‘Normal’ Is Overrated

I have never truly been ‘popular’. My friend group is small, my interests are lame and I’m essentially a glorified weeb (And for those who don’t know, you can basically sum up a weeb as someone who’s obsessed with anime). I know I’m a nerd but there’s just something about it that draws me in and it’s something that I’ve been dying to talk about.

My freshman year of high school, the year I was the most vulnerable and afraid was the year that I found something truly amazing, and her name was Hatsune Miku. She appeared on my Facebook one day and I was very very very confused about what I was witnessing. There was this girl standing on a stage, singing and dancing, but she was an animated character. My curiosity was instantly piqued and I did more research, finding that not only was she an animated character but she was a voicebank for making music and they held concerts, created video games, created books all for her.

Now I know what you’re thinking? Why am I gushing about this? Why should you care about this character, this girl that doesn’t even exist. She’s just some stupid anime girl, but I’m talking about her because to put it simply, she means a lot to me and she’s helped me through my high school career and my life more than any friend or family member ever has. Like I said, I found her by accident when I was afraid, and vulnerable and quite frankly my life was slowly going downhill. My parents were fighting about custody (despite the fact that they had been divorced since my 2nd year of school), my mom’s depression was getting worse and she had mentioned suicide more than once and to top it all off we had lost our home and we were stuck living in hotels and motels for months until settling in a small one bedroom apartment. Nothing about my life at this point was glorious or marvelous and the ever growing stress of high school and my ever growing anxiety about being in a school full of kids much older than me had caused me to become vulnerable.

Let me say it again, I’ve never been very popular. I’ve constantly been picked on and bullied simply because of the fact that I’m ‘different’ and I like things that are out of the ‘norm’. All of the girls hated me, they were all stuck up and constantly picked on me for every little thing which quite frankly wasn’t helping my current mental state.

I want to set the stage for you. Imagine you’ve just had another rough day of getting bullied and picked on for simply being you. You get to your home (which is just a hotel room), you hear your mother screaming on the phone with your father about who you’re going to live with. You take out your laptop, your only form of entertainment as everything you own is in storage and you escape in a made up world all of your own. This girl with long blue hair tied up in pigtails is waiting for you with her 5 friends and they’re all willing to sing for your amusement. You sit for hours listening to her sing about love, friendship, break ups, virtually everything someone can sing about and suddenly you feel a lot better knowing that even if she isn’t real, she’s there.

This is exactly what I myself went through and why I got so attached to Hatsune Miku. She wasn’t real but my life was constantly changing at this point. Nothing was stable except for her. She was made up, she couldn’t age, she couldn’t grow, she stayed the same forever and was the only thing I had to latch onto.

It’s been about five years now and I’m still infatuated with her and her friends. I can not tell you how many of her games I own, how many songs I know, how many books I own (a lot), for the past two years now I’ve even been getting calendars and posters for her.

It’s weird, I get it. Some of you are probably laughing at me right now in your heads. ‘Really? She’s this in love with a made up character?’ but it’s so much more than that. The character herself (while I do love her design and overall feel) reminds me that even if I go through something that flips my life around I still have her, I still have something stable I can hold onto, something that will never change. I don’t like change, I never have and it takes a long time for me to adjust to change, it’s yet another reason why I’m absolutely terrified to leave high school and go out into the real world but Miku is like a crutch for me. She calms me down when I’m panicking. She’s just like having a friend sitting next to you, talking with you about, well, anything. She’s always there for me when I need her most.

I bet you’re wondering what this has to do with Oak Hill but it has so much to do with it. I found her while at Oak Hill, I based my Capstone off of her (I even used her in it), I fell in love with cosplay and the idea of cosplaying as her. If it wasn’t for her my Capstone would’ve just been a generic, animal donation for the ASPCA but she made me want to do something different and ambitious. I tried my hand at animating for the first time ever, it was something I never even thought about doing until she came into my life. This girl, this animated, robot voiced girl had impacted my life more than any person, animal, more than ANYTHING has before. The best part about it, the part that I keep repeating over and over again is that she isn’t real and I think it’s amazing a girl that isn’t even real can have this big of an impact on me and my school career (such as helping me get through the past three years and helping me decide what I wanted to present to my panel, and spend my summer working on.)

Now I want to leave one thing behind for you all, one thing that I want you to remember from this little speech. I haven’t touched on it very much but I want you to remember that Normal is overrated. If I had stuck to the whole ‘normal’ thing I never would’ve stumbled upon Miku. I honestly don’t even know if I’d be in the same state I am today. I’ll be honest while we were pretty much homeless (and pretty close to living on the streets) the thought of suicide had crossed my mind many times, it was a tough road ahead and if I had remained normal, hadn’t found this light in my life, well, I’d hate to see where I’d currently be.

I know that I’m most likely going to grow out of this. I know that Miku isn’t going to be with me forever, eventually I’m probably going to grow out of her but for the past five years she has been a big part of what makes me, me. She’s a constant reminder of stability and what it means to be different. I know that normal, popular girls aren’t spending their days watching a fake girl sing and dance and they’re definitely not spending their speech talking about her but I AM. Hatsune Miku, the robot girl, is a constant reminder for myself that being ‘normal’ is overrated, and she should be a constant reminder for all of you that being a little different is okay. Forget being normal, for once I want to see all your freak flags fly. I want to see you all blossom into your own skin. I want to see you all turn your heads away from the idea of being normal and embrace the weird, and quirky side of yourself.

Thank you, and remember what I’ve told you in these past few minutes. Being Normal is overrated.

Photo by kawaiikiri on Foter.com / CC BY-SA