SQUARE PEGS
CULTURE
One
in red trousers and an oversized ‘masculine-intended’ dress shirt (pilfered
from a father), wild hair and an undoubtedly tortuous sense of humour (I joke),
and the others as they well intend to be.
You’re the worlds aren’t you? You stare at
your reflection, how utterly present you appear to be yet how much you feel
like you’re here but not here, present but not present, like a market woman who
forgot her goods at home and came to the market counting the ghosts of
customers that drifted by. You listen to your brain work, you hear your mind
think and you wonder, you question, in that moment, you’re who you should be,
in that moment it is okay to accept that you do not fit into the oval view of
the world, it’s perfectly fine that you have tried in many ways to be who you
have been told you should be but you couldn’t, so you settled on who you are.
In that moment, the silence that envelops you is ample witness.
Truth is, you’re equally as special as
every other human being, equally (not in measure) as oppressed by things you
know about and things you do not know about. What makes you square is your
resilience to not bend, to not change shape. To be as obviously out of place as
a space has not been created to fit you in.
I like when some people think that square
pegs or when some people who identify as square pegs think that being
misunderstood and singled out meant a certain responsibility to greatness or a
fulfilling sense of a life being judiciously lived. I like it because it is a
humorous assumption whose basis I like to entertain as being born out of the awkward
nerd to CEO billionaire success
stories; the Zuckerbergs and Jobs effect. No one thinks of the hippie who died
from drug overdose on the roadside near a shit house or the recluse who died
alone and was found weeks later rotting on her treasured Persian rug.
There are many ways to be square, many ways
to be an individual.
Being a square peg might be an audacious
affront to a social construct but it also means living with consequences. In
the wake of the newly social embrace of the term ‘weirdo’, I hope we realise
that integration goes way beyond normalizing a term.
All my life, I have wondered about the
unanswered questions, you know, the purpose of existence, and how in the moment
we’re born we begin an adventurous journey towards death. Why do we continue
the cycle of living and dying? What it truly means to be a good person. And
here I am a couple of decades old and still wondering and searching and trying
to make sense of where our judgemental declarations on others and ourselves fit
into the bigger picture.
Yours in grand equanimity,
Ene Ijato.
This has undoubtedly been a longer than
intended absence and I apologize.
What are your thoughts? Do you identify with
conventionalism or liberalism?
A hi nya, with
love, x E
Photography || Ene Ijato
assisted by Titus Zhiri
Creative
directing || Ene Ijato
Styling
|| Ene Ijato
4 comments
Nice!
ReplyDeleteWhy do we continue the cycle of living and dying? Good food for thought. I actually came here to pick a few thoughts and I sure did. That question could be one step to the long tunnel of self discovery. Another opportunity to choose to be liberal, very free from the expectations of the society and be tagged a weirdo. Or follow the band wagon of those living by societal norms.
Are we really in a cycle of living and dying?
It was nice reading how you felt about this topic, it really is a choice we must wisely choose. Some people do like the expected outcome and routine approach of living by the books, being under a norm. It provides them with some form of sanity and who could take that away from them? And as to your question, I'd like to believe it's rhetorical? ❤ E
DeleteThen again what liberalism or conventionalism? Liberal conventionalism or conventional conventionalism? Conventional liberalism or liberal liberalism?
ReplyDeleteAlso, society likes that there are a few few spotted eggs in a nest of plain eggs, square pegs in round holes, society deems a sense of balance from that to get some so-called continuity of sanity, who defines sanity anyway, answer is society, society that we are integrated into despite our varying personalities, our path to death either by flight or foot. On basis such as this having weirdos is inevitable! To socially embrace the term "weirdo" seems to me a coping mechanism and now its spreading as a plague perhaps as many other plagues in history, see the 'dancing plague of 1518'.
Also, if for example a 75 years old Chinese man gets teleported to some rocky mountain side in Montana,to the natives of this mountain side his ways are weird so he is a weirdo, people tag what they don't know, funny how the tagging must be negative though!
Lol isn't it fun trying to pick what canopy to fall under in all their varying degrees of aggression? Sanity isn't completely defined by society either, it cannot fully tell us of all the ways there are to be insane so how do we know if we are or aren't? It just measures the acceptable degrees. Society will label the things that fall out of the norm with negative connotations because the normative is a silent law for acceptance.
DeleteEnjoyed reading your thoughts as always, thank you for your insight. ❤ E
Eager to hear your thoughts!