Personal Meanings

This song speaks to me a lot as a trans man in general. While I'm not sure what the artist had in mind when writing it, it's likely that it was not trans men or mascs, but it's not like there's many songs about us to choose from. I only know about Self-Made by Dopamine regarding the rock genre when it comes to the trans man side of things.

The first line of the song I can apply to my heavy dysphoria early on without knowing what I was experiencing. I recieved the typical diagnoses of depression and anxiety with puberty being seen as the main culprit, hormone balance wise instead of gender wise. I was just mentally ill, I needed to change how I thought of things to be positive and take some SSRI's. Yet whenever I tried to relate to others in the same boat as me, I never truly felt understood.

The second line would relate much more to when I did start questioning my gender and identified as trans. I grew up in a conservative area, so it made sense to stay in the closet as much as I could until I was sure that transition would help me.

The pre-chorus, or well the three lines after the first two, come back to my self-discovery. A lot of it came from observing my emotions and when they appeared or went away, what causes them. On top of at, at around the age 9 or 10 I started to create a paracosm that I hid in because of the stress and inability to connect with others that I felt. I would go back to that same paracosm, along with my other thoughts as I typically thought in pictures and not words, and would try to investigate what I was feeling from them and why I felt that way. I likened myself to a scientist studying myself as a separate entity, and in a way I found it to be fun and interesting.

Chorus

The chorus gives a sense of power in self-determination, and when power often means masculine, it feels like an embrace of masculinity as well. Even though I've always been more neutral with my presentation (t-shirt and Jeans for life). It gives a feeling of pride too, one that's well deserved and made with a moral code to follow. At the same time, I'm not at the point of self-acceptance. I standing to make acceptance to a pledge I have yet to fulfill. "I will make peace with all I am" goes to all the interanalized shit I have to sort out, the homophobia, transphobia, ableism, all the cultural mess that taught me to be ashamed of what I am. To make peace with myself, I also need to make peace with others like me, to defend others like me. The two will always go hand in hand. It is not all power, it's never a straight trial to the destination, "give it my all, bend with the fall."

Love will conquer all

The phrase "Love with conquer all" was firstly, to me, about pride and being queer. I focus on my transness more than my bisexuality, but I did realize that I was queer first through my sexual orientation before coming to terms with the fact that I'm trans. Love will win.

Still

Thinking more about it, I thought about the colonialism of it. The fact that it fits so well with the idea that I'm a man, more specifically a White one. To fit masculinity as a White man, I need to realize that the way my society teaches me what it means to be a man is inherently tied into colonialism. Throughout history and today, different cultures have been oppressed or brought to the brink of extinction because of the need to conquer others. Ways of being and living suppressed and marginalized. When it comes to the broader context of LGBTQIA+ rights, we can point to pinkwashing as an example of this colonialism done in the name of queer people.

For me, I need to take a step back and realize that my activism, my USAmerican upbringining of justice and getting back at people, the value in power, needs to be replaced with actual love, not the Christian nationalist kind. It needs to be replaced with a need to stand on equal footing and finding the equality, the humanity, in everyone. It's to make the world better through compassion rather than the need to beat someone, or something, down. Part of what got me thinking of this was what Alex Avila said in his video essay Is there a crisis of masculinity or is it just capitalism?:

"It's perhaps a sickening cliche to say that love conquers all, and honestly, a deeply untruthful phrase that only a man could write. Love is connection, it doesn't conquer, it doesn't dominate. When you find real love ... it's honest respectful and affirming in the will to change." (1:07:42-1:08:09)

Now, this is still one of my favorite songs. I decided that I can act like I'm all powerful when listening to it, I can enjoy the adrenaline from that, while still critiquing what it is and diving more into myself to see what it says about me and the society I live in.