people have to be somewhere

"Be yourself - everyone else is taken."

It feels a little bit like a lifetime sentence, doesn't it? Out of options, down on the tracks, you've got no one else to court or blame but your own self, however many torturous twists and turns it's taken you to get there. Sunk cost fallacy will tell you that you can pick up and change at any time. The paradox of choice says mmm, maybe not so.

It's supposed to help you. It's supposed to inspire you. It's supposed to consolidate you.

The individualist mindset has consolidated all of us, collectively, into helpless, frightened flesh-and-bone boxes. We want so badly to do everything for ourselves that we draw the line at trying-then-failing to do it.

(Asking for help? Pah! What a dreadful inconvenience.)

We want to be someone else. We have to. We can't learn without posturing, processing, absorbing and usurping for adopting.

Social creatures in a human condition aspire to be basically and ultimately validated. The shortest path, we think, is following the available example.

But still, free of the typeface restraints of motivational posters, it's sacreligious ever to forsake the principal tenet of all interpersonal interaction and relation: be yourself.

Not for any other reason than that it just plain doesn't work any other way.

We get so caught up in the minutiae we're ever attempting to control: no room, no time, no space for error. As if history and all of its gains and losses are not so sorely and deeply written at the margins.

Rejection of conformity, that's it - give weird compliments! That's not to say, there's no saving you if you try not to speak top of mind, but rather that you will lose yourself and all the rest into the gaping envelope of the groove-lined margins if you don't do what you truly feel.

Nothing is ever produced from a lack of iteration. If the system cannot propagate, it will just as swiftly die off.

Take me, for instance. Maybe multiple times. If I put you off, then I do. But I've been honest. I've been truthful. I've been real.

You can only run so far without any pants, you know? And if the choice is between running and patching up your most presentable pajamas...

You'll never get anywhere. You'll never feel anything. Positive. Negative. You won't.

You are right where you're meant to be, I fear. You're in this fiddly moment. A tragic insistence to perform everyone else's emotional labor, logistically and-not, all at once, damns us all.

For what we really are!

I can't thank you for being here if you won't show yourself. I can't perform my excitement if I've already pretended it all away.

People have to be somewhere - is that too far out for you?