Grow up, you're being perceived

Individuality cannot exist if you are locked in a feed. Where's your sense of self?

We’re not asking you to revolutionize the world, we just want you to be original.

There is a large empty white space, the void if you will. In the middle of it, there is a circle around the world ‘self’. From that circle of self is one line to another circle that has the word ‘individuality’. Ideally you want a straightforward line connecting both words, but over the years, the path from one circle to another gets interrupted. Constant construction closes the path, and the line merges with other distractions, never really connecting your self with individuality. Pot holes, traffic lights and signs of consumerism, media, consciousness, confidence, and the rabbit hole of ‘inspiration’ stop you from making it there. If the path gets interrupted and diverged constantly, you lose sense of where you were going altogether. You never really make it.

The fear of being perceived stems from our lack of perception within ourselves to begin with. We don’t know what we are, therefore we worry about other people drawing their own conclusions. What they see isn’t what you see—because what you see is a reflection of everything you’ve digested, what they see is another copy of a copy. I crave individualism in a person. Authenticity. Inspiration is only relevant if you’re not searching for it, you cannot curate it or group it into boards. The rise of this consumerism, media-money-sucking feeds, curated songs on photo-dumps strategically disguised to appear effortless and candid with no context just simply a way to shape my perception makes me roll my eyes at the sheer lack of actual character. Do you even like Nancy Sinatra? Have you always liked this color? Did you even read the book?

You need to give the concept of ‘fitting in’ with the fear of being too strange a big middle finger and a good fuck. We need real weird people, real real emotionally weird people.

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first”

Jim Morrison (The Doors)

Albert Camus. Anthony Bourdain. Cher. Fran Lebowitz. Eve Babitz. Didion. Streisand. Hepburn. Bowie. Cohen. Hendrix. De Niro. Monroe. Dickinson. Pope fucking Francis (excuse my French).

What happened to real people. Real people with real fears, ambitions, possessions, dreams, passions, voices. That entire personality of yours is based off a book, a character, a film, article, a song or poem.

‘Sylvia Plath is me’. No, write your own damn poems and bury the fig tree.

You shape shift like a caricature, like a clay-animated-human, who has no real ground. Do you even like philosophy? I mean, do you find Politics intriguing? Are you faking your empathy, your feminism, your movements? Just think to yourself, reflect, tell yourself the truth of what it is you are. The perception of others will always fail, always, nobody will ever know you the way you would like, you can only hope they think you’re a good person. Beyond that, you have the choice to be the moth or the flame.

No one is a real villain anymore either. There’s copies of old tyrants roaming in politics, and impersonators of old Queens eating cake while the rest get a weird sense of deja vu.
Why is it that I have to curate my closet following an aesthetic or icon? Why can’t I do whatever I like, why can’t I make my own book, my own color palette, my own choice of terrible sweaters? Why is it that I need to have a board, a feed of perfectly placed photos that are easy on the eye and blend seemingly while never being mine to begin with? Why does the choice of my clothes, influence the way I talk, what books come with the outfit, what hair, what man, what life, what job? Are humans just giving up on their complexities, to fall under the guise of being fitted into a category or ‘type’. There is no type. Nothing as simple as a word could encompass how capable we are of being complicated, why would you give that up?

No one knows the definite answer to the big questions—like if God is real, or if love with the absence of lust exists—but you need to come up with your own version of answers or at least some pondering response. You can only depend on Socrates for so long. You can listen, you can read the entire library of etymology, philosophy, history, but you also need to think. To sit and wonder. To reflect what you read, to see it in the mirror when looking at yourself, to perceive your flesh in the universe as something maybe not entirely sculpted on its own, but at least finds its way to individuality. Who are you when you run out of inspiration? Can you give birth to something out of nothing?

Why do you choose this song when it isn’t one you listen to? Why are there ‘film’ photos on your feed that you shot on a phone but added a grainy black and white filter on? Why do you need a profile with cut and pasted photos to seem like a man who knows his books, politics, songs, fashion Why can’t you just be real? Why can’t you say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I disagree’?

Inspiration is meant to be filtered through a sieve of your own taste, not blindly adapted into your personality. You can find a page you like in a magazine, or a quote in a Dostoevsky book, but not everything you consume needs to be part of your personality. You don’t need to have an aesthetic. Even the women you like is just a curated aesthetic, the type of hair she would have or where the mole would be on her face. You don’t know anything about your own soul to perceive someone else’s.

You are so focused and hell-bent on fearing the way someone perceives you, so you manage everything so well on the surface of your skin, completely neglecting the inside while it rots away. You become a shell of a person. Minimalism deprives us of having stuff that matters, consumerism pushes us to purchasing stuff that endorses capitalism. CDs, books, DVDs, posters, trophies, frames, memorabilia, souvenirs, stamps, letters, notebooks, legal pads—stuff that matter more. Stuff, but it’s the good stuff. The stuff someone asks you about, remembers, the stuff you get to spin however you like. Instead you’re busy chasing the latest Kardashian craze, and Bieber wrapped gloss having no say in it whatsoever.

You don’t need a Pinterest board, you need a notebook and a mirror.

Here’s what to do:

1. Find a notebook. Any notebook. The smaller the better because you can easily carry it with you. A pen that can clip on the cover.

2. Throw out your old self.

3. Be reborn.

4. Ask if you believe in God.

5. Fall in love (at least once) and ask if you feel like you deserve it.

6. Make art. Music, writing, poetry, paintings, photos, fashion. Just create something or everything.

7. Reflect.

8. Read.

9. Reflect.

10. And as you do everything, write.

11. Move as far as you can, as much as you can.

12. Kiss a lot.