We Heart It
I don’t really know a whole lot about Bon Jovi except that he was the Pretty Blond Boy of the 80s, which I don’t remember because I wasn’t born yet. Kind of like how River Phoenix was the Golden Boy of the 80s, but I don’t remember that either, because I was only 3 when he died. (But, oh, how I love him. I mean, as much as you can love someone who’s dead and who you’ve never met. Okay, so I really feel more pathos for him than love, but you get what I mean.) Several bloggers whose posts I’ve read and whose posts had anything at all to do with Bon Jovi had the opinion that he was bleh, that he was too pretty with his hair and his smooth face, and other brooding, melodramatic things teenagers said in the 80s. But, seeing as how I didn’t come around until the 90s, and I became equipped with a taste for classic rock thanks to my dad listening to nothing BUT on the drives to school every morning for five years (because before I turned 13, we would only listen to the oldies station; I guess he thought the Everly Brothers were more appropriate than the Rolling Stones), I thought that Bon Jovi was awesome, and I liked his hair, and I thought he was smoking hot in Ally McBeal, even though I never watched it.
While “Living On A Prayer” had a nice beat and it made me laugh when Eric from college would sing it to himself working out statistics problems in the seat next to me, my Bon Jovi Jam was “It’s My Life.” It was the song I wanted to shout in my parents’ faces through the entirety of my adolescence and even still now. In fact, whenever I catch it on the radio, I belt out and imagine my ENTIRE family standing there listening to me tell them that Bon Jovi’s got my back. It’s MY life. It’s NOW or never. I’m not gonna LIVE forever. I just want to LIVE while I’M alive. You get that? My, now, live? YES! “It’s MY life!” I want to yell. “Please stop harassing me about it!” I mean, I could understand if I were a bum druggie who’d flunked out of college and worked at the gas station down the road, but I’m a flipping college graduate. Okay, so our opinions may differ on the worth of my degree, but I did what I wanted to do, and I did it well. Do I know what I want to do right this very second for the rest of my life or even the remainder of the year? Yes and no. I’m undecided. I’m still working on it.
And I know what you’re going to say. “They’re your family, Lauren, they worry and care about you.” Understood. I get that. But you need a better image. My family, while I love them, don’t listen to anything I have to say. They don’t really care about what I’m interested in, and when they’ve broached it in the past, they look at me like I’m weird, they humor me for a few minutes, then they go on about something else. My mom once asked if I plagiarized a short story I wrote in eleventh grade. My dad never sat me down and asked me what I was interested in, instead he shoved me into softball because it was what he was interested in, and then when I didn’t like it after a few years, he got mad. Then on a birthday trip to the mall, I asked my mom if she ever wished I was more normal, and she said yes! Yes! She said, “Well, there have been times where I wished you were more normal.” What does that even mean, normal?
Regardless, I don’t want to be it. I’m perfectly happy being who I am now. I may not be perfect about it, but I’m perfect for it, because it’s how God made me. And I’m not apologizing for that. I don’t care how awkward and nerdy I am. So, you see, if I actually trusted my family with my feelings, to really know me to my core, I would agree with your “they worry and carry about you” bit. I know they worry and care about me. But it’s more of a monetary thing rather than a bonding thing. It’s more of a superficial thing rather than an authentic thing. Because money has been spent on school and now it needs to be paid back, and why can’t you ever be interested in anything practical, Lauren? Your whole life is your fault! Yes, this I know, but by the grace of God, I am where I am and not somewhere worse. And I just don’t understand why they don’t ever want to listen to that part of my story.
I shouldn’t have all this pressure to figure it out now, tomorrow, in a couple months, by the end of the year, even five years from now what I want to do with the rest of my life. Yes, I would like to have made progress in my passions and interests in the next five years, but the next five years does not the rest of my life make, and I really wish people would take some time to breathe and understand that. By the way, this is all leading up to this manifesto I want to write. I’ve decided: a manifesto needs to be written. I’ve decided, if you don’t write anything else in your entire life, you should write a manifesto. You should get your beliefs down on paper. You should know what you’ll tolerate and won’t tolerate, what you like and dislike, what makes you laugh and what makes you cry, what makes you jubilant, angry, and sad. And when you’ve figured out all these things, you shouldn’t settle for anything less than them. You should make time for yourself to do things – things you love, things for other people, things for God, things for yourself. And I’m going to stop here before I actually start writing my manifesto.
But all I’m saying is that, regardless of your thoughts on Bon Jovi and his hair, he had it right.
It’s my life. (And yours, too.)
