things only got weirder.

I distinctly remember a group of boys paying me to leave a room once at a dance, after trying to scare me of with some paper crosses; another time, I was asked if I “really believed I was a raven”, which didn’t even make sense to me. I was a natural antagonist, so it was really just fuel for the fire.

I don’t know if I decided being weird was cool and acted weird, or if I was realizing I was weird and decided that I liked it that way. Either way, originality has always been a theme in my life. Sometimes, I worry my quest for “originality” in my youth has made me innately Too Weird to be understood be other people. I don’t know that I have a choice but to be this way, though, anymore.

Either way, the statement I made then still rings true.

It’s all I’m trying to be.

Lyrics #