Today in English, my teacher decided to go off on a tangeant about conformity to society's view of people, and that got me thinking.
She raised an obvious but still important question:
Why care about anyone else's perception of you?
She then answered her own question:
We fear not being accepted.
But that raises a slue of further questions, such as, why should we care if we aren't accepted? People may redicule us, yes, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. If we all spend our time here worrying about changing ourselves for each other, then how can we truly be happy? If everyone is trying to please everyone else, how can we be individuals? Is anyone happy with this?
We need to stop being sheep.
If you don't express yourself in a way that comes naturally, can you really die in content?
I don't think so.
I'm going to try and become more of an individual. More myself. Why don't you?
I’ve spend the past couple of years pondering on what it really means to be an individual. What it means to be ‘more myself’. I have given up on trying to define who I am. I have a core personality that is constant no matter who it is that I am interacting with: I think of this part of myself as ‘the naked self’. If I am to follow on with the imagery of nakedness to represent the inner or true self, it makes sense to say that as humans, we will find it very hard to live between a society which covers it’s nakedness, if we are the only ones naked. So I have different layers to who I am, similar to clothing, which I put on in different circumstances. E.g. I would be more formal in formal circumstance, I allow myself to act childishly around my young brother, and worry very little about what I say and how I act when I am around family and friends, people whom I love and I am very comfortable around. I don’t believe this makes me a fake person, as I still have the naked core to who I am in any circumstance, but I have learned to slightly alter that, in order to fit into the circumstance at hand, and you might say, conform to the society’s believe of how I should act in that specific circumstance.
ReplyDeleteSomething to ponder on?