The Ignorance of "It's Just a..."

 The Ignorance of "It's Just a..."

You ever reached a point so low that it felt like you had reached the bedrock?

I have. More than once. That hollow moment when the stone you’ve been pushing—the weight, the guilt, the expectation, the dream—slips from your hands and thunders back down the slope. You stand there watching it roll, knowing exactly what it means. Knowing you have to walk back down. Knowing you have to press your shoulder to it again. 

The ache is familiar. The climb is endless. And the word Sisyphean exists because enough of us have tasted that flavor of futility—the sensation that no matter how hard you strain, no matter how quickly you move, nothing truly advances. Effort without elevation. Motion without momentum.

Sometimes it’s worse than exhaustion. Sometimes it’s paralysis.

Sometimes you reach the bottom and simply stay there. Not because you’re lazy. Not because you don’t care. But because the thought of leaning into that stone again feels like pressing bone against a blade. And in that stillness—cold, unmoving, dim—there is a strange relief. If you don’t climb, you can’t fall. If you don’t try, you can’t fail. The darkness stops shifting. It becomes predictable. Manageable. Almost comforting.

But comfort, when left unattended, calcifies.

That “safe” place becomes a cell. The bars are subtle—sugar, distraction, endless scrolling, noise to drown out the voice that asks what happened to you. Whispers that soften the self-loathing just enough to keep you seated. Doubt wrapped in velvet. It doesn’t feel like imprisonment at first. It feels like rest. It feels like mercy. Until one day you realize you’ve been there far too long.

And then—sometimes—something reaches down.

Not always something grand or thunderous. Not always a miracle with choirs behind it. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s deeply personal. A presence. A memory. A line spoken at the right time. It could be God. It could be your mother’s voice. It could be a friend who refuses to let you disappear. It could be an old hobby dusted off. It could even be that internal command that cuts through the fog and says, bluntly, enough.

Something brushes against you in that pit and you feel the instinct to answer it. To lift your head. To reach back.

But more often than we admit, that hand is smaller than we expect.

Smaller in the world’s eyes. Smaller in polite conversation. Smaller in the hierarchy of “serious” reasons to change your life.

I call it the Ignorance of “It’s just a…”

It’s just a song.

It’s just a game.

It’s just a cartoon.

It’s just a book.

It’s just a band.

As if the word “just” has the authority to shrink impact.

You tell someone that a song pulled you back from the edge and they’ll say, “It wasn’t the song. You just had a realization.”

You say a video game character inspired you to endure and someone laughs, “Bro, it’s just a game. You’re not Solid Snake.”

You say a mosh pit cracked something open in your chest and suddenly you’re informed that rock music doesn’t lead people anywhere holy.

We rush to explain away the spark.

As if meaning must arrive wearing robes.

But here’s the truth: those “small” things reach places inside us that sermons and speeches sometimes cannot. A singer screaming lyrics into a mic can articulate what you never had words for. An animated character sobbing through loss can give you permission to feel your own. A fictional hero enduring humiliation, exile, torment—still walking—can show you what stubborn hope looks like in motion. An ancient epic of defiance against gods can remind you that persistence itself is rebellion.

These are not trivial forces. They are bridges.

Art is not an accessory to growth. It is often the catalyst. It slips past our defenses. It bypasses pride. It meets us at eye level when we are too ashamed to look up at anything grander. And when it grips us in that moment—when it stirs us, steadies us, challenges us—that is not accidental. That is not childish. That is not delusion.

That is connection.

We diminish these lifelines because they don’t look heroic from the outside. But they are heroic in effect. They teach. They model resilience. They make us feel seen. They remind us that suffering has been survived before. They whisper, sometimes scream, keep going.

And if a song, a story, a character, a riff of guitar, a pixelated soldier, or a line of poetry is what nudges someone back to their feet—if that’s what gets their hands on the stone again—then it is not “just” anything.

It is enough.

And I’m done pretending it isn’t.

How many of you can feel this image just by looking at it?

If you can, then you know this was never “just a Dragon Ball frame.”

This was the first time I can remember something reaching into me and speaking in a language I actually understood. Not polished. Not academic. Not filtered. It met me where I was—angry, confused, small—and it said something I didn’t even realize I had been waiting to hear.

This was the first time Goku went Super Saiyan in Dragon Ball Z.

