There’s a story that is referred to constantly in Black Rock Shooter (my favorite anime to date) called “Li’l Bird, Li’l Bird Colorful Colors”. The anime and the story speak eactly to how I’ve been feeling and going through up to the point when I declared that I wanted to be happy again and would try to persue it. For the sake of this post (and those who want to see the anime at some point), I’m not going to go into the extremely confusing plot of B*RS but will explain “Li’l Bird…”.

The quickest/easiest way to give a synopsis of this story is that it’s about a little white bird who travels through many different worlds and absorbs the color into its wings (“the blue of tears”, “the pink of sneezes”, and the “orange of smiles”, are some of the colors). By the end of the story, the little bird absorbs so many colors that it becomes dull and black. And then it dies. I know what you’re thinking. “What the fuck do you mean ‘And then it dies’?!” But it’s important that the bird dies. The little white bird went out and experienced all of these colors in different worlds, but along the way it allowed those experiences to taint it and weigh it down. Then, weighed down by all of these experiences it couldn’t go on any longer.

I cannot fully or properly express how much this resonates with how I was feeling even as late as last November. My heart was so heavy with everything that was going on around then (granted, nowhere near as bad as I was the previous year, but it was still pretty damn bad). I made the promise to myself to try and do whatever it takes to be happy (I mostly linked it to my weight, but was wrong in thinking that was the bulk of it). I barely did anything except work, workout and hide away in my apartment around that time. I started to backtrack a little bit with the progress I was making in January and then in mid-February B*RS started. As the story progressed the girl’s other selves fought in order to protect their “real-world” selves and the story of the Li’l Bird was told. Then the Li’l Bird died. And I bawled. (Feel sorry for M here because he was confused as hell as to why I was crying over the death of something that wasn’t even technically a character in the show.)

I didn’t want to be like the Li’l Bird (experience everything, but get weighed down by everything), but I didn’t want to keep myself caged up and stop myself from going out and experiencing things or opening up to people because of fear that it will change me for the worse. I want to go out there and experience everything that there is and feel things without being crippled by the fear that someone might use those feelings or my trust against me. I’m ready to finally believe in myself enough to go out and kick some ass.

                                   “Li’l Bird, Li’l Bird Colorful Colours”