A Sea of Banality

I wasn’t going to update my blog today, but here is another post. Like a moth drawn to a candle flame, I am back for another day. I had written one post today about my experiences with getting a haircut yesterday. It was called “The Devil’s Haircut”. I didn’t publish it. I censored myself. It sits on my computer’s desktop in a Word file languishing probably never to be edited or read again. Why did I censor myself and what was so bad about the post?

It made me feel dirty and I started to ask myself why. It was the truth. It is exactly what happened yesterday and yet I couldn’t publish it, but I got great satisfaction out of writing it. I felt relieved to get my ideas down on “paper” and to release them. I just couldn’t share it. The thought of publishing it was mortifying.

The post dealt with my mental illness and the phobia I have of going out and doing something as seemingly simple as getting a haircut. I felt I would be ostracized for sharing it. “How can a 33 year old man not just go down to the Barber and get a haircut without it becoming a major crisis?” I thought people would think. It made me feel as if I was acting like a frightened child.

This brought me to thinking about why I would want to hide my illness and my feelings. I am fallible and like most others want to fit in and appear “normal”. I have often learned the hard way in life that to stand out or to reveal too much can be a dangerous thing when dealing with unpredictable others. I have been burned before by my previous blog as family members made an attempt to censor me because they thought I revealed too much. This left a big distaste in my mouth for what I do everyday in updating this blog. Maybe that has a lot to do with my uneasiness with writing and sharing it publicly. Still, it made me think about how much control we give others in our day to day lives and how our behavior can easily be modified by the thoughts and actions of others. This brought me to, “Are we truly free?”

I don’t feel free most of the time. I feel caged and corralled by what others think and expect of me. I want to break free and toss my cares into the wind, but like others, I have been carefully conditioned to think and act a certain way. Everywhere I turn I see this happening; in my relations with my family; in my writings; in what I see touted in our media. It seems that everyone has an opinion on how I should act and live my life and, frighteningly, most of those opinions are the same or very close. I just feel it stifles creativity and originality. That is why I find modern society and popular media so boring and restrictive. Everyone is trying to fit in and be alike.

I crave individualism, creativity, openness, and distinctiveness. I yearn for unconventional ideas and inspiring and non-mainstream thoughts. I guess I will just keep looking, but have found very few in my daily life and on the internet. I feel as if I am caught adrift among a sea of banality; a cast-away amidst throngs of clones who think and act alike.