I talk a lot about our “Goku moments.” Those flashes in time that look tiny from the outside, but split your internal world clean in half. The first time the Green Ranger showed up in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and dismantled the team like they were nothing. The scene in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when Will breaks down in Uncle Phil’s arms after his father walks out again. The instant on Namek when Goku’s hair ignites gold and something ancient wakes up behind his eyes.

They’re “just” scenes. Just episodes. Just animated frames stitched together for ratings and character development. Entertainment. Something to fill a timeslot before the next program rolls in.

Right?

But what if you’re just a kid coming home to a house that doesn’t feel like home? What if you spend eight hours a day in a building where you don’t belong, orbiting classmates and even teachers who treat you like an easy target? What if you walk back through your own front door knowing the temperature of the house depends on whether your father is one sentence away from detonation? What if the only thirty minutes of the day that feel like oxygen come from an after-school anime block?

What if that’s the only place you feel strong?

By the time Goku faces Frieza, you’ve been watching the fight for what feels like an eternity. Dozens of episodes. You’ve watched friends die. You’ve watched hope thin out. You’ve watched Frieza smirk while planets tremble. You’ve seen Goku push past every visible limit and still fall short. Over and over.

For me, Frieza wasn’t just a villain in Dragon Ball Z.

Frieza was my father’s temper.

Frieza was the classroom.

Frieza was the snickering behind my back.

Frieza was the teacher who decided I was stupid before I had the chance to prove otherwise.

Frieza was the bus driver who accused me of things I didn’t do because it was easier than admitting she was wrong.

Frieza was every force that made me feel powerless.

And then it happens.

Krillin dies. The sky turns. The music shifts. Goku’s grief doesn’t implode—it transforms. He doesn’t shrink. He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t break. He snaps—but not downward. Upward. Into something brighter. Into something legendary.

For an entire season they whispered about the “Legendary Super Saiyan.” It was myth. It was rumor. It was something other people might become.

And then Goku becomes it.

In that moment, I wasn’t the kid who got punished because algebra didn’t click fast enough. I wasn’t the kid getting mocked in the hallway. I wasn’t the kid bracing for impact at home.

I was Goku.

I felt it in my chest. That surge. That shift. That realization that being pushed to the edge didn’t mean disappearing—it could mean transforming. The beating didn’t stop existing. The world didn’t magically become kind. But something inside me stood up straighter.

I wasn’t powerless. I was charging.

And yes, it was imaginary. Yes, it was animated. Yes, it was a serialized television moment designed to spike viewership.

But it gave me a framework.

It told me that rage doesn’t have to rot you from the inside—it can be refined into resolve. It told me that breaking points can be breaking open points. It told me that even if you feel small for years, there might be something in you waiting for ignition.

That was my Goku moment.

Not because I thought I could shoot energy beams. Not because I believed I’d physically overpower anyone. But because for the first time, I saw a narrative where suffering didn’t equal surrender. Where endurance wasn’t passive. Where the underdog didn’t just survive—he transformed.

People call these things trivial because they don’t experience them the same way. They see pixels. You felt permission. They see a frame. You felt fire.

Nothing that teaches you how to survive is “just” anything.

Highschool was the greatest waste of time of my entire life...

Eight hours a day. Five days a week. Four years I will never get back. A pressure cooker of humiliation and fluorescent lighting. I was mercilessly bullied for the crime of existing incorrectly—dressing different, listening to rock, watching anime in a place where both were treated like character defects.

I had never taken pre-algebra, never been given the foundation everyone else seemed to magically have. So they dropped me into Algebra like it was a minor detail. Undiagnosed numeric dyslexia turning numbers into scrambled hieroglyphics. I was a straight-A student in everything else, but this one class became the public proof that I was “stupid.” Not because I was incapable—because I had never been taught, and after a while, I didn’t care enough to bleed for it.

School became eight consecutive hours of hell.

Baggy black pants. Converse. Flannel shirts. Spiked hair styled after Mike Shinoda. Soul patch. Yes, I was that guy. The rock kid in a sea of camo and cattle brands.

But why was I that guy?

I grew up in rural Kentucky. The kind of place where kids did farm chores before first period and came into class smelling like livestock. The kind of place that held “Drive Your Tractor to School” days without irony. So why wasn’t I another yee-haw caricature stitched from mossy oak and small-town bravado?

