Sunday, February 16, 2014

20140216.0630

You are not weird.

I know that you claim to be
Pretend to be
Think you want to be
But you do not really know what it means
You only know what you have been told
By TV shows
And movies
And Austin
That show a sanitized version of actual weirdness
Heavily made-up people
Whose "bad" sartorial choices reflect fashion magazines
More than the closets of those who do not care
Falsely awkward people
Who protest having crushing social anxiety and other problems
Yet still manage to surround themselves with friends
And relate to them well
People who were supposedly bullied
Or supposedly still are
Yet they show no marks on body or mind to show that they have been abused
And in all too many cases they are themselves the abusers

This is not weird
And you who emulate it are likewise not weird
You cannot be
If you mimic what is spoon-fed through mass media

Weird is what gets you ostracized
Forced out
Abused by others and eventually yourself
Weird is when you are told
That you are too smart
Too ugly
Too other
For some other reason than the many bad reasons people hate people
(Skin color, ethnic heritage, sexual identity, and the like)
(There are some good reasons to hate people)
And you are not so much asked to change as punished before you can have the opportunity to change

Weird is wanting to conform
Thinking that doing so will make things better
(It does not
But only exchanges the one problem for another
There is no net gain
Although there may well be a seeming small-scale benefit)
Yet not knowing how to do so and not really understanding why it ought to be so
(It is not difference and caring about being not-different
That is instead called strength and self-assurance
And it is eminently desirable
Weird tends to lack it)

You already conform
You do not seek to conform
And because you are already among the throng
You are not weird.

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