Smells like teen spirit

For those that don’t know, yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Do you remember where you were? Me? I was recovering from the knowledge that my first serieous boyfriend was a cheating scum bag with no shame whatsoever. I was recovering from seeing my cheating scumbag boyfriend kiss someone else in front of me and then try to deny it. Kurt’s death didn’t even register for a couple of days because I felt so heartbroken about the end of this ‘relationship’. I put relationship in inverted commas because, whilst at the time I thought it was one, I now, with hindsight, realise it was nothing close to what a normal relationship should be like.  So April 5th 1994 wasn’t just about Cobain’s death, to me it was my loss of innocence. I’d gone from silly teenage girl in love to grown-up realising that the world hurts and is damn cruel at times.

I was a big Nirvana fan at school. It certainly wasn’t trendy to like Nirvana back then. Most of my friends argued over who was the cutest in Take That but not me. I was doing everything I could to make my school uniform stand out, to look individual and listening to nirvana turned out to help a lot, but that wasn’t why I did it. There was something, as I suppose there was for most fans, something in the music that screamed out to me.

Cobain shot himself (and yes, I believe he shot himself. I’m all for conspiracy theories when there’s some plausibility behind them. And it ticks me off to hear kids the same age as my sister accusing Courtney Love of murdering Cobain. You weren’t there! Didn’t you read about the drug overdoses? This guy didn’t want to live any more!) Anyway, he killed himself about a year after my first, (admitedly half-hearted) suicide attempt. I was a screwed up teenager (although probably normal really). My mum was remarried and having kids left, right and centre. We were constantly arguing and I figured she wouldn’t miss me too much. After that, I became a much more solitary figure. I couldn’t deal with what was around me, I couldn’t cope under the pressure of the expectations of my family and I spent many evenings alone in my room listening to music like Nirvana and Manic Street Preachers – classic depression songs for teenagers really.

I coped when Kurt died, there was too much in my own life that was crap to be worrying about anything else. But when Richie Edwards took off one February morning, it gave me pause for thought. These were two people from bands I admired, bands who, among others, had helped me through some (what, as a teenager I considered to be) tough times. With hindsight maybe what I faced wasn’t that terrible, but then it felt it. But then I wondered, if these two couldn’t face their life any more, and they were famous with money to get whatever therapy they needed, if they couldn’t face their life any more, how on earth was I ever going to cope?

Obviously I did. I’m still here, ten years on, wondering if my teenage years were normal or the face of some larger problem? At the time it felt like the end of the world, but now I know it wasn’t. Now I know that what I went through is being lived by people every day around the world. I wasn’t special, I wasn’t terribly screwed-up. I was just normal. Funny how I can recognise that now and yet at the time it was all I wanted to be.

Until there is a next time…

xx