Masks

I look around and a feeling of despair takes over. A feeling compounded furthermore by my inability to alter my surroundings and instead having to simply sit back and watch the drama unfold. When I look around at my surroundings...I don't actually see my surroundings. I see masks. Facades. And then comes into focus  the ethereal billboard hovering in the air that says "Welcome to the masquerade."

It's a dress rehearsal everyday and everybody is playing a role. Dumb is the one refuses to jump into the band-fake-wagon. It's depressing; watching the human reduced to an entity that seeks refuge under layers of make-up, pretentions and sanctimony. We're so desperate to please the world.  So desperate to be accepted. So desperate to be "cool." Everything that we're doing to 'stand out' is only a step towards trying to 'fit in.'

Virtues of integrity and merit have been kissed goodbye. Who cares, when you can wrap up your deficiencies under fancy wrappers and some very sweet talk?

Never try to cover up what you lack by making an exaggerated show of what you have. This has been an unspoken dictum in my life for a very long time. I will speak about it today. I find it despicable, the idea of having to fake one's identity (and to lose it in the process.) What level of Munafiqat is that?! The idea of faking perfection…ridiculous! Excuse me for throwing the clichè in your face, but nobody's perfect. You'd mock and jeer, but clichès are clichès for just one reason: they work. In a world that is SO obsessed with perfection, do we not realize that it is only our imperfections that set us apart? Ignore that, and we're just an aggregate of some (perfect) flesh on some (perfect) bones- (perfectly) fit for the grave.

Hypocrisy scares me. The slow poison. The shrewd deviousness of it, the way it weaves into our lives; slowly, silently, gradually tightening it's grasp and choking our originality to death.

Am I the only one freaked out by this possibility? The possibility of not knowing who I am, of what I can do, of what I can be...

I steal another glance around me. Plastic smiles and steely laughter. Bright faces and dark souls. Solid words and shaky principles. Lots of style and little substance. Welcome to the masquerade.

“The only thing worse than a conformist is a fashionable conformist,” as Ayn Rand quite correctly pointed out. It’s okay to be weird. It’s okay to be awkward. It’s okay to be real. The only thing that’s definitely NOT okay is to stop being yourself. Whose favour do we seek to gain that way? No good comes out of moulding one’s self into society’s idea of perfect; the society is, after all, a bunch of real people trying extremely hard to be unreal.

I do not know if the rantings of a disappointed girl ever made any difference to the world, but necessity sometimes prevails over logic. The girl writing this feels trapped, and this is her SOS call:

Take the curtain-call, let the curtain fall. Let’s go behind the scenes, and embrace who we’ve always been.