The Fifth Reflection

For a vast majority of my life, I’ve been very conscious of my own humanity, and the mortality that comes with being human. The thing with Russian Roulette is that it talks about the seemingly random things that occur in life. Russian Roulette, being an activity involving a random occurrence that leads to someone’s death, is a very interesting concept that, in a lot of ways, accurately portrays human life. And the song itself gives very real examples of the seemingly random nature of Porter’s success, whether he wants it or not.

In the case of the song, Porter discusses from the very beginning that he’s very much faking it until he makes it. Or, faking it until he doesn’t have to bother to fake it anymore, which is a thing that’ll occur when he dies. He feels an obligation to fake how he feels, despite not wanting to fake those feelings, or really feel anything at all

I relate to that a lot, and I have throughout my life. My brain, which has been through all sorts of different trauma, whether it was from getting punched in the face in 8th grade, being abandoned by a vast majority of his closest friends as a junior in high school, or the emotional abuse endured in the summer of 2024 from a (now ex) girlfriend, has been forced to fake a smile. It’s been forced to fake emotions to give the appearance of wellbeing. My heart has been forced to feel things it didn’t want to feel.

Pressure started to build, especially when I started college and my brain didn’t understand math as well as I had pretended to. And how I faked this idea that I was fine, until it became too difficult to hide the fact that I was actually very unwell and very unhappy, which caused a spiral into depression unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, worsened by the perceived inability to be honest with myself and with others in the way I talked about my feelings. 

“Go fuck myself? I already did” speaks on this reality that some people are genuinely out to get me, but I’ve already gotten to myself worse than they ever will. And whether that’s perception or reality is irrelevant, especially now that I’ve gone through the events of the last few months.
Maybe my own worst enemy isn’t always myself

And now, as we approach the fall of 2024, and now that I’m out of a genuinely abusive situation, I’m starting to understand the part of the song where Porter talks about the things he wants to do “one more time” in a way I didn’t understand it previously. Those seemingly mundane things are what saved Porter. And the seemingly mundane is what saved me. 

I wanna take a nap one more time

I wanna buy a car one more time

I wanna get a tattoo from Riley one more time

I wanna buy a vacuum one more time

I wanna direct a newscast one more time

I wanna edit a video one more time

I wanna make a song one more time

I wanna take a roadtrip one more time

I wanna go to a concert one more time

And my beautiful ADHD brain wanted to do those things “one more time” so badly that it held on for those things, if not for anything else. And while it may be cliche that I had the thought of “it’ll get better” cross my mind, it’s a beautiful cliche. And it reflects me because I’m beautiful too. My desire to turn the mundane into beauty turned my horrible situation into a very beautiful version of me and kept me alive. Instead of me needing to be saved from my brain, my brain saved me from myself.

And I didn’t kill myself, even though I can be an idiot sometimes