Because every version of that identity I encountered felt rotten to me. Cruel. Small. Proud of being small. I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t want to blend into a culture that once burned a cross in a Black student’s yard and treated it like gossip instead of evil. I didn’t want to wear camouflage like I was mid-hunt during third period. I didn’t want to chant school pride for a place that felt hostile to anyone who didn’t mirror it perfectly.

None of it was me.

That building wasn’t me.

Those hallways weren’t me.

Those people weren’t me.

For eight hours a day, every day, all I wanted was escape. I wanted anime. I wanted distorted guitars. I wanted to scream until my throat tore open about how much I hated the suffocation, how alien I felt, how I refused to bend into a shape they found acceptable.

Enter Linkin Park.

Everything I wasn’t allowed to say, they said.

Every scream I swallowed, they detonated.

Every insecurity, every flash of anger, every internal fracture—they articulated it.

It wasn’t just noise. It was precision. It was rage refined into poetry. The verses didn’t whine—they confronted. The choruses didn’t beg—they erupted. It felt like someone had climbed into my skull, cataloged every unspoken thought, and blasted it back at the world through stadium speakers.

And at the center of it was Chester Bennington.

His voice wasn’t polished rebellion. It was raw nerve. It cut through everything. It was the scream I didn’t have the lung capacity for. The blade honed on obsidian, slicing through self-doubt and ridicule and boredom and fear. When he sang about being trapped, about not being heard, about fighting something internal that wouldn’t let go—it didn’t feel theatrical. It felt documented.

His voice carried me through high school. Through the hatred. Through the suffocating boredom. Through the drama and the trauma and the constant sense of misplacement. When the world around me felt like mud, his music felt like being lifted onto the back of a Gundam and launched skyward—above the noise, above the ridicule, above the pig-stench smallness of it all.

He wasn’t background music.

He was reinforcement.

People say, “He was just a singer.”

No.

He was a lifeline.

He likely saved millions of lives by giving pain a vocabulary and permission to exist out loud. Mine included. When I felt invisible, he made invisibility audible. When I felt weak, he modeled vulnerability without surrender. When I felt rage boiling, he showed me it could be channeled instead of self-destructed.

The cruel irony is that he couldn’t save himself. His own battle was heavier than the scaffolding his art built for others. That doesn’t diminish what he did. If anything, it underscores the cost. The fact that he carried so much for so long while helping others carry theirs makes his impact sharper, not smaller.

He wasn’t “just a musician.”

He wasn’t “just a frontman.”

He wasn’t “just a voice.”

He was a voice for the voiceless. A scream for those too afraid—or too exhausted—to scream. A man who turned internal chaos into something survivable for strangers he would never meet.

So no. He wasn’t “just a singer.”

He was a lifesaver.

The end of my first marriage was a heavy time...

When I look back at that time, I don’t see a sequence of events. I see a room.

Pitch black. The faintest outlines of furniture barely visible against the dark. Across the room, the cold glow of a computer monitor—the only light. The shadows didn’t feel like the absence of light. They felt tangible. Dense. They had weight. They had fingers. They had hands. They moved with intention, like something malevolent sharing the space with me.

That isn’t embellishment. That’s memory.

Regret had a shape. Paranoia had breath. Fear, self-loathing, anger, doubt—they weren’t abstract emotions. They were physical occupants of that room. They pressed against my ribs. They coiled around my thoughts. The desire to end everything wasn’t poetic despair; it was a persistent presence, as real as the desk in front of me.

I was a hundred pounds overweight. Unemployed. Alone. Facing parental alienation from my one-year-old son. Everything that once defined stability—marriage, home, identity—was gone. Completely gone. People told me they loved me, and I believed they meant it, but belief and feeling are not the same thing. Love felt theoretical. Distant. Unreachable.

I had only my computer.

And the darkness.

And then, there was Maximilian Dood.

I’d followed Max for years before that. A fighting game streamer and YouTuber, loud, animated, deeply invested in the things he loved. His enthusiasm wasn’t casual—it was volcanic. He didn’t just enjoy games; he celebrated them. If you didn’t care about what he was playing, he’d drag you into caring through sheer force of passion. He was infectious. Unapologetically excitable. Fully present in his joy.

