Cultural Definitions.
We’re all definitions, with labels, trademarks and other external designs all over us. How we look and are perceived are after many years of inherited necessity and later shallow yet oddly accepted business. We have separate clothes for men and women, and I’m not talking about the size and cut, because we can easily be separated and continue to live those lives we’re told to live. Go into a clothing store and compare the departments, men and women and children — such a huge difference it is, and we don’t have to read the signs and only look at the colors to so where everyone is told to belong.
It’s not by direct choice, but of thousands of years of cultural evolution. Other things are toys and the performing arts, who have — even if it like the above is beginning to relax a tiny bit — been transformative to shape the identity of mankind.
Toys, for example, relate to real things preparing the children to enter adulthood, but is often marketed to either gender. To be fair, it’s getting better; with wider perspectives how we humans want to be deep inside, and not just what the advertising telling us is correct. There’s layers of choices slowly appearing from the consciousness, freeing us from predictable definitions. Even boys can wear pink, and girls wear blue — to generalize a bit. Things like that are just surface, it’s not even connected on a deeper plane to who we are. We might like a certain look and feel comfortable with it, but as soon we look down at others for sporting another style the destructive part of our cultural brainwashing shines through.
Mankind would be a much healthier race if it managed to be able to deactivate the “I Must Be” part, the one we’re taught willingly and unwillingly from birth, and change it to “I Want to Be”. The sad thing is that if humans refuse to conform to what the society say, they’re seen as odd and weird and off and sometimes dangerous — when it’s the opposite. Embracing your style, wearing the clothes you want, being the identity you feel the most comfortable in, is truly the most normal thing in the world.
I’ve had my phases in life — from dressing in suits to hoodies, from horror tees to what I do right now, something more discreet and gentle to my own eyes; all of this often connected to the person I am at that moment of time. This brings me a lot of enjoyment, as it’s a way to explore my identity. Wearing certain things mirrors who I am, and it makes others — whether the understand it or not — create a version of me that they want to see. This is something you can use depending on where you are in your life and career, to either enhance your own persona in a constructive way — for your own pleasure or for putting your mark in people you happen to spend time with. When I was working down in South Africa, on the savanna, I dressed accordingly as some kind of comic book ranger/explorer, complete with a safari hat and a big beard. It made me feel safe and grounded in that environment. When I came home I shaved my beard and mustache, cut my hair and began wearing simple striped shirts and transformed myself into something less spectacular. I felt that was needed, I wanted to see what was under the costume and look at myself in a less contrived way.
Was I still there or had someone else appeared? Parts of the old me still existed, but there was new details I hadn’t noticed before, and understanding those made me feel even more grounded in who I am and where I’m going. It was a part of my recent metamorphosis. It reminded me of a butterfly I saw in Africa, who before it turned into a colorful being built a wooden house on a pillar, where it crawled into and began to change. The house, five or six sticks set like a tube and clued to together with god knows what strange bodily juices, was so beautiful — and yet so odd and off the charts, but it had a purpose — and that purpose lead to the next phase in the life of that butterfly.
Play with how you are perceived, have fun, and don’t be shy. Be what you want to be, instead what you (according to society) must be. There’s nothing like that here, there’s no point in being what you’re supposed to be in the eyes of others.
That’s being imprisoned in invisible structures of cultural evolution. What we can do is to pick and choose, and that’s something amazing. As long as it feels right to you. What’s the meaning living a life trapped in an identity, or several, that’s not healthy? Explore them, but be prepared to move on and check out something else.
One day you’ll find what you want and can lay down there on the green field of your deeply personal comfortability, inhaling the perfection of what you really are. All that angst, all that pain will sink away merge with the ground under you, building a healing fundament of experiences.
We’re all butterflies, some of us dark and brooding — and other’s playful and filled with colors. It’s all good and it’s all fine. We are what we are, something we never should deny ourselves.
