I've been told that i'm unique and
special my whole life. I grew up on it. The TV shouted it at me every
time i went to school and every time i got home. My teachers reassured
me of it even though i had never known anything different. It prevaded
our culture so thoroughly you would have to live in a cave to not know
that you were a special little snowflake with a world of potential in
your hands.
I understand why we are told this. Self-esteem is important. You have to know that you are a worthwhile human being to ever believe that you can achieve greatness. So we were told over and over again.
As we went through school the mantra changed. Slowly it morphed from "you are unique and special" to something less patronising.
"you are an individual"
I understand why we were told this too. We were teenagers. we were finding our identity and some of us were struggling with it. We had to be told that we could think for ourselves, that we could and should be ourselves whatever that may be.
As i grew older and i left high school these three things played on my mind.
I'm unique
I'm special
I am an individual.
I understood these to be good things. I understood these to be the pillars that i could always fall back to.
I'm unique
The world has never and will never have a person like me again. My thoughts and actions are new and innovative.
I'm special
What i offer is worthwhile. What i offer is great. What i offer is useful to the rest of the world and the world needs me because i am great and i am worthwhile.
I am an individual.
Everything I am i lay claim to. I have created myself from the ground up. If the world lost me it would be losing a piece of the puzzle that it would never get back. I had something to offer that no one in this world can offer, i just need to figure out what it is.
And these things paralyzed me.
Now i'm not going to blame external forces for my problems and cry "woe is me, everyone has been out to destroy me from the get go!" That is not the purpose of this. I am not looking for sympathy, I'm looking to explain something i realised not too long ago.
I am not an individual.
Not too long ago i identified as a hippy. I liked the term and i liked the connotations. I still do to some extent.
I chose to identify with being a hippy just after i got back from Canada. I felt it explained alot (but not all) about me and it was an expression of my individuality. I felt secure in myself because i had found something that i could desrcibe myself as. In essence i had found who i was.
I found new ideas to set myself apart from people, i learnt new skills to set myself apart, I didn't buy too many new clothes because i was and still am pretty poor.
It was cool to see how i acted, dressed and thought and affirm my differences from other people. Finally i could affirm what i had always told myself.
I am unique.
I am special
I am an individual.
I read somewhere that punks are fools because they think being an individual means dressing the same as their friends. I laughed at that and realised the fool i was being.
Being an individual isn't based on the clothes you wear or the skills you learn. Being a hippy doesn't make me unique if anything it makes me less unique because i attached myself to a group.
Once again i was thrown into not knowing who i am.
I still identified as a hippy from time to time because it felt safe to atleast pretend to know who i was.
I started identifying with what beliefs i held because surely those were my own. These were the problems i had tousled with in my mind. These were problems i sat in bed thinking about for days before coming up with an adaquate answer that i felt safe putting my faith in.
So I became my ideas. I became anti-monogamy. I became anti-sterotypes (funnily enough) I became anti-right wing and i became a lover of people and diversity.
I loved people because they were individuals. They were all radically different from one another and they knew it. They acted differently, thought differently. They were all different. They knew what they were. They had it figured out. I should aspire to be them.
So i talked to as many people as i could. I gleamed from them what their individuality was. What they defined themselves as. I started asking questions that went deeper. Instead of askign how are you i started asking "how is life" on the hopes they would talk about something a bit deeper than "good" "aw alright" etc etc.
I talked to more and more people and more and more those peoples ideas effected me. They changed the way i think, They changed the way i act. The more i learnt the more i changed and i began to feel that i was a fleshed out person. That i was becoming unique, special and most of all an individual.
For a while i felt great about this. When people talked to me they told me how interesting i was, They told me how crazy my stories were and they told me they wished they knew as much as me.
It would have been easy to claim that that was all me. It would be easy to think "yeah i'm interesting as fuck." "yeah i've seen and done alot" "yeah i am really fucking smart"
But in the back of my head i knew i had gotten all that information from the internet or people or books. I knew all those experiences i had were half because of me and half because of the other person who allowed me to have that experience with them.
In the end i realised that I was and still am, just an incredibly porous sponge.
I soak all this knowledge and experience from all around me but just because it is in my mind doesn't mean it is mine.
Slowly i realised that everything i have ever learnt is because of someone else.
It sounds very very pessimistic but its not. I think its really beautiful.
Every word i ever learnt, i learnt by reading what someone else had written. Almost every concept that i have learnt i have not learnt through working out the formulas myself but because i have read or been taught the formula that someone else wrote.
I started to realise that all my beliefs were just an amalgamation of thousands of different lessons i had been taught my various people. The way i act are movements that i copied from movies, tv, people i've seen, friends, brothers, sisters. People.
Hardly anything that i am was created by me.
So i realised that I am not unique.
I am not special
I am certainly not an individual.
Everything i am, I owe to the teacher who taught me. They gave it freely to me and i appropriated it for my own use. I have no right to claim anything i learnt as my own because i didn't invent it. Even if i were to be the person who invented it, every bit of prerequiste knowledge i needed to invent that thing wouldn't be my own.
The invention would be the sum of a thousand inventions before it.
So this realisation taught me a few life lessons:
1) no knowledge can be hoarded. The only reason you know what you know is because other people taught you
2) It is in our best interests to teach others. Like we were taught how to be who we are, so too must we teach others so they can build on what we have given them.
3) I should not aspire to be an individual. It alienates us from our peers. It makes us believe trying to distance ourselves from people who will help us is beneficial to us. It tells us that what we have learnt is a commodity that is our own, that is ourselves. It stifles change by cutting us off from eachother in the constant effort to be different.
