“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contrary to popular belief, the human world is not round—it’s just a big box. Sorry Galileo. My humblest apologies Magellan. Australia, I don’t know how you handle hanging upside down like that. The world used to be round, back when there was freedom, back when there was still some value to individuality.
“I value individuality,” an indignant voice shouts from the crowd, faceless in the dim lights of the hall. “I’m an individual.” Of course he’s an individual, marked so clearly by his Hollister shirt, Abercrombie cologne, and Converse shoes. I can’t imagine how I missed that brilliant individuality, or, for that matter, the “individuals” on either side of him in parallel apparel.
As I was saying, we don’t live on a sphere, we live within a carefully constructed steel cube—a box. If you can’t fit in this box, if you so much as rub against its unyielding edges, you’d better get your hands on a space shuttle or prepare to be ground down till you slide in appropriately. Hardly anyone can get their hands on suitable space-craft these days, so it’s likely a personality-sandblast will be coming your way.
“It’s true,” says a sensible woman sitting in the first row, just off-center. “There’s so much pressure to—“ “Poor you,” Captain Individuality bellows coldly from a few seats back. “Yeah, poor you,” his mindless twins chirp mockingly. She’s startled to silence, and with expressions of self-satisfaction, the homogenous triplet of “individuals” know they’ve done their job. Order is restored.
I can’t stress enough my distaste for society’s hypocrisy. We say things like be yourself, or be all you can be, and we never mean it. We see someone who is unlike us and ostracize them for their (God forbid!) incongruities. As if hypocrisy wasn’t enough, it had to drag irony into the mix too.
No one is content to be so confined, and yet we try to contort ourselves to earn the respect of our peers. You have to be beautiful, you have to be a genius, you have to be involved, you have to be social, and you have to live in fear of who you might actually be. If everyone could focus on their own identity instead of playing a judgmental form of social Dominoes, instead of incessantly picking and being picked at, we’d live in a far more constructive world.
“Someone’s just mad they aren’t normal,” Captain Individuality chastises, guffawing heartily as if in triumph. If it’s normal to be so bland and ignorant, I’m happy to keep normal at a safe distance.
The audience jeers in robotic unison, and I look at that woman in the center row. She too laughs. She laughs with bright, fiery eyes and sagaciously upturned lips, not at me, but at them.
The audience jeers, but there’s only one person on this stage.