Just A Little Different

Stay Undefined

Describe yourself for me. Your gender. Your appearance. Your strength. Your age. Your intelligence. Your sexuality. What if I said that to me you were just some lame person making up someone that you want to be. Right there. Whatever you told me and whatever I told you. Yeah, well, we both defined you.

Everyday we define things. Even ourselves. We hear gay and what do we think? Some frilly guy who likes other guys. Know what that did? We just defined anyone we knew was gay as that stereotype. How about gender? You hear girl and most likely you thought of boobs, hips, long hair, and dresses. Admit it, we lump people into categories. 

We try to define people. It's almost like without making some 'definition' of each and every person we would be hopeless. 

And okay I get it. What seems so bad about defining others? It is our way of viewing the world and in a sense "getting to know" people. Except not really. When we are defining things, its like we're throwing our opinion and our ideals upon them. They don't get a say in how we define them. Sure you can argue that because of how they act, who they hang out with, how they look, their gender, their sexuality, their beliefs, among so many other things make them who they are. But what if it didn't?

What about that one person in the back row always wearing black, listening to some music that you guessed was probably like rock or something, and doesn't seem very intelligent. Right there. Yeah that was me defining someone. Now lets give him a name: Julian. Now what I said above is how everyone sees Julian. It's how they define him. But what if Julian was a classical music lover and the reason he sat in the back was because he didn't wanted to get noticed for his intelligence. Maybe he's just shy and quite and hates the attention. So actually he doesn't mind being thought stupid because he knows that he's a straight A student. He also doesn't care because no one is paying him mind like he likes it. Sure there's a chance he is how others define him, but that still isn't fair to him.

Now think of a nerdy girl, always making snarky comments and somehow keeping a smile. There's some who realize her snarky comments are just her jokes or that she's not having a good time. Both of these are defining her. Even the girl will define herself. She will think of herself as a nerd, and her snarky comments are just her feeling threatened. That smile she has is a lie. The girl even though she has a lot of attention on her, hates it especially with the chance one of her weaknesses might show through so she smiles. She probably is struggling with social anxiety and depression. But who would not that when they only see her defined in a certain way? And how can the girl get past any of her issues if she's constantly keeping herself in the boundaries that she defined herself as?

That's why I want us to try to keep others as undefined as possible. Sure it's hard not to define people. I mean even today I looked at a guy who to me never seemed all that intelligent and thought, "What an idiot." But maybe if we tried to keep an undefined look on the world and even ourselves we'll realize how not everything is as it seems.

I AM ME.

I am not just what I see myself as or what others see myself as. I am CONSTANTLY changing. YOU are constantly changing. There is never a time when you are not. You may not notice it, but you are.

YOU ARE YOU.

Stay undefined.