His love for fighting games. His reverence for Final Fantasy VII. Later, his playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Remake. When he talked about them, it wasn’t content—it was communion. He made you want to feel what he felt. To be part of something that mattered, even if only digitally.

When you’re at the edge of your hope, when the quiet of the night makes destructive options feel inviting, having access to that kind of energy matters more than people realize.

There were nights I genuinely did not see a reason to continue. The future looked blank. The present felt unbearable. The past felt like proof of failure. And in those hours—those long, suffocating hours when sleep wouldn’t come—it was Max’s late-night streams that kept me tethered.

His voice filled the room when silence became dangerous.

His excitement during his Final Fantasy VII Remake playthrough—his shock, his joy, his nostalgia—gave me something I didn’t have access to on my own. Passion. Anticipation. That rare feeling of looking forward to something. Watching him experience moments I’d waited years for felt electric. And through the screen, some of that electricity reached me.

His interactions with his chat—including me. His dynamic with his wife Jae Jae. Moments with their daughter Ripley. They felt real. They felt warm. At a time when my own life felt stripped of connection, I found myself living vicariously through that warmth. Not in a delusional way. Not in a replacement-for-reality way. But in a sustaining way.

It was like an IV line delivering something vital straight into my system.

Joy.

Excitement.

Momentum.

Just enough to see me through to sunrise. Just enough to loosen the grip of the night’s fingers.

I’ve thanked Max before. Through donations. Through messages. And he’s responded—every time. Recently, during an anniversary stream, he scrolled through old fan art and there it was: a drawing I’d made during my first year as a viewer. Still saved. Still kept. Still present years later.

Seeing that did something to me.

Because for all the talk about “parasocial relationships,” something real exists there too. We exchange fragments of ourselves. Maybe small. Maybe fleeting. Maybe buried beneath thousands of other names in chat logs and thank-you notifications.

But they’re real.

He may never fully grasp what those late-night streams meant to me. I may be one name among thousands. But I carry that time with me. And somewhere in a digital folder, he carried a piece of me too.

We keep tiny parts of each other as we move through life. A saved drawing. A remembered username. A moment shared in chat. They seem insignificant from the outside.

They are not.

Max wasn’t “just a content creator.” He wasn’t background noise. He wasn’t distraction.

He was light in a room where the dark had weight.

And sometimes, that is the difference between making it to morning and not.

Losing 100 lbs. is fucking hard...

Doing it in less than a year feels almost violent. Like tearing an old version of yourself off bone by bone. You’re hungry when you shouldn’t be. You’re tired when you don’t want to be. You stare at the ceiling at night bargaining with cravings. You step on the scale and pray the number moved. Some days it does. Some days it doesn’t. And on those days, the doubt creeps in.

I had tried before. Really tried. Gym every day. Sweat pooling at my feet. Cardio I hated. Weights. Calisthenics. Structured routines. I blasted heavy metal and hard-driving rock like I was trying to bully my body into change. It worked for a little while. I’d drop some weight. Feel good. Then burn out. Quit. Gain it back—and more. Repeat the cycle.

Anger was never enough to sustain transformation.

Then I found TWICE.

And everything shifted.

There are endless analytical things I could say about them. I’ve built a YouTube channel on that alone. Discography. Concepts. Evolution. Performance quality. But what they did for me doesn’t live in analysis. It lives in something quieter and far more personal.

Try losing 100 pounds. Go ahead. Try it. It will expose every weakness you have. It will force you to confront boredom, loneliness, impatience, insecurity. When you’re deep into a calorie deficit and your body feels heavy and slow, when cardio feels like it’s stretching into eternity, you need something to hold onto.

For me, that was TWICE.

Not in some abstract “music is motivating” way. In a visceral, emotional, human way.

These nine women—their music, their personalities, their chemistry, their confidence, their beauty—arrived at the exact moment I was ready to either change my life or give up on it. It felt almost absurdly simple: their songs were bright, rhythmic, alive. Their energy was disciplined but joyful. Their presence was polished but warm.

And yes, they’re hot.

There’s no point pretending that didn’t matter. It did. Watching them dance—sharp, controlled, powerful—while I was sweating on a treadmill made something click. They looked confident in their bodies. Commanding. At home in their movement. I wanted that. I didn’t want to hate my reflection anymore. I wanted to feel strong and aligned and proud of the way I carried myself. I wanted to feel like if one of them bumped into me on the street I would be confident enough in myself to speak to them.

