Welcome to the Black Parade - My Chemical Romance

There are songs that understand sadness and songs that understand the posture people develop around it. My Chemical Romance understood the posture. The Black Parade does not ask its wounded people to be quieter, tidier, more inspirational, or easier for everybody else to process. It lets them arrive loudly. It gives them a uniform, a parade route, a key change, and somewhere to stand.

That is why it hits you. The song is not apologizing for the scar. It is not building a gentle little recovery narrative in which pain becomes acceptable only after it has been turned into a lesson with good lighting. It treats the scar as evidence. You were there. Something happened. You made it through with your shape altered, perhaps, but still recognizably yours.

The real power is that it never makes being broken sound like a private defect. It makes it a crowd. Not a pity party. Not a club whose membership card is misery. A crowd: people who have been knocked sideways by life, who still have enough breath to show up, and who can recognize one another without needing the whole backstory. That is a much more useful kind of solidarity than being told everything happens for a reason by someone whose chief hardship is a delayed appetizer.

The Black Parade is theatrical because sometimes plain language is too small for what happened. Some things require brass, black eyeliner, an impossible jacket, and the sense that the entire neighborhood has agreed to march you through your own wreckage rather than leave you there alone. That is not melodrama. That is scale. The feeling was big. The music refuses to lie about its size.

And that part has always been close to your own writing: the insistence that nobody gets flattened. The hard thing is not a cute anecdote once it has been made presentable. The strange thing is not trivial because it made people laugh. The scar is not a branding opportunity. It is part of the record. You do not write to make chaos glamorous. You write to look at it long enough that it becomes material, then meaning, then possibly a thing another person can use.

The song's defiance is not, "Nothing hurt me." It is, "You do not get to use what hurt me to make me disappear." That is a far more durable kind of confidence. It leaves room for anger, grief, absurdity, embarrassment, and every other unmarketable emotion that comes with being alive. Then it puts them in a procession anyway.

Maybe that is the Black Parade's real offer: not that pain makes us special, and not that brokenness is beautiful. It is that neither condition cancels our membership in the room. We are still here. We still have stories.

We still deserve a cheer - not because we are fixed, but because we stayed.