Moonchild, You Shine: A Special Second Anniversary Post

Image description: A screenshot from the music video for "Moonchild," a 2018 song from RM of BTS's solo mixtape mono. As the title of the post probably demonstrates, today's post is going to heavily feature this song and its themes in honor of my blog's 2nd anniversary.

A very happy Valentine’s Day, Galentine’s Day, Day-Before-Half-Priced-Chocolate Day, or whatever you may celebrate today, dear readers! To me, this is a special day – my blog’s second anniversary. I literally cannot believe it’s been two whole years of running The Asexual Geek and talking about aspec issues, as well as things that are important to me personally. During last year’s anniversary post, I did exactly that, writing about how the act of “speaking myself” has been the theme of my life and my blog. In that post, I talked about how the question of who we are as people is an ongoing journey that requires the ability to use our voices. In many cases, I don’t think it’s a question that ever has a complete answer, and involves continual work, creation, recreation, and a lot of redefining things.

So, knowing that I wanted to do a post for this anniversary too, I found myself wondering what to discuss. While these posts are “special posts,” often independent of my usual analysis and definitely more personally introspective/philosophical, I nevertheless want to discuss things that are relevant. In order to do that, I turn to today’s other deeply formative and life-changing two-year anniversary – becoming a BTS fan. In last year’s post, I focused on their message and the impact it’s had on me, and I wanted to find something similar that incorporated both of these special anniversaries and all of these aforementioned themes, something that spoke to the acts of defining and redefining that I have done through this blog and in my life in general. I decided to get personal and candid, as I have been a lot lately, and to use today as an opportunity to opine about another type of redefinition that has been continually ongoing for me – the redefinition of how I choose to see myself, and how I hope others see me in return.

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As those who know me personally can attest, I’ve never exactly excelled at looking on the bright side of things. In fact, my personal philosophy often tends to be something more in line with “if anything can go wrong, it will,” and rather than “sunshine and roses,” I think it’s safe to say my personality would be far more accurately described most days as moonlight and thorns. That’s not to say that I’m a dark and brooding person; in fact, I can actually be pretty silly. I also take great pains to make sure I never seem ungrateful for the abundant blessings and privileges in my life. But even so, I’ve always been what most people would call a “pessimist.”

That definition haunted me for a great deal of my life. At least in my experience, being a pessimist – or even a realist, as I often preferred to describe myself instead – is not usually welcome in most settings. Most potential friends, for instance, don’t really want to spend time with an “if anything can go wrong, it will” type of person, nor do most coworkers want to deal with a cynical and jaded employee. Many times in my life, I definitely felt like the odd person out in most social situations because my “pessimistic” nature was out of place; it felt like one more thing about me that the rest of the world found undesirable. While other things about me – such as my aspec identity – were unchanging and were not things I would ever try to change anyway, being pessimistic felt like it was something I could and should change. Thus, I often spent a lot of time thinking about how I could leave behind the “undesirable” state of being a “pessimist” and try to approach something more “acceptable.”

That is, until I discovered “Moonchild.”

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve heard me discuss BTS plenty of times, as well as frequently mentioning their leader RM and his 2018 mixtape mono, a seven-song playlist that changed my life. Of the many deeply impactful songs on the playlist, “Moonchild” is the one that spoke to me most highly; I can still very clearly remember the wave of emotion I felt when listening to this song for the first time. Why? Because the song spoke to my exact problem, and gave me a solution I hadn’t considered before – that it was okay to embrace the side of myself that I had, up until that point, thought of as undesirable and pessimistic. That side of myself wasn’t something to be discarded, but something that was a part of me, something I could learn to embrace and find meaning in.

From that point forward, I began tossing out the pessimist label and started using Moonchild. For people who don’t understand the reference, I instead rely on “realist,” but I almost always disagree when people try to call me a pessimist. That might seem like an odd thing to get particular about – after all, it’s not as though “pessimist” is a slanderous word the way something like “prude” is – but in my opinion, it is a loaded one. The definition of the word in and of itself is not dissimilar to how I described myself earlier in the post (the literal definition is “tending to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen,” which is very similar to my aforementioned philosophy). However, when you look up “pessimistic” in a dictionary or type it into Google, many of the synonyms are things I’ve been called by people in the past – “negative” or “cynical” or “fatalistic” or “dark,” the list goes on. By contrast, both the definition and synonyms if you do likewise for the word “optimistic” will yield words like “confident” or “hopeful” or “bright.”

As such, for most of my life I felt like I could only become a confident or productive person if I was also optimistic, believing that those things were mutually exclusive. This led to me also believing that being pessimistic was the antithesis of those things, a personal failure I needed to overcome in order to be the person I wanted to be. This is why having the term Moonchild to embrace became so important to me. In the song, RM postulates that people like him and like me are naturally of a sadder disposition, and as such have to work a bit harder to be happy than most people do. This doesn’t mean we’re never happy, nor does it mean we can automatically be classified as dark, but it does mean that our happiness requires effort, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Within my own experiences, this is exactly what I needed to hear, especially as an aspec person.

In my case, there are very specific reasons why happiness sometimes feels like a struggle for me, often caused by many of the things I discuss on this blog. During times when aphobia leaves me feeling unwanted or where the world tries its best to make me feel broken and toss me aside, it’s easy for me to wonder what I did to deserve the pain these things cause. As I said earlier, although I would never want to trade my aspec identity, these feelings sometimes make it difficult to feel any type of pride and instead see only the heartache. Add in a word like “pessimist,” and together these things paint a picture that I am just doomed to be a gloomy, unlikable individual who can never rise above her circumstances.