When I Can't Stop Me first slid into my K-pop playlist, something locked in. I was hooked. I was a ONCE immediately. There was no slow build. I dove into everything—music videos, dance practices, live stages, variety content. Their world became part of mine.

And suddenly cardio didn’t feel like punishment.

It felt like participation.

Their music filled the empty space that boredom used to dominate. Their visuals gave my eyes somewhere to land when my lungs burned. Their choreography made movement feel purposeful instead of repetitive. And Momo—God, Momo—there’s something about the way she dances that feels almost gravitational. Watching her move made effort look beautiful. It made discipline look worth it. Some days I genuinely felt like if I just pushed a little harder, I could break through gravity itself. And I was almost immediately enamored with her, her beauty, her personality, her style... She was earth-shattering on a profound emotional level.

That emotional attachment changed everything.

This wasn’t rage-fueled heavy metal self-correction anymore. It wasn’t me trying to prove something out of spite. It was me building something. The soundtrack of my transformation wasn’t anger. It was color. Precision. Joy.

Weeks became months.

The weight kept coming off.

And somewhere along the way, it stopped being about the scale. It became about identity. About consistency. About waking up and choosing to move again. And again. And again.

One hundred pounds.

Gone.

My life didn’t just change physically. My confidence shifted. My posture changed. My energy changed. The discipline required to lose that weight bled into every other corner of my life. Work. Creativity. Relationships. Ambition.

And through all of it, TWICE was there.

My office walls are covered in all nine members of TWICE, my shelves house their albums. As I type this, a Momo photocard sits on my desk in front of this monitor. If you've ever watched my YouTube channel you know what my office looks like.

They don’t know I exist. They probably never will. That doesn’t matter. This was never about proximity. It was about impact.

I am a ONCE for life because when I needed momentum, they gave it to me. When I needed beauty in my routine, they filled it. When I needed something to look forward to every single day, they were there. and it just kept going and going and going, and has never stopped.

They are not “just a girly pop group.”

They are the foundation upon which I built a life defined by positivity, change, growth, joy, and humility. They were the light during the grind. The color during the monotony. The reason I kept stepping back onto that treadmill when quitting would have been easier.

Losing 100 pounds is hard.

Doing it without something that makes you feel alive while you’re doing it? Harder.

And I will never pretend they were “just” anything but the soundtrack to my tectonic shift.

I feel a great swell of pity for anyone who has never felt so close to something that it mattered...

The “it’s just a game” crowd.

The “they’re just actors” dismissals.

The “it’s only a movie” shrug.

Those words feel safe. Detached. But they also feel… small.

Because when something shapes you—when it steadies you, strengthens you, carries you—that thing stops being “just” anything.

Art is not trivial when it rearranges your spine.

Music is not trivial when it speaks the words you can’t form.

Stories are not trivial when they teach you how to survive.

There are moments in life when a character, a band, a creator, a group of performers becomes more than entertainment. They become scaffolding. They become a handhold. They become proof that beauty exists when everything around you feels dull and airless.

Maybe some of us are wired for that connection. Maybe it comes from growing up feeling out of place. Maybe it comes from wanting out, from wanting more, from searching for something sacred in color and sound and story. Maybe it’s just how some hearts are built.

But to trivialize any of it—to say it’s “just” this or “only” that—is to trivialize what it did for the person who needed it.

If something helps someone endure, that thing is not small.

If something shapes how someone thinks, loves, trains, creates, survives—then it carries weight.

Goku made me stronger in ways that had nothing to do with fists.

Chester Bennington was loud when I couldn’t be.

Jean-Luc Picard and William Riker modeled steadiness and presence when I needed examples.

Maximilian Dood was light in long stretches of dark.

TWICE became the soundtrack to my entire life, a life so much better than the one lived before.

None of them know. None of them had to. That’s not the point.

The point is impact.

If the beauty, the talent, the energy, the discipline of something moves you into a better version of yourself, then it is not trivial. It is foundational.

And if someone reduces that to “just,” what they’re really doing is shrinking the magnitude of the human capacity to be moved.

If these things are trivial, then so is the growth they inspired.

So is the strength.

So is the survival.

And that’s not true.

You are a more than "just a person", you're a person shaped by what you loved enough to let it change you.