When Courtney Love Comes Out

 

Tortured-type people like The Strokes and Courtney Love have it easy sometimes.
When those people feel insane, they can go insane. When they want to smash things or sing about prostitution-like sex or scream or wear ripped fishnets, they can. Because people won’t look at them all funny. It’s why Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison could hunch over and lie down on stage in the middle of songs. It’s why musicians smash their guitars in the middle of solos.  It’s allowed because it’s expected.
But what happens when people who don’t look like Courtney Love feel like her on the inside?
Though this sounds a little to much like the “popular girl who feels alone even though she has 6 million friends” routine, it’s legit, people. This is why therapy is confidential: so that when Mr. Fabulous feels like shit, people won’t go accusing him of having too much/looking too good/being too happy to be upset.
And though this may oversimplify their Cobain’s problems vs Mr. Fab’s problems, they have one thing in common: at least half of those problems are self-induced. When Cobain rips himself up with drugs, Fabulous destroys himself with contained emotion. And when those tortured artists are having bathroom sex, Fabulous is drinking alone in the bathroom. So what’s the difference?
The difference is this: we feed off those musicians/actors/models’ problems, never once realizing we have them ourselves. And we also don’t realize we ought to allow ourselves to have them, that we ought to accept them. The things that rip our insides out might be the things that identify us. So when we blast “Juicebox” or “But Julian, I’m a Little Bit Older Than You” in our rooms and sing along like we wrote the songs ourselves, we should understand that we did; we wrote them in our heads, we were just too scared to sing them in public.