This is who i am. Just an amalgamation of thousands of lessons and ideas passed down through generations. I am not an individual and i love it.
I understand why we are told this. Self-esteem is important. You have to know that you are a worthwhile human being to ever believe that you can achieve greatness. So we were told over and over again.
As we went through school the mantra changed. Slowly it morphed from "you are unique and special" to something less patronising.
"you are an individual"
I understand why we were told this too. We were teenagers. we were finding our identity and some of us were struggling with it. We had to be told that we could think for ourselves, that we could and should be ourselves whatever that may be.
As i grew older and i left high school these three things played on my mind.
I'm unique
I'm special
I am an individual.
I understood these to be good things. I understood these to be the pillars that i could always fall back to.
I'm unique
The world has never and will never have a person like me again. My thoughts and actions are new and innovative.
I'm special
What i offer is worthwhile. What i offer is great. What i offer is useful to the rest of the world and the world needs me because i am great and i am worthwhile.
I am an individual.
Everything I am i lay claim to. I have created myself from the ground up. If the world lost me it would be losing a piece of the puzzle that it would never get back. I had something to offer that no one in this world can offer, i just need to figure out what it is.
And these things paralyzed me.
Now i'm not going to blame external forces for my problems and cry "woe is me, everyone has been out to destroy me from the get go!" That is not the purpose of this. I am not looking for sympathy, I'm looking to explain something i realised not too long ago.
I am not an individual.
Not too long ago i identified as a hippy. I liked the term and i liked the connotations. I still do to some extent.
I chose to identify with being a hippy just after i got back from Canada. I felt it explained alot (but not all) about me and it was an expression of my individuality. I felt secure in myself because i had found something that i could desrcibe myself as. In essence i had found who i was.
I found new ideas to set myself apart from people, i learnt new skills to set myself apart, I didn't buy too many new clothes because i was and still am pretty poor.
It was cool to see how i acted, dressed and thought and affirm my differences from other people. Finally i could affirm what i had always told myself.
I am unique.
I am special
I am an individual.
I read somewhere that punks are fools because they think being an individual means dressing the same as their friends. I laughed at that and realised the fool i was being.
Being an individual isn't based on the clothes you wear or the skills you learn. Being a hippy doesn't make me unique if anything it makes me less unique because i attached myself to a group.
Once again i was thrown into not knowing who i am.
I still identified as a hippy from time to time because it felt safe to atleast pretend to know who i was.
I started identifying with what beliefs i held because surely those were my own. These were the problems i had tousled with in my mind. These were problems i sat in bed thinking about for days before coming up with an adaquate answer that i felt safe putting my faith in.
So I became my ideas. I became anti-monogamy. I became anti-sterotypes (funnily enough) I became anti-right wing and i became a lover of people and diversity.
I loved people because they were individuals. They were all radically different from one another and they knew it. They acted differently, thought differently. They were all different. They knew what they were. They had it figured out. I should aspire to be them.
So i talked to as many people as i could. I gleamed from them what their individuality was. What they defined themselves as. I started asking questions that went deeper. Instead of askign how are you i started asking "how is life" on the hopes they would talk about something a bit deeper than "good" "aw alright" etc etc.
I talked to more and more people and more and more those peoples ideas effected me. They changed the way i think, They changed the way i act. The more i learnt the more i changed and i began to feel that i was a fleshed out person. That i was becoming unique, special and most of all an individual.
For a while i felt great about this. When people talked to me they told me how interesting i was, They told me how crazy my stories were and they told me they wished they knew as much as me.
It would have been easy to claim that that was all me. It would be easy to think "yeah i'm interesting as fuck." "yeah i've seen and done alot" "yeah i am really fucking smart"
But in the back of my head i knew i had gotten all that information from the internet or people or books. I knew all those experiences i had were half because of me and half because of the other person who allowed me to have that experience with them.
In the end i realised that I was and still am, just an incredibly porous sponge.
I soak all this knowledge and experience from all around me but just because it is in my mind doesn't mean it is mine.
Slowly i realised that everything i have ever learnt is because of someone else.
It sounds very very pessimistic but its not. I think its really beautiful.
Every word i ever learnt, i learnt by reading what someone else had written. Almost every concept that i have learnt i have not learnt through working out the formulas myself but because i have read or been taught the formula that someone else wrote.
I started to realise that all my beliefs were just an amalgamation of thousands of different lessons i had been taught my various people. The way i act are movements that i copied from movies, tv, people i've seen, friends, brothers, sisters. People.
Hardly anything that i am was created by me.
So i realised that I am not unique.
I am not special
I am certainly not an individual.
Everything i am, I owe to the teacher who taught me. They gave it freely to me and i appropriated it for my own use. I have no right to claim anything i learnt as my own because i didn't invent it. Even if i were to be the person who invented it, every bit of prerequiste knowledge i needed to invent that thing wouldn't be my own.
The invention would be the sum of a thousand inventions before it.
So this realisation taught me a few life lessons:
1) no knowledge can be hoarded. The only reason you know what you know is because other people taught you
2) It is in our best interests to teach others. Like we were taught how to be who we are, so too must we teach others so they can build on what we have given them.
3) I should not aspire to be an individual. It alienates us from our peers. It makes us believe trying to distance ourselves from people who will help us is beneficial to us. It tells us that what we have learnt is a commodity that is our own, that is ourselves. It stifles change by cutting us off from eachother in the constant effort to be different.
This is who i am. Just an amalgamation of thousands of lessons and ideas passed down through generations. I am not an individual and i love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment