It’s funny how much of one’s environment is the words they hear. I hear “Screw that fucking weirdo. He’s so creepy and annoying.” or maybe “Oh, you do ballet? Yeah, straight as a broken arrow.” Those marks build up, like atoms coming together, to form a crystal of a sort around one’s personality. But instead of a beautiful shining quartz, it is a worn-out, sickly-green jade. The mind forms layers, pushing down the human being beneath that jade, and hiding their beauty behind an ugly mask. All these jabs label that human being, until the jade starts to label itself. Finally, the jade is packed off and thrown into a box with other ugly stones and the box is left on a table by the fault lines that make up society, where the shaking of many earthquakes knock the stones together, scratching them even more. This is my world.
The physicist Richard Feynman often said “What do YOU care what other people think?” While this is a good philosophy, it becomes difficult to follow when one starts doubting oneself as well. Then, the classifications of others start to become important, causing a nasty cycle of negative introspection and more self-doubt. As the years have passed by, one veers more and more to one of these two directions. I would like to at least think that I have veered towards the former, while still retaining a reasonable level of humanity.
Not only does “OUT OF IT” have significance in the form of sequestering myself from social classification, but it has significance for other reasons as well, as I have had difficulty with ADD for many years. I hope that people can learn to see beyond the surface of any person, even if, cynically I guess, so many people have seemed not to be able to do so in the past.
Looking back at this, it will be a good reminder, to me, above all, that I am not my classification.