The Real Me, The Who, Quadrophenia

The album Quadrophenia entered my life in 1994, a couple years before I met Kevin. That was a particularly difficult year for me, for reasons that need not be included here.

Alongside The Dark Side of the Moon, Quadrophenia was an album we bonded over. Who couldn’t resist a story about a troubled Mod with a nice Vespa and a nice variation on the tales of a Neuro Spicy Teenage Boy?

One of the reasons that Kevin and I did not want to combine our DNA and create a human being is because we knew there were things that we did not want to be responsible for passing along. Any progeny of ours would be genetically pre-disposed to various mental illnesses and diseases. Some of them we had suffered and wished upon no other human, much less one we were raising. It’s what made sense for us at the time. And, in retrospect, I’m incredibly glad we made the choices we made back then. I could have been a widow with a kid aged from a teenager to a toddler I had to finish raising on my own that now has to process trauma on top of being predisposed to depression, suicide, and addiction. I know I would not have be as stable as I am now (laughs in neuro spicy) if I’d had to spend most of my resources supporting my kid learning to live life without a father. We’ve got to know our limits…

But I digress. Inheriting mental illness sucks, but it’s something that’s inherited randomly, right alongside other things like body type and hair texture. Humanity isn’t going to stop reproducing for the foreseeable future, so perhaps it’s time to use the vast amount of knowledge we have and raise kids to speak out if they don’t feel right? I, for one, am glad I’ve always been able to talk about stuff like therapy and meds with my parents. It gives me motivation to continue to grow and live as long as the universe will allow.

This is not to say that I would judge you, dear reader, for choosing a different path. While I have control over my own “old school blog”, my Internet Authority doesn’t extend beyond the domains I own. People have the right to their own opinions, their own ramblings. Not everything on the Internet has to be worthy of citation in a Wikipedia article!