To Live Without Definition

Another late one tonight...overtime and then mending a coat...sigh.  But I'm one post away from a month long blog-a-thon, so I'm doing a quickie tonight!

I used some happy mail napkins I got from my friends Boo and Pamikins quite a while ago, as well as some leftover's from my Journal 52 page for this week and ended up with this:

I guess it's a collage...

I had painted the background and then put other napkins on, but didn't like it...so I tried to take the napkins off...which ended up ripping the pages.  Oh well...let's just say it adds to the finished piece, ok?

"To live is the rarest thing in the world.  Most people exist, that is all."
-Oscar Wilde

I whited out the background on the page with the groups of girls, but left the colorful and crazy background for the individual girl...

While there have been times in my life I've wanted to fit in or, more correctly, to be accepted...those are two entirely separate things after all...I've never quite understood the desire to be like other people.  

In the past, I often wished that my brain functioned the way normal people's brains do...until I realized that most people's brains don't actually function all that well either.  I don't say that in a mean way...although now that I think about it it's probably hard to interpret that in any other way...

What I mean is that I see a lot of people putting "fitting in" over being happy.  I'm not always innocent of that crime myself...less so the older (and wiser) I get though.

The other day, a man I work with called me a free thinker and told me that I was therefore a rare and dangerous breed.  He said that generally people like me are misunderstood and tend to cause a lot of problems just by doing what comes naturally to them...because most people fear things that are different.  I think it was a compliment...

He's not wrong, I guess.  It's been my experience that people like to label things...and when they come across someone that doesn't fit into a predefined category, they're not exactly sure what to do about it.  I imagine that I've been very off-putting to a lot of people in my life so far.

I like to think that I have learned to temper my weirdness with kindness...that I don't try to shove my ways down anyone else's throat. 

I was thinking about Oscar Wilde's quote that I put on my spread today.

I always giggle to myself when people try too hard to stand apart from the crowd...because doing that just lands them in another crowd.  Maybe I'm just a little snobbish about my weirdness.

I wish that we lived in a world where everyone could be free to be themselves at all times.  I think people like to believe we live in that kind of world, but it's not true.  I've not met a person in my life, including me, who is not a watered-down version of the person they'd like to be.  And every single person I've ever known, again including myself, perpetuates the world as it is...because we like to pass judgement, consciously or not...we like our labels...we like to think we know what other people are, to be able to define them.  And to try to define another person is to judge them.

Starting now, I'd like to quit passing judgement on other people and, instead, to concentrate more fully on becoming the undiluted version of me.