Everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird
I like all of what I’ve read of Adam Mastroianni’s work, but I love this. I’d enthusiastically encourage you to go and read all of it.
Mastroianni discusses a time when he went for a job interview as a professor, realising that he had a couple of choices. He could be himself, or wear a mask. Ultimately, he decided to be himself, didn’t get the job, but everything was fine.
From there, he talks about the some of the benefits and drawbacks of conformance as a species, noting that taking the mask off is incredibly liberating. I know this from experience, as it was the exact advice given to me by my therapist in 2019/20 and, guess what? Afterwards some people thought I was an asshole. But then, so did people before. At least I know where I’m at now.
[H]istorically, doing your own thing and incurring the disapproval of others has been dangerous and stupid. Bucking the trend should make you feel crazy, because it often is crazy. Humans survived the ice age, the Black Plague, two world wars, and the Tide Pod Challenge. 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct, but we’re still standing. Clearly we’re doing something right, and so it behooves you to look around and do exactly what everybody else is doing, even when it feels wrong. That’s how we’ve made it this far, and you’re unlikely to do better by deriving all your decisions from first principles.
Maybe there are some lucky folks out there who are living Lowest Common Denominators, whose desires just magically line up with everything that is popular and socially acceptable, who would be happy living a life that could be approved by committee. But almost everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird. If you’ve got even an ounce of strange inside you, at some point the right decision for you is not going to be the sensible one. You’re going to have to do something inadvisable, something alienating and illegible, something that makes your friends snicker and your mom complain. There will be a decision tucked behind glass that’s marked “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?”, and you’ll have to shatter it with your elbow and reach through.
[…]
When you make that crazy choice, things get easier in exactly one way: you don’t have to lie anymore. You can stop doing an impression of a more palatable person who was born without any inconvenient desires. Whatever you fear will happen when you drop the act, some of it won’t ultimately happen, but some will. And it’ll hurt. But for me, anyway, it didn’t hurt in the stupid, meaningless way that I was used to. It hurt in a different way, like “ow!…that’s all you got?” It felt crazy until I did it, and then it felt crazy to have waited so long.
Source: Experimental History
Image: JOSHUA COLEMAN