But embracing Moonchild as my identity helps me overcome that limiting definition and break into a new one – one where even pain has purpose and where even the struggle is a beautiful one. And this theme is not limited to just “Moonchild” or mono. One of my personal favorite BTS songs is 2020’s “On”, with its anthemic declarations of “bring it on, bring the pain on.” Additionally, in a live broadcast from 2016, RM himself discussed this very phenomenon of feeling lost and struggling with a lack of purpose. “We have to feel pain,” he said in that broadcast, discussing how it’s normal to feel strained under the weight of many emotions. “We have to experience many things.”

BTS’s legion of fans is proof that I’m not the only one who finds value in this message, and I know I’m not the only aspec person to find strength in it either. But the way I relate to being a Moonchild is uniquely mine and unique to my circumstances. The way I fold it into my life, my identity, and my story is just as important to me as any other part of my personality. This may sound like a reach or overdramatic, but just like someone who loves a fandom makes it part of themselves, so too has this song and its message become a part of me, and something that has been deeply comforting in times of need. I think this is a large part of what makes BTS’s music so special – because everyone can relate it to something unique in their own life and use it to love themselves and redefine their world in unique ways. As such, I think the most important takeaway in today’s post is embracing our uniqueness. 

I know that tends to sound extremely trite in many cases and thus easy to ignore because it seems like the type of easy, saccharine slogan that should go on an inspirational poster. In my case, I believe that’s probably part of why I’m so drawn to the way the song “Moonchild” frames the idea of uniqueness, because it’s not sugary sweet; if anything, it’s almost a little sad. I’ve shed many tears while listening to this song and, as I said, I often use it to comfort myself. There are many ways in which I’m different from the people around me, beyond just being aspec, and they’re things I’ve had to deal with over the course of my life. Everything from choosing not to go to college to knowing I don’t ever want to have children have all provided me with different challenges, heaped on top of those that already exist because I am asexual and aromantic, as well as sex-repulsed. All of these things combined sometimes make me feel alienated, as I’ve discussed in many posts before. And, even though not many people have the exact same set of circumstances I do, I don’t doubt this is a feeling many of us share.

The idea of being different from others in a way that makes us feel alone is something I’m sure we’ve all gone through at some point. For some people, it may last a brief time; for others, it may last a lifetime. I believe I’m probably in that latter category, but I no longer think that means my life is doomed to be unhappy or unfulfilled. On the contrary, I believe that being different and feeling misunderstood is the challenge I am meant to take on. I don’t mean to get too heavily metaphysical or too overdramatic, but I can’t help but firmly believe that these trials will someday be the things in which my purpose in life can be found.

It harkens back not only to the lyrics of “Moonchild” (“All the pain, all the sorrow, that’s your destiny”), but also to RM’s 2016 live broadcast, which I referenced earlier. When discussing the fact that we need to feel pain and experience various emotions, RM discusses the metaphor of our minds being like growing trees, with our emotions as the branches; the more branches you have, the more you can prune them in your later years with the hopes of becoming a “beautiful tree.” I absolutely adore this metaphor, and am very strongly bonded to the hope of becoming a beautiful tree myself someday. This is why I’ve made it something of a mission to embrace both positive and negative emotions, and to value them as a vital part of pruning my mind into the tree I hope to be.

This is also why I strive so hard to leave behind the negative beliefs I’ve held about myself in the past – not just terms like pessimist or hurtful slurs like “prude”, but any time I’ve tricked myself into feeling inferior or didn’t believe in myself. That is not easy. It’s an ongoing struggle all people go through, which is exactly why I wanted to do a post like this on my blog’s second anniversary, because I believe this is a relatable topic. Last year, I wrote about using our voices, which I think all people can relate to as well, even if their life looks nothing like mine. In that post, I discussed the importance of our sense of self, and my own personal belief that we should all seek to define ourselves, thinking deeply about what those definitions look like over the course of our lives. They don’t have to be labels or identities (and they don’t have to be found in songs, of course, although there is the added bonus of getting a new favorite song out of the deal). In fact, in my case, I may sometimes rely too heavily on my labels – Moonchild included – but for me, they help give definition to parts of myself I would otherwise struggle to describe.

For others, maybe it’s not so much a label that will help them, but a piece of media that makes them feel understood, or even just a person who understands them. Whatever it may be, I likewise think it’s important to have something that helps us feel secure in our unique definitions of self. As mentioned earlier, I don’t think we will ever quite have a full picture at any given time, and indeed the picture we have of ourselves will likely continue to grow and evolve. But by seeking to know it and define it and understand it ourselves, I believe we do ourselves a great service – we work to prune the branches of our minds so we can continue to develop as unique and special trees.

There have been many opportunities over the last two years for me to do that, both through this blog and outside of it. Some days, I’ve been more successful than others, but the amount of growth and work I’ve done on myself has been enormous. You may not always see it, as it may not always be reflected in the posts I do, but it's there. And it wouldn’t be possible if I had continued labelling myself as a pessimist and if I hadn’t made the choice to believe in myself and my abilities. For those reasons and so many more, February 14th will always have a special place in my heart, as it represented the moment where I truly chose to take that first step towards believing in myself.

Despite that, the past two years have been very up and down. There have not been a lot of things that made sense during that time or felt like unshakable constants, so I’ve been grateful that this could be one, and that I could share this analysis with people. As always, thank you so much for being here and for supporting me in your own unique and individual ways. We all have something incredible to offer and our own paths to walk. And, while I may take a lot of stumbling steps as I attempt to find mine, I feel confident that everything I do is going towards becoming the beautiful tree I know I can be, as well as a better and more defined Moonchild. After all, a wise philosopher once told me that when moon rises, it’s my time.

I wish you a very happy day for whatever you celebrate today and thank you for spending at least part of that day with me.

With platonic love,

- Rachel, aka The Asexual Geek