idolatry is a cancer, and your favorite artist is not a diety.

I logged onto my socials today after my morning routine and after buying my Belle and Sebastian tickets (which shout out if you’re feeling sinister 30 year tour if you’re gonna be at the NYC show hmu), and did my routine scrolling yada yada.

I happen to come across somebody that’s a fan of an artist, giving them feedback on their marketing and trying to tell them how they could do it better out of concern of their fav not reaching enough people.

And then I continued to scroll and saw this saga from this different account talking about how they were sorry that they were coughing at a fan event and it was followed by seven tweets explaining why. And then a few posts below I saw negative Covid tests, being posted and other people quote tweeting the same post with more negative Covid tests?

know and trust me when I say I of all people understand and know about putting an artist on a pedestal. I had a pretty rough childhood and dealt with lots of abuse and bullying and the like so naturally I needed something to get me through the day and putting all of my energy into an artist and their work was my lifeline - and so I get that completely. and I understand how it happens. In my experience, it is a side effect of mental illness. I understand not everything is a one-size-fits-all, but I’m just speaking from my own personal experience.

about 10 years ago, I was incorrectly diagnosed as bipolar 2. if finding the right medication was like taking a trip to the amusement park, I had the cedar point luxury experience of trying more meds than I can count until I found one that worked.

they ended up putting me on a mood stabilizer that is traditionally used as epilepsy medicine and it has somehow done the trick. Now you and other doctors that I have seen in the past have asked or maybe asking, “well if you’re not bipolar why does a mood stabilizer work?”

come to find out that I have C-PTSD and my body has been in fight or flight mode for a majority of my life. Something about this specific medicine (shout out Trileptal), and how it deals with the nervous system, (which is how this medicine deals with epilepsy) helped me and my nervous system not constantly live in fight or flight mode. And the longer I was on this specific medicine and I stopped being hypervigilant, and I stopped looking for other things to save me. I started to detach from idolatry culture. I started learning things that people who aren’t as mentally ill were taught from the beginning.

The more therapy I went through and the more I took care of myself and managed my trauma and fought for myself to have a safe space as an adult, the more detached I became from the previous things I held dear. and that’s not to say I don’t still appreciate them for what they are and what they were to me but more so realizing those were things or people or bands, that I was using as a life preserver in the ocean of my trauma.

and I think that’s part of why this shit hits home for me and why it bothers me so much. And then there’s the part of me that has insurmountable empathy for a portion of these people because granted there is no one size fits all, and there is nuance to this, but I know the things that I went through that made me attached to the things that I did to survive and I can’t help but feel bad for these people in more ways than one. I don’t say this in a holier than thou way I say this coming from somebody who has been through that.

these people have placed their idol as a deity and the fellow people in the fandom as their fellow apostles and are operating from the place of “if I get excommunicated from the pack, I’m not gonna get a seat at the last supper.” But we are no longer cavemen living in a tribe in the forest. It’s okay to not critique Taylor Swift’s marketing. I think the billionaire will be okay. It’s okay to cough because your spit went down the wrong pipe at a Sabrina Carpenter show. I think everyone else will survive.

I don’t know if I have much else to say about this. I think this shit is just… hard to watch.

Whatever it’s fine